I’ve finished the Inferno and am now beginning Dante’s ascent of Purgatory. I also made my first visit to Brisbane Forest Park, a very pleasant expanse of mixed eucalypt and subtropical rainforest, just west of my new home.

Partly because I was thinking about Dante, it struck me that Queensland seems to have more optimistic/picturesque placenames than the areas I’m used to. On today’s journey, for example, I passed Mt Glorious. By contrast, a typical bushwalk in the Snowy Mountains might begin at Dead Horse Gap, and bypass Mt Purgatory on the way to Mt Terrible. Or there’s Scabby Range, Dry Plain and Doubtful Creek, to name just a few of the spots I’ve visited.

Despite occasional temptations, I’ve stuck to my resolution to abandon The Bill, which, as Rob Corr pointed out, jumped the shark some time ago (I nominate the station firebombing, which wrote out six characters in one episode, but the warning signs were evident well before that). I have, however, received reports of the ultimate shark-jump, a dramatic wedding episode. I didn’t get any good recommendations for alternative TV addictions, so I’ll be curled up in front of a video, instead of watching while Debbie, covered in blood, escapes from Tom’s office, as promised in the TV guide.

Update Demonstrating yet again this blog’s intimate link with the Zeitgeist, The Age runs a story on the soaping up of The Bill. It confirms that the firebombing was the first initiative of the shark-jumping new executive producer, but then descends into the realm of the bizarre, claiming that all of this reflects viewer demands for more “realism”. This confirms the inversion of the term that first arose with the use of the term “reality TV” to describe live-in game shows.

I have recently experienced a significant relaxation in my research budget constraint. To translate from economese, I have more money to spend (thanks, Brendan!), and one thing I plan to do is to add to my research library. As can be seen from my website my interests are very diverse and it’s not always easy to keep up. So I thought I’d ask for suggestions. They don’t have to be in economics. In fact recommendations for important books in other fields (particularly other social sciences) would be most welcome. But within economics, if there’s a really good book on endogenous growth theory and related topics, I’d be keen for a recommendation.

Although my budget constraint is not too tight at present, my time constraint is very tight, so reading has to provide consumption benefits as well as contributing to my work. Unless it’s absolutely essential, I’m not going to wade through anything that’s badly written, or printed in hard-to-read type on cheap paper.

One thing I’d particularly like to do is to update and extend my maths library, most of which dates back to my undergraduate days in the 1970s. Areas where I’d particularly like a good recommendation include number theory, differential geometry and algebraic topology. I’d also like suggestions for good books on analysis and general topology(currently I have Rudin Functional Analysis, Royden’s Real Analysis , Conway Functions of One Complex Variable Ash Real Analysis and Probability and Dugundji Topology, so I’m looking for something substantially new and improved). And if there are any hot new areas that have developed since the 1970s that I don’t know about, I’d like to find out.

Finally, of course, I’m always keen to have suggestions for new reading of any kind, even if it has no possible relevance to research. Hopefully readers of this blog will have an idea of what I might like.