Reading list

Reading list

1. books

1.1. Fiction

1.1.1. Epic

  1. FINISHED The Knight in the Panther's Skin
    AUTHOR: Shota Rustaveli
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Georgian
READ_LANGUAGE: German
RATING: 3

    An epic tale of chivalric sacrifice and disobedience towards authority in the name of friendship, honor and love.

1.1.2. Science Fiction

  1. The Will to Battle
    AUTHOR: Ada Palmer
  2. Murderbot
    AUTHOR: Martha Wells
  3. Cyberiad
    AUTHOR: Stanisław Lem
  4. Rho
    AUTHOR: E. S. Schmidt
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: German
READ_LANGUAGE: German
  5. Galápagos
    AUTHOR: Kurt Vonnegut
  6. FINISHED I, Robot
    AUTHOR: Isaac Asimov
RATING: 3

    A collection of short stories describing the comical situations humans have gotten themselves into (and how they got out of them) by creating robots with "positronic" brains which always obey the following 3 rules:

    1. "A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm."
    2. "A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders conflict with the First Law."
    3. "A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws."

    While I enjoyed the creative Sherlock-Holmes-like deduction puzzles the stories pose and found it entertaining how the robots end up ridiculing humans (e.g. the religious fanatic, or the people-pleasing liar), the characters in the (admittedly short, but interwoven) stories are not fully developed and the language is somewhat uninspiring.

  7. FINISHED The Big Time
    AUTHOR: Fritz Leiber
SOURCE: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/fritz-leiber/the-big-time
RATING: 2

    While the book builds on some interesting premises (Big Time vs Small Time and time travel incl. messing with it), I have found it utterly confusing because it introduces so many concepts without properly explaining them: Doppelgangers (split into Ghosts and Demons), Change Winds, the Void, Resurrection, Change Death, Inversion, etc. This made it difficult for me to enjoy the book and think things through.

  8. The Futurological Congress
    AUTHOR: Stanisław Lem
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Polish
  9. The Left Hand of Darkness
    AUTHOR: Ursula K. Le Guin
  10. Cloud Atlas
    AUTHOR: David Mitchell
  11. Parable of the Sower
    AUTHOR: Octavia E. Butler
  12. The Last of the Masters
    AUTHOR: Philip K. Dick
  13. The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
    AUTHOR: Ursula K. Le Guin
SOURCE: https://libcom.org/article/dispossessed
  14. Gateway
    AUTHOR: Frederik Pohl
  15. FINISHED The Marching Morons
    AUTHOR: Cyril M. Kornbluth
SOURCE: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/51233
RATING: 3

    Brief novella about a man, Barlow, who is being brought out of hibernation from a back then experimental drug) after centuries and finds himself on the earth where the huge majority of the population has an "average IQ of 45" and life is being kept together by a very tiny elite of "normal" people who have to toll like "slaves" to provide the services the "morons" need. This entire situation (completely fictional as IQ despite being strongly heriditary shows a very strong reversion to the mean effect, just like height; otherwise the world would at some point only be populated by dwarfs and giants) is the result of uninhibited breeding among less gifted people while intelligent people decided less and less kids. The elite looks to Barlow to solve the population problem which threatens to bring the planet to the limit. Barlow, being a greedy, racist and selfish man without any moral fibre, proceeds to implement a "solution" to the problem after making incredible demands beforehand.

    While the world the novella portrays is curious and the social commentary biting, the novel became increasingly disjointed to me and the end just kinda bolted on.

  16. The Invisible Man
    AUTHOR: H. G. Wells
SOURCE: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/h-g-wells/the-invisible-man
  17. Roadside Picnic
    AUTHOR: Arkady Strugatsky, Boris Strugatsky
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Russian
  18. Solaris
    AUTHOR: Stanisław Lem
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Polish
  19. Eight O'Clock in the Morning
    AUTHOR: Ray Nelson
  20. FINISHED 2 B R 0 2 B
    AUTHOR: Kurt Vonnegut
SOURCE: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/21279
RATING: 4
  21. FINISHED A Psalm for the Wild-Built
    AUTHOR: Becky Chambers
RATING: 3
  22. FINISHED Old Man's War
    AUTHOR: John Scalzi
RATING: 4

    Captivating and funny science-fiction tale which still manages to pose some serious questions.

  23. The Wall
    AUTHOR: John Lanchester
  24. This Is How You Lose the Time War
    AUTHOR: Amal El-Mohtar, Max Gladstone
  25. Alan Mendelsohn, The Boy From Mars
    AUTHOR: Daniel Pinkwater
  26. Válka s Mloky
    AUTHOR: Karel Čapek
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Czech
  27. Starship Troopers
    AUTHOR: Robert Heinlein
  28. Player Piano
    AUTHOR: Kurt Vonnegut
  29. The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
    AUTHOR: Philip K. Dick
  30. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
    AUTHOR: Douglas Adams
  31. Dune
    AUTHOR: Frank Herbert
  32. Neuromancer
    AUTHOR: William Gibson
  33. The City & the City
    AUTHOR: China Miéville

1.1.3. Drama

  1. Timon of Athens
    AUTHOR: William Shakespeare
SOURCE: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/william-shakespeare/timon-of-athens
  2. FINISHED R.U.R.
    AUTHOR: Karel Čapek
SOURCE: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/karel-capek/r-u-r/paul-selver_nigel-playfair
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Czech
READ_LANGUAGE: English
RATING: 4

    I loved how the book criticizes (amongst other things like the desire to rule, demeaning women, mass control through nationalism, willingness of shareholders to sacrifice anything for profit) the dehumanizing and self-serving Silicon Valley belief in technological "progress" 100 years in advance:

    The plot focuses on a small group of industrialists, who sell machines ("robots", the novel actually coined the English term) who, albeit having human shape, have "no soul", "no interest in life", "no enjoyments", "no passion", and are built solely to work and fulfill the wishes of their owners without complaint. While the group pretends that they produce robots because they desire for humanity to be free from the burden of work and find self-fulfillment, it becomes pretty clear, that they are simply acting out of self-interest: reordering the world such that all human workers are replaced by robots (regardless the fact that they anticipate violence in this process) would make them supremely rich and powerful.

    While the premise of the plot is fascinating, I found certain elements of it, like the change-your-ways-ok-I-will-marry-you twist, nothing but awkward.

  3. Top Dogs
    AUTHOR: Urs Widmer
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: German
READ_LANGUAGE: German
  4. The Physicists
    AUTHOR: Friedrich Dürrenmatt
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: German
READ_LANGUAGE: German
  5. FINISHED The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark
    AUTHOR: William Shakespeare
SOURCE: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/27761
RATING: 4
  6. Life Is A Dream
    AUTHOR: Pedro Calderón de la Barca
SOURCE: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/6363
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Spanish
READ_LANGUAGE: English
  7. Waiting for Godot
    AUTHOR: Samuel Beckett

1.1.4. Historical fiction

  1. Foucault's Pendulum
    AUTHOR: Umberto Eco
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Italian
  2. Beloved
    AUTHOR: Toni Morrison
  3. Khatyn
    AUTHOR: Ales Adamovich
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Belarusian
  4. The Empusium
    AUTHOR: Olga Tokarczuk
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Polish

    [Read after Thomas Mann's Der Zauberberg]

  5. The Killer Angels
    AUTHOR: Michael Shaara
  6. The Jungle
    AUTHOR: Upton Sinclair
SOURCE: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/upton-sinclair/the-jungle
  7. The Underground Railroad
    AUTHOR: Colson Whitehead
  8. Life and Fate
    AUTHOR: Vasily Grossman
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Russian
  9. Maria
    AUTHOR: Ulas Samchuk
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Ukrainian
  10. The Yellow Prince
    AUTHOR: Vasyl Barka
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Ukrainian
  11. FINISHED Tango of Death
    AUTHOR: Yuri Vynnychuk
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Ukrainian
READ_LANGUAGE: Ukrainian
RATING: 4

    A stunning and entertaining novel describing humanity in all its tragic and beautiful dimensions. Full of allusions to historical events (the Tragedy pid Bazarom, the Nazi invasion of Poland, the Soviet invasion of Poland, the Katyn massacre, the NKVD prisoner massacres, and the name giving Tango of Death), the book gives an incredibly vivid description of multi-cultural interwar Lviv (how historically accurate it is I cannot really assess) before the Second World War, the Holocaust and Soviet population settlement policies homogenized the population of Lviv - thereby irrevocably destroying a unique and truly European flair the city must have had for a long time. Somewhat similar to Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita the book features magical elements and a book-in-book approach, which connects the storyline from interwar Lviv to the storyline in modern-day Lviv in independent Ukraine.

  12. FINISHED Lincoln in the Bardo
    AUTHOR: George Saunders
RATING: 3

    Stylistically interesting book which I had trouble understanding though. Taking the premature death of Willie Lincoln as the main theme, it describes the life stories of wildly different characters who are "tarrying" in the Bardo and their earthly and bardoesk struggles.

    Because the novel is told alternatingly by the many different characters themselves in dialogues or monologues, in often slangy or broken English (depending on the age and social status of the person), and jumps between locations (here, the Bardo, and there, their lived lifes) and times, it is occassionally difficult to follow though. At times, I also felt like my English was not good enough, to fully understand what was being said.

    I particularly liked the reflections of Abraham Lincoln on his son's death and how the same mortifying grief was felt all over the country embroiled in a bloody Civil War with him as the President. I was also looking forward to finding out about the fate of the Reverend, who lingered in the Bardo because he would have been sent to Hell but couldn't understand why - unfortunately, the novel leaves that open.

  13. With Fire and Sword
    AUTHOR: Henryk Sienkiewicz
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Polish
  14. Atonement
    AUTHOR: Ian McEwan
  15. Radetzkymarsch
    AUTHOR: Joseph Roth
  16. The Books of Jacob
    AUTHOR: Olga Tokarczuk
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Polish
  17. FINISHED Glory
    AUTHOR: NoViolet Bulawayo
RATING: 3

    A novel taking the coup against freedom-fighter-turned-dictator Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe in 2017 as the historic background to describe the life of oppressors and oppressed in the fictitious Jadada. The novel shines when describing the emotional landscape of oppressed people and the trauma caused by the atrocities commited in the Gukurahundi. However, I did not get the choice on why all character are (domesticated) animals: While Orwell's Animal Farm describes the processes one could observe in Zimbabwe in the aftermath to the Second Chimurenga very well, the political process/environment in Glory is much more akin to the process of "inheriting" extractive institutions Acemoglu and Robinson describe in Why Nations Fail.

  18. The Prince and the Coyote
    AUTHOR: David Bowles
  19. Everything is Illuminated
    AUTHOR: Jonathan Safran Foer
  20. FINISHED Data Tutashkhia
    AUTHOR: Chabua Amirejibi
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Georgian
READ_LANGUAGE: German
RATING: 4
  21. Paradise
    AUTHOR: Abdulrazak Gurnah
  22. Blood Meridian
    AUTHOR: Cormac McCarthy
  23. FINISHED East of Eden
    AUTHOR: John Steinbeck
  24. Gravity's Rainbow
    AUTHOR: Thomas Pynchon

1.1.5. Psychological novel

  1. FINISHED No Longer Human
    AUTHOR: Osamu Dazai
READ_LANGUAGE: English
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Japanese
  2. FINISHED Hunger
    AUTHOR: Knut Hamsun
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Norwegian
READ_LANGUAGE: German
SOURCE: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/60728

    Read it a while ago, but remember how well the novel portrayed the protagonist's beliefs causing his self-destructive behavior, ultimately leading to moral, physical and psychological decay.

1.1.6. Comedy / Satire

  1. Orlando
    AUTHOR: Virginia Woolf
SOURCE: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/virginia-woolf/orlando
  2. The House of God
    AUTHOR: Samuel Shem
  3. Public and Private Life of Animals
    AUTHOR: P. J. Stahl
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: French
READ_LANGUAGE: English
SOURCE: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/58214
  4. Welcome to Lake Success
    AUTHOR: Gary Shteyngart
  5. Germany. A Winter's Tale
    AUTHOR: Heinrich Heine
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: German
READ_LANGUAGE: German
SOURCE: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/6079
  6. REREAD Animal Farm
    AUTHOR: George Orwell
  7. FINISHED Death and the Penguin
    AUTHOR: Andrey Kurkov
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Russian
READ_LANGUAGE: Russian
RATING: 3
  8. FINISHED Absurdistan
    AUTHOR: Gary Shteyngart
RATING: 2

    Too long winded, occassionally witty tale about the insecure and aimless 325 pound son of a russian gangster oligarch. Against the backdrop of the ongoing war of russia against Ukraine, one of the more interesting aspects of the novel is the portrayal of the century old (starting with the Slavophiles) russian ressentiment for the West (and America as its most common representative).

1.1.7. Tragedy

  1. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
    AUTHOR: Ken Kesey

1.1.8. Crime

  1. The Power of the Dog
    AUTHOR: Don Winslow
  2. Ratking
    AUTHOR: Michael Dibdin

1.1.9. Horror

  1. American Psycho
    AUTHOR: Bret Easton Ellis

1.1.10. Thriller

  1. The Talented Mr. Ripley
    AUTHOR: Patricia Highsmith
  2. Going Zero
    AUTHOR: Anthony McCarten
  3. A Most Wanted Man
    AUTHOR: John le Carré

1.1.11. Bildungsroman

  1. The Queen's Gambit
    AUTHOR: Walter Tevis
  2. The Catcher in the Rye
    AUTHOR: J. D. Salinger

1.1.12. Uncategorized

  1. A Woman
    AUTHOR: Sibilla Aleramo
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Italian
  2. Fahrenheit 451
    AUTHOR: Ray Bradbury
  3. The Glass Bead Game
    AUTHOR: Hermann Hesse
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: German
READ_LANGUAGE: German
  4. A Fable
    AUTHOR: William Faulkner
  5. Nagareru
    AUTHOR: Aya Kōda
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Japanese
  6. Morphine
    AUTHOR: Szczepan Twardoch
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Polish
  7. Null
    AUTHOR: Szczepan Twardoch
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Polish
  8. Adventures in Immediate Irreality
    AUTHOR: Max Blecher
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Romanian
  9. Scarred Hearts
    AUTHOR: Max Blecher
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Romanian
  10. The Painted Bird
    AUTHOR: Jerzy Kosiński
  11. The Well of Loneliness
    AUTHOR: Radclyffe Hall
SOURCE: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/radclyffe-hall/the-well-of-loneliness
  12. FINISHED The Elementary Particles
    AUTHOR: Michel Houellebecq
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: French
READ_LANGUAGE: English
  13. FINISHED The Castle
    AUTHOR: Franz Kafka
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: German
READ_LANGUAGE: German
SOURCE: https://static.zeno.org/ebooks/Kafka,_Franz_-_Das_Schloss_-_Zeno.org_ISBN_9783843023993.epub

    Despite being unfinished, Kafka creates an intriguing study of the nature of authority in his novel: The masters in the castle exert their influence solely through the meaning the villagers assign them. Otherwise the administration is simply an inefficient, error-prone, convoluted and unaccountable paperpushing machine. But the villagers try to find meaning in everything the castle representatives do, adapt their behavior accordingly, and influence others in their behavior. And K., as a foreigner caught in his own web of lies, obviously cannot get why people behave this way as he lacks an understanding of the norms the villagers have internalized to such an extent that they are oblivious to the dysfunctionality of the system.

    While it is easy to interpret the novel as to how helpless an individual can become if caught in an unyielding bureaucracy where they don't fit the pattern (very applicable to LLM support hell), the more fundamental reading of the novel to me is that our authorities are all socially constructed (intersubjective reality) and reinforce each other through other peoples' thinking and acting - which then obviously leads to the question whether we as a society also exhibit erratic and hard to justify behavior, i.e. what is our castle?

  14. Lila: An Inquiry into Morals
    AUTHOR: Robert M. Pirsig
  15. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values
    AUTHOR: Robert M. Pirsig
  16. FINISHED The Remains of the Day
    AUTHOR: Kazuo Ishiguro
RATING: 4

    Very nicely written book about an aging butler who, by reminiscing about the past on a roadtrip, sets off on his way to the painful realization that his twisted logic that dignity lies in being a literally "self"less servant in "distinguished" households is a lie. Unable to navigate emotional relationships with other humans he repeatedly flees to a professional interaction as this is what he is familiar with. Ends up idolizing his profession to such an extent that he loses personhood in the process.

  17. Ecotopia
    AUTHOR: Ernest Callenbach
  18. Demons
    AUTHOR: Fyodor Dostoevsky
  19. FINISHED Pale Fire
    AUTHOR: Vladimir Nabokov
RATING: 2

    A hard to read (due to structure and used language) novel consisting of a poem and commentary on it by a deranged and completely self-centered, unreliable narrator. While the novel is comically funny at times because the narrator is so socially inept (thinking of him and Shade as friends, his creepy stalking) and him constantly warping reality to his own benefit, I found it a tiring read: in addition to the challenging language and unusual structure, I found the self-importance of the narrator combined with the banality of his story hard to bear.

  20. The Ursitory
    AUTHOR: Matéo Maximoff
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: French
  21. The Monkey Wrench Gang
    AUTHOR: Edward Abbey
  22. FINISHED One Hundred Years of Solitude
    AUTHOR: Gabriel García Márquez
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Spanish
READ_LANGUAGE: English
RATING: 4

    (I've read the English Rabassa translation as that is the one Márquez himself has praised.)

    A book touching on some many things: the decay of a family over multiple generations, the mental states of atomized individuals, the human relationship with time, and the destructive influence hierarchical organization and boundless commerce has on societies.

    Full of insane but intriguing characters who continue to surprise the reader with their actions/choices in all kinds of unexpected situations, the novel weaves tragedy in comedy in a very unique and (to me) appealing way.

  23. Trainspotting
    AUTHOR: Irvine Welsh
  24. Uncle Tom's Cabin
    AUTHOR: Harriet Beecher Stowe
SOURCE: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/harriet-beecher-stowe/uncle-toms-cabin
  25. Women
    AUTHOR: Charles Bukowski
  26. Ham on Rye
    AUTHOR: Charles Bukowski
  27. Post Office
    AUTHOR: Charles Bukowski
  28. Neighbors
    AUTHOR: Diane Oliver
  29. Journey to the End of the Night
    AUTHOR: Louis-Ferdinand Céline
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: French
  30. Diary of a Drug Fiend
    AUTHOR: Aleister Crowley
  31. The Meursault Investigation
    AUTHOR: Kamel Daoud
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: French
  32. Im Schloß
    AUTHOR: Theodor Storm
SOURCE: https://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Im_Schlo%C3%9F
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: German
READ_LANGUAGE: German
  33. Immensee
    AUTHOR: Theodor Storm
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: German
READ_LANGUAGE: German
SOURCE: https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/6651
  34. The Rider on the White Horse
    AUTHOR: Theodor Storm
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: German
READ_LANGUAGE: German
SOURCE: https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/74008
  35. The Nickel Boys
    AUTHOR: Colson Whitehead
  36. The Trial
    AUTHOR: Franz Kafka
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: German
READ_LANGUAGE: German
  37. Prins Charles känsla
    AUTHOR: Liv Strömquist
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Swedish
  38. Dr. Leonardo’s Journey to Sloboda Switzerland with his Future Lover, the Beautiful Alcesta
    AUTHOR: Maik Yohansen
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Ukrainian
  39. Don Quixote
    AUTHOR: Miguel de Cervantes
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Spanish
READ_LANGUAGE: English
SOURCE: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/miguel-de-cervantes-saavedra/don-quixote/john-ormsby
  40. Tiger Trappers
    AUTHOR: Ivan Bahrianyi
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Ukrainian
READ_LANGUAGE: Ukrainian
  41. REREAD 1984
    AUTHOR: George Orwell
  42. FINISHED The Master and Margarita
    AUTHOR: Mikhail Bulgakov
RATING: 4
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Russian
READ_LANGUAGE: Russian

    An extremely rich book weaving the topics of unconditional love, religion, insanity, magic, responsibility and guilt, and critique of Soviet society (e.g. the snobishness within cultural circles, pervasive fear of the secret police, and greed in a socialist society) in a highly sophisticated form.

  43. Lolita
    AUTHOR: Vladimir Nabokov
  44. Fight Club
    AUTHOR: Chuck Palahniuk
  45. Wrong Way
    AUTHOR: Joanne McNeil
  46. Poor Things
    AUTHOR: Alasdair Gray
  47. My Struggle
    AUTHOR: Karl Ove Knausgård
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Norwegian
  48. American Street
    AUTHOR: Ibi Zoboi
  49. American Pastoral
    AUTHOR: Philip Roth
  50. Dying Animal
    AUTHOR: Philip Roth
  51. Serenade for Nadia
    AUTHOR: Ömer Zülfü Livanelioğlu
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Turkish
  52. Invisible Cities
    AUTHOR: Italo Calvino
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Italian
  53. The Leopard
    AUTHOR: Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Italian
  54. Dom Casmurro
    AUTHOR: Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Portuguese
  55. The Green Berets
    AUTHOR: Robin Moore
  56. In Cold Blood
    AUTHOR: Truman Capote
  57. Die Elixiere des Teufels
    AUTHOR: E. T. A. Hoffmann
SOURCE: http://www.zeno.org/Literatur/M/Hoffmann,+E.+T.+A./Romane/Die+Elixiere+des+Teufels
  58. FINISHED Steppenwolf
    AUTHOR: Hermann Hesse
SOURCE: https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/75802
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: German
READ_LANGUAGE: German
RATING: 5

    Powerful book which spoke to me like no other recently.

    The protagonist Harry Haller, an aging man, comes to see himself as a dual being with an animalistic, raw, untamed side (the Steppenwolf) and a highly sophisticated, cultures and intellectual one. He finds himself lonely and totally unfit for life in the nationalistic and bourgeois society which surrounds him. Although he despises that lifestyle in his mind, he has to admit to himself that he outwardly resembles his contemporaries in his own behavior. The very vivid inner conflict between his striving for ideals and the actual baseness of his life brings Haller on the verge of suicide.

    He then gets to know a woman, who (tries to) introduce him to a more accepting, joyful, humorous view on life.

    The book is superbly written and offers an intriguing depiction of a very rich emotional inner life.

  59. Der schwarze Obelisk
    AUTHOR: Erich Maria Remarque
  60. Drei Kameraden
    AUTHOR: Erich Maria Remarque
  61. The Bonfire of the Vanities
    AUTHOR: Tom Wolfe
  62. Der Zauberberg
    AUTHOR: Thomas Mann
  63. Tropic of Cancer
    AUTHOR: Henry Miller
  64. CANC Présence de la mort
    AUTHOR: Charles Ferdinand Ramuz
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: French
READ_LANGUAGE: German

    The novel has a very interesting premise of the Earth falling into the sun and how people react to it, but I found it neigh unreadable.

  65. REREAD Slaughterhouse-Five
    AUTHOR: Kurt Vonnegut
  66. The Passion According to G.H.
    AUTHOR: Clarice Lispector
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Portuguese
  67. Mrs. Dalloway
    AUTHOR: Virginia Woolf
SOURCE: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/virginia-woolf/mrs-dalloway
  68. Piranesi
    AUTHOR: Susanna Clarke
  69. All the Pretty Horses
    AUTHOR: Cormac McCarthy
  70. The Vegetarian
    AUTHOR: Han Kang
  71. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
    AUTHOR: Hunter S. Thompson
  72. House of Leaves
    AUTHOR: Mark Z. Danielewski
  73. The Road
    AUTHOR: Cormac McCarthy
  74. Infinite Jest
    AUTHOR: David Foster Wallace
  75. The Tartar Steppe
    AUTHOR: Dino Buzzati
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Italian

1.2. Non-Fiction

1.2.1. Psychology

  1. The Design of Everyday Things
    AUTHOR: Donald Norman
  2. Atomic Habits
    AUTHOR: James Clear
  3. Selfless: The Social Creation of "You"
    AUTHOR: Brian Lowery
  4. Solve for Happy
    AUTHOR: Mo Gawdat
  5. The Denial of Death
    AUTHOR: Ernest Becker
  6. Man and His Symbols
    AUTHOR: Carl Gustav Jung
  7. FINISHED Humor, Seriously: Why Humor Is a Secret Weapon in Business and Life
    AUTHOR: Jennifer Aaker, Naomi Bagdonas
  8. Radical Honesty: How to Transform Your Life by Telling the Truth
    AUTHOR: Brad Blanton
  9. The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture
    AUTHOR: Gabor Maté, Daniel Maté
  10. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma
    AUTHOR: Bessel van der Kolk
  11. Your Erroneous Zones
    AUTHOR: Wayne W. Dyer
  12. No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model
    AUTHOR: Richard C. Schwartz

1.2.2. Business

  1. Who Moved My Cheese?
    AUTHOR: Spencer Johnson
  2. FINISHED Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals
    AUTHOR: Oliver Burkeman
RATING: 3

    Read this book earlier this year and remember that despite a sensible hypothesis (give up on achieving everything in one's finite time) and containing some useful advice on confronting finitude in everyday life (accept that decisions necessarily imply giving up on certain things; be aware and in the moment; serialize tasks whenever possible), I couldn't help but feel that the insights weren't particularly new: E.g. the stoics have had some of the exact same thoughts roundabout 2000 years before.

  3. Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In
    AUTHOR: Roger Fisher, William Ury, Bruce Patton
  4. The Decision Book: Fifty Models for Strategic Thinking
    AUTHOR: Mikael Krogerus, Roman Tschäppeler
  5. Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World
    AUTHOR: Cal Newport
  6. Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World
    AUTHOR: Cal Newport
  7. Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations
    AUTHOR: Clay Shirky

1.2.3. Complexity

  1. Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos
    AUTHOR: Mitchell Waldrop
  2. At Home in the Universe
    AUTHOR: Stuart A. Kauffman
  3. Ubiquity
    AUTHOR: Mark Buchanan

1.2.4. Programming

  1. Crafting Interpreters
    AUTHOR: Robert Nystrom
SOURCE: https://craftinginterpreters.com/contents.html
  2. Hacking: The Art of Exploitation
    AUTHOR: Jon Erickson
  3. The Secret Life of Programs: Understand Computers – Craft Better Code
    AUTHOR: Jon Steinhart
  4. The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering
    AUTHOR: Frederick P. Brooks Jr.
  5. The Little Schemer
    AUTHOR: Daniel P. Friedman, Matthias Felleisen
  6. Implementation Patterns
    AUTHOR: Kent Beck
  7. FINISHED Getting Real
    AUTHOR: 37 Signals LLC
SOURCE: https://basecamp.com/gettingreal
RATING: 4

    Insightful and practical short booklet on how to build a sucessful web app. While I don't agree with some details, the strong focus on practicality, simplicity, minimalism and customer/user-orientation resonates well with me.

1.2.5. Political theory

  1. Anarchy explained to children
    AUTHOR: José Antonio Emmanuel
  2. Anarchistische Ökologien
    AUTHOR: Milo Probst
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: German
READ_LANGUAGE: German
SOURCE: https://www.matthes-seitz-berlin.de/fs/OPENACCESS/probst_anarchistische-oekologien_oa.pdf
  3. How to Spot a Fascist
    AUTHOR: Umberto Eco
  4. The Myth of the Strong Leader
    AUTHOR: Archie Brown
  5. Blackshirts & Reds
    AUTHOR: Michael Parenti
  6. READING Political Theory of Anarchism
    AUTHOR: Jonathan Eibisch
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: German
READ_LANGUAGE: German
SOURCE: https://www.transcript-verlag.de/978-3-8376-7183-4/politische-theorie-des-anarchismus/
  7. The Human Condition
    AUTHOR: Hannah Arendt
  8. The Quest for Cosmic Justice
    AUTHOR: Thomas Sowell
  9. Ethics: Origin and Development
    AUTHOR: Peter Kropotkin
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Russian
  10. Mutual Aid
    AUTHOR: Peter Kropotkin
SOURCE: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/peter-kropotkin/mutual-aid
  11. The Origins of Totalitarianism
    AUTHOR: Hannah Arendt
  12. The Road to Serfdom
    AUTHOR: Friedrich A. Hayek
  13. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism
    AUTHOR: Benedict Anderson
  14. What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets
    AUTHOR: Michael Joseph Sandel
  15. Orientalism
    AUTHOR: Edward Said

1.2.6. Economics

  1. The Wealth of Nations
    AUTHOR: Adam Smith
SOURCE: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/adam-smith/the-wealth-of-nations
  2. Moneyland: Why Thieves and Crooks Now Rule the World and How To Take It Back
    AUTHOR: Oliver Bullough
  3. Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism
    AUTHOR: Yanis Varoufakis
  4. The Intelligent Investor
    AUTHOR: Benjamin Graham
  5. Fractals and Scaling in Finance
    AUTHOR: Benoit Mandelbrot
  6. Trade Wars are Class Wars
    AUTHOR: Matthew C. Klein, Michael Pettis
  7. Cloudmoney: Cash, Cards, Crypto, and the War for Our Wallets
    AUTHOR: Brett Scott
  8. Der Wachstumszwang: Warum die Volkswirtschaft immer weiterwachsen muss, selbst wenn wir genug haben
    AUTHOR: Mathias Binswanger
  9. READING Debt: The First 5000 Years
    AUTHOR: David Graeber
  10. Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We'll Win Them Back
    AUTHOR: Rebecca Giblin, Cory Doctorow
  11. Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist
    AUTHOR: Kate Raworth
  12. Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World
    AUTHOR: Liaquat Ahamed
  13. Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered
    AUTHOR: Ernst F. Schumacher
  14. FINISHED Good Economics for Hard Times
    AUTHOR: Abhijit V. Banerjee, Esther Duflo
  15. FINISHED Why Nations Fail
    AUTHOR: Daron Acemoglu, James A. Robinson
  16. Too Big to Fail: Inside the Battle to Save Wall Street
    AUTHOR: Andrew Ross Sorkin

1.2.7. Biology

  1. Evolutionary Dynamics: Exploring the Equations of Life
    AUTHOR: Martin Nowak
  2. Blueprint
    AUTHOR: Robert Plomin

1.2.8. History

  1. Auschwitz
    AUTHOR: Laurence Rees
  2. The Volunteer
    AUTHOR: Jack Fairweather
  3. Berlin: The Downfall 1945
    AUTHOR: Antony Beevor
  4. Stalingrad
    AUTHOR: Antony Beevor
  5. Berlin Diary
    AUTHOR: William L. Shirer
  6. A Small, Stubborn Town: Life, death and defiance in Ukraine
    AUTHOR: Andrew Harding
  7. The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine
    AUTHOR: Serhii Plokhy
  8. The Anatomy of a Moment: Thirty-Five Minutes in History and Imagination
    AUTHOR: Javier Cercas
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Spanish
  9. Band of Brothers
    AUTHOR: Stephen E. Ambrose
  10. Das Schwarzbuch des Kommunismus
    AUTHOR: Stéphane Courtois
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: French
  11. A People's History of the United States
    AUTHOR: Howard Zinn
  12. We Were Soldiers Once…and Young: la Drang - The Battle That Changed the War in Vietnam
    AUTHOR: Harold G. Moore, Joseph L. Galloway
  13. Space Rogue: How the Hackers Known As L0pht Changed the World
    AUTHOR: Cris Thomas
  14. HOLD The Best and the Brightest
    AUTHOR: David Halberstam
  15. Red Famine
    AUTHOR: Anne Applebaum
  16. FINISHED On Tyranny
    AUTHOR: Timothy Snyder

    A very practically useful handbook on how citizens can sustain a healthy democracy inspired by lessons from the 20th century.

1.2.9. Mathematics

  1. The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives
    AUTHOR: Leonard Mlodinow
  2. FINISHED How Not to Be Wrong
    AUTHOR: Jordan Ellenberg
RATING: 4

    Very nice book about how mathematical thinking can help structure everyday problems and decision making.

1.2.10. Causality

  1. The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect
    AUTHOR: Judea Pearl, Dana Mackenzie

1.2.11. (Auto-)Biography / Memoir

  1. The Girl in the Green Sweater
    AUTHOR: Krystyna Chiger, Daniel Paisner
  2. Between the World and Me
    AUTHOR: Ta-Nehisi Coates
  3. FINISHED Maus
    AUTHOR: Art Spiegelman

    A moving comic about the trauma and multi-generational guilt induced by the horrors of the Holocaust.

  4. Physics and Beyond
    AUTHOR: Werner Heisenberg
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: German
READ_LANGUAGE: German
  5. The World of Yesterday
    AUTHOR: Stefan Zweig
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: German
READ_LANGUAGE: German
  6. The Pianist
    AUTHOR: Władysław Szpilman
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Polish
  7. Diary of an Invasion
    AUTHOR: Andrey Kurkov
  8. REREAD The Doors of Perception
    AUTHOR: Aldous Huxley
  9. A Tale of Love and Darkness
    AUTHOR: Amos Oz
  10. The African
    AUTHOR: J. M. G. Le Clézio
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: French
  11. FINISHED Lincoln's Virtues: An Ethical Biography
    AUTHOR: William Lee Miller
  12. FINISHED Schützenhilfe
    AUTHOR: Jonas Kratzenberg
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: German
READ_LANGUAGE: German

    Story of how a German Bundeswehr soldier feels the call of duty to use his skills to protect the Ukrainian people in the wake of Russia's full scale invasion in 2022. Details his experiences in the Armed Forces of Ukraine until his battlefield injury.

  13. Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!
    AUTHOR: Ralph Leighton, Richard Feynman
  14. The Eden Express: A Memoir of Insanity
    AUTHOR: Mark Vonnegut
  15. FINISHED Wittgensteins Neffe
    AUTHOR: Thomas Bernhard
  16. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
    AUTHOR: Jean-Dominique Bauby
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: French
  17. A Surgeon's War
    AUTHOR: Henry Ward Trueblood
  18. Seven Pillars of Wisdom
    AUTHOR: Thomas Edward Lawrence
  19. Wind, Sand and Stars
    AUTHOR: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: French
  20. The Short-Timers
    AUTHOR: Gustav Hasford
  21. FINISHED Becoming Myself: A Psychiatrist's Memoir
    AUTHOR: Irvin D. Yalom
  22. FINISHED A Loss
    AUTHOR: Olesya Khromeychuk
  23. A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier
    AUTHOR: Ishmael Beah

1.2.12. Free Culture, Open Content and FLOSS

  1. Against Intellectual Monopoly
    AUTHOR: Michele Boldrin, David K. Levine
SOURCE: http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/againstnew.htm
  2. Athena Unbound: Why and How Scholarly Knowledge Should Be Free for All
    AUTHOR: Peter Baldwin
  3. Internet for the People
    AUTHOR: Ben Tarnoff
  4. The Copyright Wars: Three Centuries of Trans-Atlantic Battle
    AUTHOR: Peter Baldwin
  5. Free Culture
    AUTHOR: Lawrence Lessig
  6. FINISHED Culture vs. Copyright
    AUTHOR: Anatoly Volynets
SOURCE: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Culture_vs._Copyright
RATING: 3

    Insightful analysis on the difference of culture (described as an inner dialogue in the creator as well as a dialogue with the audience) and civilization; in particular in the juxtaposition of cultural goods (whose value increases with more use) in comparison to material ones (whose value decreases with more utilization). While the analysis on copyright as an inhibitor of innovation and "the progress of science and useful arts" is convincingly laid out (e.g. I wasn't aware that the Statute of Anne, the precursor to the current copyright system, was instituted upon the request of publishers, not authors), the alleged economic superiority of the alternative options (self-tuning and authoright) for creators seems doubtful to me (unfortunately).

  7. You Are Not a Gadget
    AUTHOR: Jaron Lanier

1.2.13. Chess

1.2.14. Philosophy

  1. The Mind's I
    AUTHOR: Douglas Hofstadter, Daniel C. Dennett
  2. Consciousness Explained
    AUTHOR: Daniel C. Dennett
  3. The Mystery of Consciousness
    AUTHOR: John Searle
  4. The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory
    AUTHOR: David Chalmers
  5. Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life
    AUTHOR: Arthur Schopenhauer
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: German
READ_LANGUAGE: German
SOURCE: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/47406
  6. The World as Will and Representation
    AUTHOR: Arthur Schopenhauer
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: German
READ_LANGUAGE: German
SOURCE: http://www.zeno.org/Philosophie/M/Schopenhauer,+Arthur/Die+Welt+als+Wille+und+Vorstellung
  7. The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self
    AUTHOR: Thomas Metzinger
  8. On the Duty of Civil Disobedience
    AUTHOR: Henry David Thoreau
SOURCE: https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/71
  9. Walking
    AUTHOR: Henry David Thoreau
SOURCE: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1022
  10. Reality
    AUTHOR: Peter Kingsley
  11. Philosophical Investigations
    AUTHOR: Ludwig Wittgenstein
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: German
READ_LANGUAGE: German
SOURCE: https://www.wittgensteinproject.org/w/index.php/Philosophische_Untersuchungen
  12. HOLD Tao Te Ching
    Author: Laozi
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Chinese
READ_LANGUAGE: English
SOURCE: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/laozi/tao-te-ching/james-legge
  13. HOLD Thus Spoke Zarathustra
    AUTHOR: Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: German
READ_LANGUAGE: German
SOURCE: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7205
  14. Existentialism is a Humanism
    AUTHOR: Jean-Paul Sartre
  15. Sein und Zeit
    AUTHOR: Martin Heidegger
  16. The Myth of Sisyphus
    AUTHOR: Albert Camus
  17. The First and Last Freedom
    AUTHOR: Jiddu Krishnamurti
  18. How to Be an Existentialist
    AUTHOR: Gary Cox
  19. Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False
    AUTHOR: Thomas Nagel
  20. The Foundations of Science
    AUTHOR: Henri Poincaré
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: French
SOURCE: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/39713
READ_LANGUAGE: English
  21. Beyond Freedom and Dignity
    AUTHOR: Burrhus Frederic Skinner
  22. On Bullshit
    AUTHOR: Harry G. Frankfurt
  23. Small Gods
    AUTHOR: Terry Pratchett

1.2.15. Physics

  1. Candide and the Physicist
    AUTHOR: Bernard d'Espagnat

1.2.16. Technology

  1. Addiction by Design
    AUTHOR: Natasha Dow Schüll
  2. The Cultural Logic of Computation
    AUTHOR: David Golumbia
  3. Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI
    AUTHOR: Karen Hao
  4. Artificial Communication: How Algorithms Produce Social Intelligence
    AUTHOR: Elena Esposito
SOURCE: https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/5338/Artificial-CommunicationHow-Algorithms-Produce
  5. Code: And Other Laws of Cyberspace version 2
    AUTHOR: Lawrence Lessig
SOURCE: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Code_v2.pdf
  6. The AI Con
    AUTHOR: Emily M. Bender, Alex Hanna
  7. Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution
    AUTHOR: Steven Levy
  8. Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech
    AUTHOR: Brian Merchant
  9. Where Wizards Stay Up Late
    AUTHOR: Katie Hafner, Matthew Lyon
  10. Data Cartels: The Companies That Control and Monopolize Our Information
    AUTHOR: Sarah Lamdan
  11. Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy
    AUTHOR: Cathy O'Neil
  12. Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence
    AUTHOR: Kate Crawford
  13. New Dark Age:Technology and the End of the Future
    AUTHOR: James Bridle

1.2.17. Sociology

  1. Cowardice: A Brief History
    AUTHOR: Chris Walsh
  2. Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World
    AUTHOR: Anand Giridharadas

1.2.18. Medicine / Health

  1. FINISHED Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art
    AUTHOR: James Nestor

    Despite sometimes making very hard to believe claims, the book highlights how important breathing is for us humans and how one can benefit from doing it correctly. After reading the book I have become much more attentive to my own breathing and make an active effort to avoid mouth breathing at all costs (incl. taping my mouth shut overnight).

  2. Why We Die
    AUTHOR: Venki Ramakrishnan
  3. Sleep: Change the way you sleep with this 90 minute read
    AUTHOR: Nick Littlehales
  4. The Brain's Way of Healing: Remarkable Discoveries and Recoveries from the Frontiers of Neuroplasticity
    AUTHOR: Norman Doidge
  5. In Praise of Walking: A New Scientific Exploration
    AUTHOR: Shane O'Mara
  6. Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams
    AUTHOR: Matthew Walker
  7. Am Leben bleiben. Ein Onkologe bekämpft seinen Krebs.
    AUTHOR: Wolfram Gössling
  8. Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain
    AUTHOR: Lisa Feldman Barrett

1.2.19. Science

  1. Exceeding Our Grasp: Science, History, and the Problem of Unconceived Alternatives
    AUTHOR: P. Kyle Stanford
  2. Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth
    AUTHOR: Stuart J. Ritchie
  3. Conversations with a Mathematician: Math, Art, Science and the Limits of Reason
    AUTHOR: Gregory J. Chaitin

1.2.20. Religion

  1. Bardo Thodol or The Tibetan Book of the Dead
    AUTHOR: Karma Lingpa
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Tibetan

1.2.21. Environment

  1. Fire Weather
    AUTHOR: John Vaillant
  2. Silent Spring
    AUTHOR: Rachel Carson
SOURCE: https://www.fadedpage.com/showbook.php?pid=20151002

1.2.22. Uncategorized

  1. Women and War
    AUTHOR: Aurélie Bros
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Ukrainian
  2. The Art of War
    AUTHOR: Sun Tzu
SOURCE: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/sun-tzu/the-art-of-war/lionel-giles
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Chinese
READ_LANGUAGE: English
  3. A Burst of Light
    AUTHOR: Audre Lorde
  4. Steal this book
    AUTHOR: Abbie Hoffman
  5. SuperCooperators: Altruism, Evolution, and Why We Need Each Other to Succeed
    AUTHOR: Martin Nowak
  6. Trust Me, I'm Lying
    AUTHOR: Ryan Holiday
  7. The Elephant and the Blind
    AUTHOR: Thomas Metzinger
  8. How We Give Now: A Philanthropic Guide for the Rest of Us
    AUTHOR: Lucy Bernholz
  9. Gomorrah
    AUTHOR: Roberto Saviano
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Italian
  10. The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
    AUTHOR: Julian Jaynes
  11. The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on The Tibetan Book of the Dead
    AUTHOR: Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner, Richard Alpert
  12. Gleich geht die Geschichte weiter, wir atmen nur aus: Essays
    AUTHOR: Tanja Maljartschuk
  13. The Revolution Will be Digitised: Dispatches from the Information War
    AUTHOR: Heather Brooke
  14. Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are
    AUTHOR: Seth Stephens-Davidowitz
  15. Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World
    AUTHOR: Carl T. Bergstrom, Jevin D. West
  16. Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another
    AUTHOR: Philip Ball
  17. Programming & Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer: Theory & Experiments
    AUTHOR: John C. Lilly
  18. Be Here Now
    AUTHOR: Ram Dass
  19. What's Our Problem?: A Self-Helf Book for Societies
    AUTHOR: Tim Urban
  20. Humankind: A Hopeful History
    AUTHOR: Rutger Bregman
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Dutch
READ_LANGUAGE: English
  21. The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload
    AUTHOR: Daniel Levitin
  22. What is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell
    AUTHOR: Erwin Schrödinger
  23. Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well
    AUTHOR: Amy Edmondson
  24. Wanting
    AUTHOR: Luke Burgis
  25. Why Most Things Fail
    AUTHOR: Paul Ormerod
  26. Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
    AUTHOR: Douglas Hofstadter
  27. The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
    AUTHOR: James Gleick
  28. An Immense World
    AUTHOR: Ed Yong

2. papers

2.1. Philosophy

  1. Philosophy of AI
    AUTHOR: Vincent C. Müller
SOURCE: https://philpapers.org/archive/MLLPOA.pdf
  2. Morality and Art
    AUTHOR: Philippa Foot
SOURCE: https://philarchive.org/go.pl?id=FOOMAA-2&proxyId=&u=https%3A%2F%2Fphilpapers.org%2Farchive%2FFOOMAA-2.pdf

2.2. Information Theory

  1. A Mathematical Theory of Communication
    AUTHOR: Claude E. Shannon
SOURCE: https://web.archive.org/web/19980715013250/http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/ms/what/shannonday/shannon1948.pdf

2.3. Complexity

  1. FINISHED More is Different
    AUTHOR: Philip Warren Anderson
SOURCE: https://www.tkm.kit.edu/downloads/TKM1_2011_more_is_different_PWA.pdf

    In one of the very first papers to approach the problem of "emergence", nobel prize winning physicist Philip Warren Anderson describes why accepting reductionism ("the ability to reduce everything to simple fundamental laws") as a fundamental scientific hypothesis "does not imply the ability to start from those laws and reconstruct the universe". Anderson argues that increasing scale will lead to unforeseen properties and behaviors on the higher level which warrants separate and dedicated scientific study. In particular, he puts forward "the theory of 'broken symmetry'" to explain "phase transitions" which cause a "shift from quantitative to qualitative differentiation". In Anderson's view these qualitative shifts warrant scientific inquiry on every level and not just on the level of fundamental laws.

    Finally, Anderson ends with a (purportedly historic) dialogue illustrating how quantitative differences (can) lead to qualitative differences in economics:

    Fitzgerald: "The rich are different from us."

    Hemingway: "Yes, they have more money."

2.4. Mathematics

  1. Mathematical Creation
    AUTHOR: Henri Poincaré
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: French
READ_LANGUAGE: English
SOURCE: https://web.archive.org/web/20210923031615/https://henripoincarepapers.univ-nantes.fr/framepdf.php?url=http://henripoincarepapers.univ-nantes.fr/chp/hp-pdf/hp1910moa.pdf

2.5. Anthropology

2.6. Computing

  1. Reflections on Trusting Trust
    AUTHOR: Ken Thompson
SOURCE: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_ReflectionsonTrustingTrust.pdf

2.7. Economics

  1. The Allocation of Food to Food Banks
    AUTHOR: Canice Prendergast
SOURCE: https://bfi.uchicago.edu/wp-content/uploads/11.1-Prendergast-food4-model.pdf

2.8. Uncategorized

  1. FINISHED ChatGPT is bullshit
    AUTHOR: Michael Townsen Hicks, James Humphries, Joe Slater
SOURCE: https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s10676-024-09775-5.pdf

    The authors argue in this well-structured article that LLMs like ChatGPT qualify as bullshitters (or bullshit machines) as described Harry Frankfurt's On Bullshit because of their utter indifference for truth. Therefore, the authors deem bullshit to be a more accurate description for LLM output than the widely accepted but more forgiving lingo of hallucinations/confabulations.

3. other

3.1. essays

  1. What is Philosophy of Science good for?
    AUTHOR: Massimo Pigliucci
SOURCE: https://philosophynow.org/issues/44/What_is_Philosophy_of_Science_Good_For
  2. Die Rackets und der Geist
    AUTHOR: Max Horkheimer
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: German
READ_LANGUAGE: German
  3. On the Shortness of Life
    AUTHOR: Seneca the Younger
SOURCE: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/seneca/dialogues/aubrey-stewart
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Latin
READ_LANGUAGE: English
  4. Self-Reliance
    AUTHOR: Ralph Waldo Emerson
SOURCE: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/ralph-waldo-emerson/essays/text/self-reliance
  5. A Room of One's Own
    AUTHOR: Virginia Woolf
  6. The Nooscope Manifested
    AUTHOR: Vladan Joler, Matteo Pasquinelli
SOURCE: https://fritz.ai/nooscope/
  7. On the foolishness of "natural language programming"
    AUTHOR: Edsger W. Dijkstra
SOURCE: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD667.html
  8. The Tyranny of Structurelessness
    AUTHOR: Jo Freeman
SOURCE: https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm
  9. BITCH Manifesto
    AUTHOR: Jo Freeman
SOURCE: https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/bitch.htm
  10. Life Without Law
    AUTHOR: Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness
  11. The Abolition of Work
    AUTHOR: Bob Black
SOURCE: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/bob-black-the-abolition-of-work
  12. Why Socialism?
    AUTHOR: Albert Einstein
SOURCE: https://monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-socialism/
  13. Bethink Yourselves!
    AUTHOR: Leo Tolstoy
SOURCE: https://ru.wikisource.org/wiki/%D0%9E%D0%B4%D1%83%D0%BC%D0%B0%D0%B9%D1%82%D0%B5%D1%81%D1%8C_(%D0%A2%D0%BE%D0%BB%D1%81%D1%82%D0%BE%D0%B9)
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Russian
READ_LANGUAGE: Russian
  14. Politics as a Vocation
    AUTHOR: Max Weber
READ_LANGUAGE: German
SOURCE: https://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Politik_als_Beruf
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: German
  15. FINISHED Politics and the English Language
    AUTHOR: George Orwell
SOURCE: https://www.fadedpage.com/showbook.php?pid=20180223
RATING: 4

    In this essay, Orwell diagnoses a tendency "away from concreteness" in modern prose which eliminates meaning and thereby prevents clear thinking. "Political language", in particular, "is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind." A lack of clarity in one's words turns language into an instrument "for concealing or preventing" rather than "expressing" thought. As a guide for one's own writing (and thinking), Orwell gives the following six rules to express oneself clearly:

    1. "Never use a methaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print."
    2. "Never use a long word where a short one will do."
    3. "If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out."
    4. "Never use the passive where you can use the active."
    5. "Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word, if you can think of an everyday English equivalent."
    6. "Break any of these rules sooner than say anything barbarous."

    While these rules serve as handy guidelines, most importantly Orwell encourages us "to let the meaning choose the word" in a very conscious process:

    [I]t is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one's meaning as clear as one can through pictures or sensations. Afterwards one can choose not simply accept — the phrases that will best cover the meaning, and then switch round and decide what impressions one's words are likely to make on another person.

3.2. speeches

  1. Two Concepts of Liberty
    AUTHOR: Isaiah Berlin
SOURCE: https://web.archive.org/web/20240127190748/https://cactus.utahtech.edu/green/B_Readings/I_Berlin%20Two%20Concpets%20of%20Liberty.pdf
  2. FINISHED Cargo Cult Science
    AUTHOR: Richard Feynman
SOURCE: https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm

    In the 1974 Caltech commencement speach Feynman pleads scientists to adhere to basic scientific integrity by raising all kinds of doubts about their own experimental results. He brings up issues persisting til today (lack of reproduced results, academic/financial/political pressures) but argues that by disregarding scientific integrity, scientists are fooling themselves and leaving the realm of science.

  3. The Ultimate Revolution
    AUTHOR: Aldous Huxley
SOURCE: https://www.organism.earth/library/document/ultimate-revolution

3.3. (news) articles

  1. Notes on the Original Affluent Society
    AUTHOR: Marshall Sahlins
  2. Seeking the Magic Mushroom
    AUTHOR: R. Gordon Wasson
SOURCE: https://bibliography.maps.org/bibliography/default/resource/15048
  3. A New Theory of the Universe
    AUTHOR: Robert Lanza
SOURCE: https://theamericanscholar.org/a-new-theory-of-the-universe/
  4. The Economy of Ideas
    AUTHOR: John Perry Barlow
SOURCE: https://www.wired.com/1994/03/economy-ideas/

3.4. blog posts

  1. Action is sometimes clearer than talk: Why we will always need trade
    AUTHOR: William Gillis
SOURCE: https://humaniterations.net/2020/09/05/action-is-sometimes-clearer-than-talk
  2. How to conduct an effective code review
    AUTHOR: Otto Kekäläinen
SOURCE: https://optimizedbyotto.com/post/how-to-code-review/
  3. Debian source packages in git explained
    AUTHOR: Otto Kekäläinen
SOURCE: https://optimizedbyotto.com/post/debian-source-package-git/
  4. Creating Debian packages from upstream Git
    AUTHOR: Otto Kekäläinen
SOURCE: https://optimizedbyotto.com/post/debian-packaging-from-git/
  5. Deep in Mordor where the shadows lie: Dystopian tales of that time when I sold out to Google
    AUTHOR: elilla
SOURCE: https://wordsmith.social/elilla/deep-in-mordor-where-the-shadows-lie-dystopian-stories-of-my-time-as-a-googler
  6. I Think I’m Done Thinking About genAI For Now
    AUTHOR: Glyph
SOURCE: https://blog.glyph.im/2025/06/i-think-im-done-thinking-about-genai-for-now.html
  7. Permacomputing update 2021
    AUTHOR: viznut
SOURCE: http://viznut.fi/texts-en/permacomputing_update_2021.html
  8. Permacomputing
    AUTHOR: viznut
SOURCE: http://viznut.fi/texts-en/permacomputing.html