>>12420949I study applied math, and most papers are pretty boring unless it is a topic you are working on yourself. Otherwise, a good textbook or monograph can be really interesting, but very few research papers rise to that level. Most of it is just methodology and publishing standards in math. Math papers in actual academic journals are often very terse and they don't go into any background or applications, so they tend not to be very interesting.
On the other hand, I also read biology and philosophy papers once in awhile, and I find those very entertaining. Typically it will either be something on evolution, communication, or cognition.
