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. Roadside Picnic
    AUTHOR: Arkady Strugatsky, Boris Strugatsky
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Russian
  2. Solaris
    AUTHOR: Stanisław Lem
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Polish
  3. Eight O'Clock in the Morning
    AUTHOR: Ray Nelson
  4. FINISHED 2 B R 0 2 B
    AUTHOR: Kurt Vonnegut
SOURCE: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/21279
RATING: 4
  5. FINISHED A Psalm for the Wild-Built
    AUTHOR: Becky Chambers
RATING: 3
  6. FINISHED Old Man's War
    AUTHOR: John Scalzi
RATING: 4

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

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

1.1.3. Drama

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

1.1.4. Historical fiction

  1. The Underground Railroad
    AUTHOR: Colson Whitehead
  2. Life and Fate
    AUTHOR: Vasily Grossman
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Russian
  3. Maria
    AUTHOR: Ulas Samchuk
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Ukrainian
  4. The Yellow Prince
    AUTHOR: Vasyl Barka
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Ukrainian
  5. 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.

  6. Lincoln in the Bardo
    AUTHOR: George Saunders
  7. With Fire and Sword
    AUTHOR: Henryk Sienkiewicz
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Polish
  8. Atonement
    AUTHOR: Ian McEwan
  9. Radetzkymarsch
    AUTHOR: Joseph Roth
  10. The Books of Jacob
    AUTHOR: Olga Tokarczuk
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Polish
  11. 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.

  12. The Prince and the Coyote
    AUTHOR: David Bowles
  13. Everything is Illuminated
    AUTHOR: Jonathan Safran Foer
  14. FINISHED Data Tutashkhia
    AUTHOR: Chabua Amirejibi
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Georgian
READ_LANGUAGE: German
RATING: 4
  15. Paradise
    AUTHOR: Abdulrazak Gurnah
  16. Blood Meridian
    AUTHOR: Cormac McCarthy
  17. FINISHED East of Eden
    AUTHOR: John Steinbeck
  18. 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. Welcome to Lake Success
    AUTHOR: Gary Shteyngart
  2. Germany. A Winter's Tale
    AUTHOR: Heinrich Heine
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: German
READ_LANGUAGE: German
SOURCE: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/6079
  3. Animal Farm
    AUTHOR: George Orwell
  4. FINISHED Death and the Penguin
    AUTHOR: Andrey Kurkov
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Russian
READ_LANGUAGE: Russian
RATING: 3
  5. 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. 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. Journey to the End of the Night
    AUTHOR: Louis-Ferdinand Céline
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: French
  2. Diary of a Drug Fiend
    AUTHOR: Aleister Crowley
  3. The Meursault Investigation
    AUTHOR: Kamel Daoud
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: French
  4. Im Schloß
    AUTHOR: Theodor Storm
SOURCE: https://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Im_Schlo%C3%9F
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: German
READ_LANGUAGE: German
  5. Immensee
    AUTHOR: Theodor Storm
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: German
READ_LANGUAGE: German
SOURCE: https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/6651
  6. The Rider on the White Horse
    AUTHOR: Theodor Storm
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: German
READ_LANGUAGE: German
SOURCE: https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/74008
  7. The Nickel Boys
    AUTHOR: Colson Whitehead
  8. The Trial
    AUTHOR: Franz Kafka
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: German
READ_LANGUAGE: German
  9. Prins Charles känsla
    AUTHOR: Liv Strömquist
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Swedish
  10. Dr. Leonardo’s Journey to Sloboda Switzerland with his Future Lover, the Beautiful Alcesta
    AUTHOR: Maik Yohansen
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Ukrainian
  11. 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
  12. Tiger Trappers
    AUTHOR: Ivan Bahrianyi
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Ukrainian
READ_LANGUAGE: Ukrainian
  13. REREAD 1984
    AUTHOR: George Orwell
  14. 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.

  15. Lolita
    AUTHOR: Vladimir Nabokov
  16. Fight Club
    AUTHOR: Chuck Palahniuk
  17. Wrong Way
    AUTHOR: Joanne McNeil
  18. Poor Things
    AUTHOR: Alasdair Gray
  19. My Struggle
    AUTHOR: Karl Ove Knausgård
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Norwegian
  20. American Street
    AUTHOR: Ibi Zoboi
  21. American Pastoral
    AUTHOR: Philip Roth
  22. Dying Animal
    AUTHOR: Philip Roth
  23. Serenade for Nadia
    AUTHOR: Ömer Zülfü Livanelioğlu
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Turkish
  24. Invisible Cities
    AUTHOR: Italo Calvino
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Italian
  25. The Leopard
    AUTHOR: Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Italian
  26. Dom Casmurro
    AUTHOR: Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Portuguese
  27. The Green Berets
    AUTHOR: Robin Moore
  28. In Cold Blood
    AUTHOR: Truman Capote
  29. 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
  30. Steppenwolf
    AUTHOR: Hermann Hesse
  31. Der schwarze Obelisk
    AUTHOR: Erich Maria Remarque
  32. Drei Kameraden
    AUTHOR: Erich Maria Remarque
  33. The Bonfire of the Vanities
    AUTHOR: Tom Wolfe
  34. Der Zauberberg
    AUTHOR: Thomas Mann
  35. Tropic of Cancer
    AUTHOR: Henry Miller
  36. 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.

  37. REREAD Slaughterhouse-Five
    AUTHOR: Kurt Vonnegut
  38. The Passion According to G.H.
    AUTHOR: Clarice Lispector
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Portuguese
  39. Mrs. Dalloway
    AUTHOR: Virginia Woolf
SOURCE: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/71865
  40. Piranesi
    AUTHOR: Susanna Clarke
  41. All the Pretty Horses
    AUTHOR: Cormac McCarthy
  42. The Vegetarian
    AUTHOR: Han Kang
  43. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
    AUTHOR: Hunter S. Thompson
  44. House of Leaves
    AUTHOR: Mark Z. Danielewski
  45. The Road
    AUTHOR: Cormac McCarthy
  46. Infinite Jest
    AUTHOR: David Foster Wallace

1.2. Non-Fiction

1.2.1. Psychology

  1. Solve for Happy
    AUTHOR: Mo Gawdat
  2. The Denial of Death
    AUTHOR: Ernest Becker
  3. Man and His Symbols
    AUTHOR: Carl Gustav Jung
  4. FINISHED Humor, Seriously: Why Humor Is a Secret Weapon in Business and Life
    AUTHOR: Jennifer Aaker, Naomi Bagdonas
  5. Radical Honesty: How to Transform Your Life by Telling the Truth
    AUTHOR: Brad Blanton
  6. The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture
    AUTHOR: Gabor Maté, Daniel Maté
  7. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma
    AUTHOR: Bessel van der Kolk
  8. Your Erroneous Zones
    AUTHOR: Wayne W. Dyer
  9. 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. 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 Quest for Cosmic Justice
    AUTHOR: Thomas Sowell
  2. Ethics: Origin and Development
    AUTHOR: Peter Kropotkin
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Russian
  3. Mutual Aid
    AUTHOR: Peter Kropotkin
SOURCE: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/peter-kropotkin/mutual-aid
  4. The Origins of Totalitarianism
    AUTHOR: Hannah Arendt
  5. The Road to Serfdom
    AUTHOR: Friedrich A. Hayek
  6. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism
    AUTHOR: Benedict Anderson
  7. What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets
    AUTHOR: Michael Joseph Sandel
  8. 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. Diary of an Invasion
    AUTHOR: Andrey Kurkov
  2. REREAD The Doors of Perception
    AUTHOR: Aldous Huxley
  3. A Tale of Love and Darkness
    AUTHOR: Amos Oz
  4. The African
    AUTHOR: J. M. G. Le Clézio
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: French
  5. READING Lincoln's Virtues: An Ethical Biography
    AUTHOR: William Lee Miller
  6. 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.

  7. Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!
    AUTHOR: Ralph Leighton, Richard Feynman
  8. The Eden Express: A Memoir of Insanity
    AUTHOR: Mark Vonnegut
  9. FINISHED Wittgensteins Neffe
    AUTHOR: Thomas Bernhard
  10. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
    AUTHOR: Jean-Dominique Bauby
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: French
  11. A Surgeon's War
    AUTHOR: Henry Ward Trueblood
  12. Seven Pillars of Wisdom
    AUTHOR: Thomas Edward Lawrence
  13. Wind, Sand and Stars
    AUTHOR: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: French
  14. The Short-Timers
    AUTHOR: Gustav Hasford
  15. FINISHED Becoming Myself: A Psychiatrist's Memoir
    AUTHOR: Irvin D. Yalom
  16. FINISHED A Loss
    AUTHOR: Olesya Khromeychuk
  17. 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. 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).

  6. You Are Not a Gadget
    AUTHOR: Jaron Lanier

1.2.13. Chess

1.2.14. Philosophy

  1. The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self
    AUTHOR: Thomas Metzinger
  2. On the Duty of Civil Disobedience
    AUTHOR: Henry David Thoreau
SOURCE: https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/71
  3. Walking
    AUTHOR: Henry David Thoreau
SOURCE: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1022
  4. Reality
    AUTHOR: Peter Kingsley
  5. Philosophical Investigations
    AUTHOR: Ludwig Wittgenstein
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: German
READ_LANGUAGE: German
SOURCE: https://www.wittgensteinproject.org/w/index.php/Philosophische_Untersuchungen
  6. HOLD Tao Te Ching
    Author: Laozi
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Chinese
READ_LANGUAGE: English
SOURCE: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/laozi/tao-te-ching/james-legge
  7. HOLD Thus Spoke Zarathustra
    AUTHOR: Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: German
READ_LANGUAGE: German
SOURCE: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7205
  8. Existentialism is a Humanism
    AUTHOR: Jean-Paul Sartre
  9. Sein und Zeit
    AUTHOR: Martin Heidegger
  10. The Myth of Sisyphus
    AUTHOR: Albert Camus
  11. The First and Last Freedom
    AUTHOR: Jiddu Krishnamurti
  12. How to Be an Existentialist
    AUTHOR: Gary Cox
  13. Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False
    AUTHOR: Thomas Nagel
  14. The Foundations of Science
    AUTHOR: Henri Poincaré
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: French
SOURCE: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/39713
READ_LANGUAGE: English
  15. Beyond Freedom and Dignity
    AUTHOR: Burrhus Frederic Skinner
  16. On Bullshit
    AUTHOR: Harry G. Frankfurt
  17. Small Gods
    AUTHOR: Terry Pratchett

1.2.15. Physics

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

1.2.16. Technology

  1. Where Wizards Stay Up Late
    AUTHOR: Katie Hafner, Matthew Lyon
  2. Data Cartels: The Companies That Control and Monopolize Our Information
    AUTHOR: Sarah Lamdan
  3. Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy
    AUTHOR: Cathy O'Neil
  4. Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence
    AUTHOR: Kate Crawford
  5. 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. 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. Uncategorized

  1. The Elephant and the Blind
    AUTHOR: Thomas Metzinger
  2. How We Give Now: A Philanthropic Guide for the Rest of Us
    AUTHOR: Lucy Bernholz
  3. Gomorrah
    AUTHOR: Roberto Saviano
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Italian
  4. The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
    AUTHOR: Julian Jaynes
  5. The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on The Tibetan Book of the Dead
    AUTHOR: Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner, Richard Alpert
  6. Gleich geht die Geschichte weiter, wir atmen nur aus: Essays
    AUTHOR: Tanja Maljartschuk
  7. The Revolution Will be Digitised: Dispatches from the Information War
    AUTHOR: Heather Brooke
  8. Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are
    AUTHOR: Seth Stephens-Davidowitz
  9. Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World
    AUTHOR: Carl T. Bergstrom, Jevin D. West
  10. Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another
    AUTHOR: Philip Ball
  11. Programming & Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer: Theory & Experiments
    AUTHOR: John C. Lilly
  12. Be Here Now
    AUTHOR: Ram Dass
  13. What's Our Problem?: A Self-Helf Book for Societies
    AUTHOR: Tim Urban
  14. Humankind: A Hopeful History
    AUTHOR: Rutger Bregman
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Dutch
READ_LANGUAGE: English
  15. The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload
    AUTHOR: Daniel Levitin
  16. What is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell
    AUTHOR: Erwin Schrödinger
  17. Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well
    AUTHOR: Amy Edmondson
  18. Wanting
    AUTHOR: Luke Burgis
  19. Why Most Things Fail
    AUTHOR: Paul Ormerod
  20. Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
    AUTHOR: Douglas Hofstadter
  21. The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
    AUTHOR: James Gleick
  22. 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

2.4. Anthropology

3. other

3.1. speeches

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

3.2. (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. 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.

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

3.3. blog posts