Yesterday I bought a collection of George Orwell’s writing, Shooting an Elephant. In the first essay, Why I Write, Orwell says,
I have not written a novel for seven years, but I hope to write another fairly soon. It is bound to be a failure, every book is a failure, but I do know with some clarity what kind of book I want to write.
When finishing my own book, How to Think Like a Mathematician, I felt that I had failed to do what I had set out to do. It didn’t compare favourably to the book I had imagined it would be. It wasn’t clear enough; it didn’t have all the right topics; when I had the right topic, I didn’t have straightforward, clear examples. I could go on and on. I felt that this was the sorriest excuse for a book that the world had seen and it was only the greater embarrassment of not delivering on my promise to the publishers that I would submit it that made me send the manuscript to them.
Fortunately, in the six months since submission I have developed some perspective and have had unsolicited emails from people around the world saying how much they liked it. Reading the proofs has also allowed me to see that it is not all bad. I might even say that some of it is quite good! There are some parts I wish I had spent more time on and some where I wish I had spent less, but mostly I will take the modest approach and say “You know, that’s not too shabby.”
Of course, having spent the last umpteen years (a long time anyway) writing the book there is a book-shaped hole in my life. I shall need to work on a new project. I had planned to write a “popular science” version of the story of the Poincare Conjecture but then Perelman proved it and at least three authors wrote books on it. None of them wrote it in the way I would have done but with the market saturated it seems pointless to begin. Maybe ten years hence I’ll have a go (when someone has found a flaw in the proof and there has been an unseemly squabble over the $1million prize money.) Anyhow, I have a number of ideas for textbooks on mathematics. I’ll see how my plans develop.
One final thought. The book Orwell was planning when he wrote the above quote – the book that would be a failure – was Nineteen Eighty-Four. Arguably, one of the most successful and influential books of the 20th century!
