They're very verbose and dense, and it strikes me that Neal Stephenson more or less wrote the three books just for himself, but it's worth checking out his "The

They're very verbose and dense, and it strikes me that Neal Stephenson more or less wrote the three books just for himself, but it's worth checking out his "The Baroque Cycle" trilogy, culminating with "The System of the World." It's fiction, but it's very eye-opening and mind-teasing fiction that puts a lot of contemporary moving parts in motion at the same time. And the books basically revolve around the Newton-Leibniz feud over inventing calculus.