Logic Lit.

Waggish on left-brained literature:

I work amongst engineers, and many of them are voracious readers who, nonetheless, have little connection to any prevailing literary trends. Rather, there appears to be a parallel track of literature that is popular specifically amongst engineers, which I'll call "left-brained literature" for lack of a better term. The provisional definition of the term is simply those books that fall into the category of my having empirically observed them being read by a multitude of engineers with a literary bent. My conclusions are tentative, but I think that it's valuable just to construct this sort of list.

I'm excluding all genre science-fiction from the category, because I don't find it particularly revelatory. I'm interested in that subset of "mainstream," "non-genre" fiction (these relative terms having been established by social consensus), and within that set, which novels of some notoriety and good PR happen to attract members of the engineering professions.

Waggish continues with a list of left-brain lit authors. Each author is described briefly, but Waggish sums up their strengths and weaknesses with a brilliant short-hand. Highly recommended.

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