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. Eight O'Clock in the Morning
    AUTHOR: Ray Nelson
  2. FINISHED 2 B R 0 2 B
    AUTHOR: Kurt Vonnegut
SOURCE: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/21279
RATING: 4
  3. FINISHED A Psalm for the Wild-Built
    AUTHOR: Becky Chambers
RATING: 3
  4. FINISHED Old Man's War
    AUTHOR: John Scalzi
RATING: 4

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

  5. The Wall
    AUTHOR: John Lanchester
  6. This Is How You Lose the Time War
    AUTHOR: Amal El-Mohtar, Max Gladstone
  7. Alan Mendelsohn, The Boy From Mars
    AUTHOR: Daniel Pinkwater
  8. Válka s Mloky
    AUTHOR: Karel Čapek
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Czech
  9. Starship Troopers
    AUTHOR: Robert Heinlein
  10. Player Piano
    AUTHOR: Kurt Vonnegut
  11. The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
    AUTHOR: Philip K. Dick
  12. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
    AUTHOR: Douglas Adams
  13. Dune
    AUTHOR: Frank Herbert
  14. Neuromancer
    AUTHOR: William Gibson
  15. The City & the City
    AUTHOR: China Miéville

1.1.3. Drama

  1. FINISHED The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark
    AUTHOR: William Shakespeare
SOURCE: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/27761
RATING: 4
  2. Life Is A Dream
    AUTHOR: Pedro Calderón de la Barca
SOURCE: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/6363
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Spanish
READ_LANGUAGE: English
  3. Waiting for Godot
    AUTHOR: Samuel Beckett

1.1.4. Historical fiction

  1. Atonement
    AUTHOR: Ian McEwan
  2. Radetzkymarsch
    AUTHOR: Joseph Roth
  3. The Books of Jacob
    AUTHOR: Olga Tokarczuk
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Polish
  4. FINISHED Glory
    AUTHOR: NoViolet Bulawayo
RATING: 3
  5. The Prince and the Coyote
    AUTHOR: David Bowles
  6. Everything is Illuminated
    AUTHOR: Jonathan Safran Foer
  7. FINISHED Data Tutashkhia
    AUTHOR: Chabua Amirejibi
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Georgian
READ_LANGUAGE: German
RATING: 4
  8. Paradise
    AUTHOR: Abdulrazak Gurnah
  9. Blood Meridian
    AUTHOR: Cormac McCarthy
  10. FINISHED East of Eden
    AUTHOR: John Steinbeck
  11. 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. FINISHED Death and the Penguin
    AUTHOR: Andrey Kurkov
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Russian
READ_LANGUAGE: Russian
RATING: 3
  2. 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.

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. 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. FINISHED The Master and Margarita
    AUTHOR: Mikhail Bulgakov
RATING: 4
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Russian
READ_LANGUAGE: Russian
  2. Lolita
    AUTHOR: Vladimir Nabokov
  3. Fight Club
    AUTHOR: Chuck Palahniuk
  4. Wrong Way
    AUTHOR: Joanne McNeil
  5. Poor Things
    AUTHOR: Alasdair Gray
  6. My Struggle
    AUTHOR: Karl Ove Knausgård
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Norwegian
  7. American Street
    AUTHOR: Ibi Zoboi
  8. American Pastoral
    AUTHOR: Philip Roth
  9. Dying Animal
    AUTHOR: Philip Roth
  10. Serenade for Nadia
    AUTHOR: Ömer Zülfü Livanelioğlu
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Turkish
  11. Invisible Cities
    AUTHOR: Italo Calvino
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Italian
  12. The Leopard
    AUTHOR: Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Italian
  13. Dom Casmurro
    AUTHOR: Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Portuguese
  14. The Green Berets
    AUTHOR: Robin Moore
  15. In Cold Blood
    AUTHOR: Truman Capote
  16. 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
  17. Steppenwolf
    AUTHOR: Hermann Hesse
  18. Der schwarze Obelisk
    AUTHOR: Erich Maria Remarque
  19. Drei Kameraden
    AUTHOR: Erich Maria Remarque
  20. The Bonfire of the Vanities
    AUTHOR: Tom Wolfe
  21. Der Zauberberg
    AUTHOR: Thomas Mann
  22. Tropic of Cancer
    AUTHOR: Henry Miller
  23. 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.

  24. REREAD Slaughterhouse-Five
    AUTHOR: Kurt Vonnegut
  25. The Passion According to G.H.
    AUTHOR: Clarice Lispector
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Portuguese
  26. Mrs. Dalloway
    AUTHOR: Virginia Woolf
SOURCE: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/71865
  27. Piranesi
    AUTHOR: Susanna Clarke
  28. All the Pretty Horses
    AUTHOR: Cormac McCarthy
  29. The Vegetarian
    AUTHOR: Han Kang
  30. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
    AUTHOR: Hunter S. Thompson
  31. House of Leaves
    AUTHOR: Mark Z. Danielewski
  32. The Road
    AUTHOR: Cormac McCarthy
  33. Infinite Jest
    AUTHOR: David Foster Wallace

1.2. Non-Fiction

1.2.1. Psychology

  1. Man and His Symbols
    AUTHOR: Carl Gustav Jung
  2. FINISHED Humor, Seriously: Why Humor Is a Secret Weapon in Business and Life
    AUTHOR: Jennifer Aaker, Naomi Bagdonas
  3. Radical Honesty: How to Transform Your Life by Telling the Truth
    AUTHOR: Brad Blanton
  4. The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture
    AUTHOR: Gabor Maté, Daniel Maté
  5. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma
    AUTHOR: Bessel van der Kolk
  6. Your Erroneous Zones
    AUTHOR: Wayne W. Dyer
  7. No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model
    AUTHOR: Richard C. Schwartz

1.2.2. Business

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

1.2.3. Complexity

  1. At Home in the Universe
    AUTHOR: Stuart A. Kauffman
  2. Ubiquity
    AUTHOR: Mark Buchanan

1.2.4. Programming

  1. Hacking: The Art of Exploitation
    AUTHOR: Jon Erickson
  2. The Secret Life of Programs: Understand Computers – Craft Better Code
    AUTHOR: Jon Steinhart
  3. The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering
    AUTHOR: Frederick P. Brooks Jr.
  4. The Little Schemer
    AUTHOR: Daniel P. Friedman, Matthias Felleisen
  5. Implementation Patterns
    AUTHOR: Kent Beck
  6. 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. The Origins of Totalitarianism
    AUTHOR: Hannah Arendt
  2. The Road to Serfdom
    AUTHOR: Friedrich A. Hayek
  3. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism
    AUTHOR: Benedict Anderson
  4. What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets
    AUTHOR: Michael Joseph Sandel
  5. Orientalism
    AUTHOR: Edward Said

1.2.6. Economics

  1. Trade Wars are Class Wars
    AUTHOR: Matthew C. Klein, Michael Pettis
  2. Cloudmoney: Cash, Cards, Crypto, and the War for Our Wallets
    AUTHOR: Brett Scott
  3. Der Wachstumszwang: Warum die Volkswirtschaft immer weiterwachsen muss, selbst wenn wir genug haben
    AUTHOR: Mathias Binswanger
  4. Debt: The First 5000 Years
    AUTHOR: David Graeber
  5. Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We'll Win Them Back
    AUTHOR: Rebecca Giblin, Cory Doctorow
  6. Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist
    AUTHOR: Kate Raworth
  7. Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World
    AUTHOR: Liaquat Ahamed
  8. Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered
    AUTHOR: Ernst F. Schumacher
  9. FINISHED Good Economics for Hard Times
    AUTHOR: Abhijit V. Banerjee, Esther Duflo
  10. FINISHED Why Nations Fail
    AUTHOR: Daron Acemoglu, James A. Robinson
  11. Too Big to Fail: Inside the Battle to Save Wall Street
    AUTHOR: Andrew Ross Sorkin

1.2.7. Biology

  1. Blueprint
    AUTHOR: Robert Plomin

1.2.8. History

  1. A Small, Stubborn Town: Life, death and defiance in Ukraine
    AUTHOR: Andrew Harding
  2. The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine
    AUTHOR: Serhii Plokhy
  3. The Anatomy of a Moment: Thirty-Five Minutes in History and Imagination
    AUTHOR: Javier Cercas
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Spanish
  4. Band of Brothers
    AUTHOR: Stephen E. Ambrose
  5. Das Schwarzbuch des Kommunismus
    AUTHOR: Stéphane Courtois
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: French
  6. A People's History of the United States
    AUTHOR: Howard Zinn
  7. We Were Soldiers Once…and Young: la Drang - The Battle That Changed the War in Vietnam
    AUTHOR: Harold G. Moore, Joseph L. Galloway
  8. Space Rogue: How the Hackers Known As L0pht Changed the World
    AUTHOR: Cris Thomas
  9. HOLD The Best and the Brightest
    AUTHOR: David Halberstam
  10. Red Famine
    AUTHOR: Anne Applebaum
  11. 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 African
    AUTHOR: J. M. G. Le Clézio
  2. Lincoln's Virtues: An Ethical Biography
    AUTHOR: William Lee Miller
  3. FINISHED Schützenhilfe
    AUTHOR: Jonas Kratzenberg

    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.

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

1.2.12. Free Culture, Open Content and FLOSS

  1. Athena Unbound: Why and How Scholarly Knowledge Should Be Free for All
    AUTHOR: Peter Baldwin
  2. Internet for the People
    AUTHOR: Ben Tarnoff
  3. The Copyright Wars: Three Centuries of Trans-Atlantic Battle
    AUTHOR: Peter Baldwin
  4. Free Culture
    AUTHOR: Lawrence Lessig
  5. READING Culture vs. Copyright
    AUTHOR: Anatoly Volynets
SOURCE: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Culture_vs._Copyright
  6. You Are Not a Gadget
    AUTHOR: Jaron Lanier

1.2.13. Chess

1.2.14. Philosophy

  1. HOLD Tao Te Ching
    Author: Laozi
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Chinese
READ_LANGUAGE: English
SOURCE: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/laozi/tao-te-ching/james-legge
  2. HOLD Thus Spoke Zarathustra
    AUTHOR: Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: German
READ_LANGUAGE: German
SOURCE: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7205
  3. Existentialism is a Humanism
    AUTHOR: Jean-Paul Sartre
  4. Sein und Zeit
    AUTHOR: Martin Heidegger
  5. The Myth of Sisyphus
    AUTHOR: Albert Camus
  6. The First and Last Freedom
    AUTHOR: Jiddu Krishnamurti
  7. How to Be an Existentialist
    AUTHOR: Gary Cox
  8. Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False
    AUTHOR: Thomas Nagel
  9. The Value of Science
    AUTHOR: Henri Poincaré
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: French
  10. Beyond Freedom and Dignity
    AUTHOR: Burrhus Frederic Skinner
  11. On Bullshit
    AUTHOR: Harry G. Frankfurt
  12. Small Gods
    AUTHOR: Terry Pratchett

1.2.15. Physics

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

1.2.16. Technology

  1. Data Cartels: The Companies That Control and Monopolize Our Information
    AUTHOR: Sarah Lamdan
  2. Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy
    AUTHOR: Cathy O'Neil
  3. Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence
    AUTHOR: Kate Crawford
  4. New Dark Age:Technology and the End of the Future
    AUTHOR: James Bridle

1.2.17. Sociology

  1. Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World
    AUTHOR: Anand Giridharadas

1.2.18. Biology / Medicine / Health

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

  1. Gleich geht die Geschichte weiter, wir atmen nur aus: Essays
    AUTHOR: Tanja Maljartschuk
  2. The Revolution Will be Digitised: Dispatches from the Information War
    AUTHOR: Heather Brooke
  3. Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are
    AUTHOR: Seth Stephens-Davidowitz
  4. Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World
    AUTHOR: Carl T. Bergstrom, Jevin D. West
  5. Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another
    AUTHOR: Philip Ball
  6. Programming & Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer: Theory & Experiments
    AUTHOR: John C. Lilly
  7. Be Here Now
    AUTHOR: Ram Dass
  8. What's Our Problem?: A Self-Helf Book for Societies
    AUTHOR: Tim Urban
  9. Humankind: A Hopeful History
    AUTHOR: Rutger Bregman
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Dutch
READ_LANGUAGE: English
  10. The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload
    AUTHOR: Daniel Levitin
  11. What is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell
    AUTHOR: Erwin Schrödinger
  12. Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well
    AUTHOR: Amy Edmondson
  13. Wanting
    AUTHOR: Luke Burgis
  14. Why Most Things Fail
    AUTHOR: Paul Ormerod
  15. Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
    AUTHOR: Douglas Hofstadter
  16. The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
    AUTHOR: James Gleick
  17. An Immense World
    AUTHOR: Ed Yong

2. papers

2.1. 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

2.2. 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."

2.3. 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

3. other

3.1. (news) articles

  1. The Economy of Ideas
    AUTHOR: John Perry Barlow
SOURCE: https://www.wired.com/1994/03/economy-ideas/

3.2. blog posts