Cartography
For some reason I've been reading a lot about cartography and related fields just recently. I read The Wager, which mentioned Longitude by Dava Sobel, which I had but hadn't read, so I read that.
Now I'm reading Map of a Nation, about the Ordnance Survey. I got that on the very flimsy excuse that a character's brother works for Ordnance Survey. Is it going to be in any way relevant? No. Almost certainly not.
But I like cartography. I've always been fascinated. And The Discovery of France by Graham Robb was one of my favourite books of the other year, and is not dissimilar. At this point I probably need to learn a bit about actual surveying tools. I do have some fun pictures of vintage surveying equipment.
In the same vein of "this is not relevant but I'm doing it anyway" in a follow up from the other week about making fun and dumb things I've now got four pen names figured out along with their genres and some sample titles, for a fictional character. I need to format the piece into the magazine layout and will have achieved an almost complete waste of time and have enjoyed it enormously.
This is not an entry into the reading lists for cartography, but it probably could be.