Reading list

Reading list

1. books

1.1. Fiction

1.1.1. Epic

  1. Beowulf
    AUTHOR:
SOURCE: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/anonymous/beowulf/john-lesslie-hall
  2. 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. REREAD The Time Machine
    AUTHOR: H. G. Wells
SOURCE: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/35
PUBLISHED: 1895
  2. The Fall of Hyperion
    AUTHOR: Dan Simmons
PUBLISHED: 1990

    (Sequel to Hyperion)

  3. Hyperion
    AUTHOR: Dan Simmons
PUBLISHED: 1989
  4. Project Hail Mary
    AUTHOR: Andy Weir
  5. Bloodchild
    AUTHOR: Octavia E. Butler
PUBLISHED: 1985
  6. Ancillary Justice
    AUTHOR: Ann Leckie
PUBLISHED: 2013
  7. Snow Crash
    AUTHOR: Neal Stephenson
PUBLISHED: 1992
  8. The Word for World is Forest
    AUTHOR: Ursula K. Le Guin
  9. We
    AUTHOR: Yevgeny Zamyatin
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Russian
SOURCE: http://az.lib.ru/z/zamjatin_e_i/text_0050.shtml
  10. China Mountain Zhang
    AUTHOR: Maureen F. McHugh
  11. The Will to Battle
    AUTHOR: Ada Palmer
  12. Murderbot
    AUTHOR: Martha Wells
  13. Cyberiad
    AUTHOR: Stanisław Lem
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Polish
  14. Rho
    AUTHOR: E. S. Schmidt
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: German
READ_LANGUAGE: German
  15. Galápagos
    AUTHOR: Kurt Vonnegut
  16. 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.

  17. 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.

  18. The Futurological Congress
    AUTHOR: Stanisław Lem
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Polish
  19. The Left Hand of Darkness
    AUTHOR: Ursula K. Le Guin
  20. Cloud Atlas
    AUTHOR: David Mitchell
  21. Parable of the Sower
    AUTHOR: Octavia E. Butler
PUBLISHED: 1993
  22. The Last of the Masters
    AUTHOR: Philip K. Dick
  23. FINISHED The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
    AUTHOR: Ursula K. Le Guin
SOURCE: https://libcom.org/article/dispossessed
  24. Gateway
    AUTHOR: Frederik Pohl
  25. 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 with the end just kinda bolted on.

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

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

  33. The Wall
    AUTHOR: John Lanchester
  34. This Is How You Lose the Time War
    AUTHOR: Amal El-Mohtar, Max Gladstone
  35. Alan Mendelsohn, The Boy From Mars
    AUTHOR: Daniel Pinkwater
  36. Válka s Mloky
    AUTHOR: Karel Čapek
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Czech
  37. Starship Troopers
    AUTHOR: Robert Heinlein
  38. Player Piano
    AUTHOR: Kurt Vonnegut
  39. The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
    AUTHOR: Philip K. Dick
  40. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
    AUTHOR: Douglas Adams
  41. Dune
    AUTHOR: Frank Herbert
PUBLISHED: 1965
  42. Neuromancer
    AUTHOR: William Gibson
  43. The City & the City
    AUTHOR: China Miéville

1.1.3. Drama

  1. Peer Gynt
    PUBLISHED: 1867
AUTHOR: Henrik Ibsen
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Norwegian
  2. Cassandra
    AUTHOR: Lesya Ukrainka
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Ukrainian
  3. Timon of Athens
    AUTHOR: William Shakespeare
SOURCE: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/william-shakespeare/timon-of-athens
  4. 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.

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

1.1.4. Historical fiction

  1. Wolf Hall
    AUTHOR: Hilary Mantel
  2. The English Patient
    AUTHOR: Michael Ondaatje
  3. Wide Sargasso Sea
    AUTHOR: Jean Rhys
  4. Memoirs of an Infantry Officer
    AUTHOR: Siegfried Sassoon
  5. Foucault's Pendulum
    AUTHOR: Umberto Eco
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Italian
  6. FINISHED Beloved
    AUTHOR: Toni Morrison
  7. Khatyn
    AUTHOR: Ales Adamovich
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Belarusian
  8. The Empusium
    AUTHOR: Olga Tokarczuk
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Polish

    [Read after Thomas Mann's Der Zauberberg]

  9. The Killer Angels
    AUTHOR: Michael Shaara
  10. The Jungle
    AUTHOR: Upton Sinclair
SOURCE: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/upton-sinclair/the-jungle
  11. FINISHED The Underground Railroad
    AUTHOR: Colson Whitehead
RATING: 3

    A good book elaborating on the horrors of slavery - be it on the plantations, on the run, or "in safety". I didn't understand why Whitehead decided to make the Underground Railroad a physical thing though and felt like this is a fairly grave stylistic and storytelling error: the book does not gain anything by it. Overall, I think, Beloved is the significantly better book, because it is so much more harrowing.

  12. Life and Fate
    AUTHOR: Vasily Grossman
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Russian
  13. Maria
    AUTHOR: Ulas Samchuk
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Ukrainian
  14. The Yellow Prince
    AUTHOR: Vasyl Barka
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Ukrainian
  15. 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.

  16. 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.

  17. With Fire and Sword
    AUTHOR: Henryk Sienkiewicz
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Polish
  18. Atonement
    AUTHOR: Ian McEwan
  19. Radetzkymarsch
    AUTHOR: Joseph Roth
  20. The Books of Jacob
    AUTHOR: Olga Tokarczuk
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Polish
  21. 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.

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

1.1.5. Psychological novel

  1. Ungebetene Gäste
    AUTHOR: Ayelet Gundar-Goshen
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Hebrew
  2. FINISHED No Longer Human
    AUTHOR: Osamu Dazai
READ_LANGUAGE: English
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Japanese
  3. 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. Erewhon
    AUTHOR: Samuel Butler
SOURCE: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/samuel-butler/erewhon
PUBLISHED: 1872
  2. Gargantua and Pantagruel
    AUTHOR: François Rabelais
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: French
READ_LANGUAGE: English
SOURCE: https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/1200
  3. FINISHED Small Gods
    AUTHOR: Terry Pratchett
RATING: 3

    Hilarious, easy to read novel full of plot twists, satirizing gods (their vanity and selfishness), organized religion and the pro-forma "faith" it inspires. Hammers home the message that the power gods wield materialize through believers. And that not being too sure of one's own opinion is healthy - especially if one can laugh about it.

  4. QualityLand
    AUTHOR: Marc-Uwe Kling
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: German
  5. Orlando
    AUTHOR: Virginia Woolf
SOURCE: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/virginia-woolf/orlando
  6. The House of God
    AUTHOR: Samuel Shem
  7. Public and Private Life of Animals
    AUTHOR: P. J. Stahl
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: French
READ_LANGUAGE: English
SOURCE: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/58214
  8. Welcome to Lake Success
    AUTHOR: Gary Shteyngart
  9. Germany. A Winter's Tale
    AUTHOR: Heinrich Heine
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: German
READ_LANGUAGE: German
SOURCE: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/6079
  10. REREAD Animal Farm
    AUTHOR: George Orwell
  11. FINISHED Death and the Penguin
    AUTHOR: Andrey Kurkov
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Russian
READ_LANGUAGE: Russian
RATING: 3
  12. 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
PUBLISHED: 1962

1.1.8. Crime

  1. The Seven-Per-Cent Solution
    AUTHOR: Nicholas Meyer
  2. The Power of the Dog
    AUTHOR: Don Winslow
  3. Ratking
    AUTHOR: Michael Dibdin

1.1.9. Horror

  1. FINISHED The Colour Out of Space
    AUTHOR: Howard Phillips Lovecraft
SOURCE: https://fadedpage.com/showbook.php?pid=20190920
RATING: 4

    Captivating and scary short story about the evil force of an unknown alien entity coming onto earth on a meteorite.

  2. The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath
    AUTHOR: Howard Phillips Lovecraft
  3. At the Mountains of Madness
    AUTHOR: Howard Phillips Lovecraft
SOURCE: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/h-p-lovecraft/at-the-mountains-of-madness
  4. REREAD The call of Cthulhu
    AUTHOR: Howard Phillips Lovecraft
SOURCE: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/68283
  5. FINISHED The Nameless City
    AUTHOR: Howard Phillips Lovecraft
SOURCE: https://www.fadedpage.com/showbook.php?pid=20130220
RATING: 2

    An evocative story which, however, lacks an interesting story arc.

  6. 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. Jane Eyre
    AUTHOR: Charlotte Brontë
SOURCE: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/charlotte-bronte/jane-eyre
  2. The Queen's Gambit
    AUTHOR: Walter Tevis
  3. The Catcher in the Rye
    AUTHOR: J. D. Salinger

1.1.12. Uncategorized

  1. FINISHED Island
    AUTHOR: Aldous Huxley
SOURCE: https://www.fadedpage.com/showbook.php?pid=20180440
PUBLISHED: 1962
RATING: 5

    Huxley uses (very eloquent) prose as a vehicle for a utopian sketch of society after his much more famous, nightmarish dystopia. The "plot" only serves as a background for the discussion of ideas. The novel, written at the end of Huxley's life, therefore integrates his ideas about politics, science and technology, reflections on philosophy and religion, and his psychedelic experiences into a coherent vision of what a good (according to Huxley) society might look like.

    What's interesting to me, is how many of the issues to which Huxley describes solutions are problems which we still face, e.g.: Alienation from work, alienation from other human beings, escapism, consumerism, healthcare which focuses on treatment rather than prevention, tabooed mental health issues, concentration of power, militarism, religious and nationalistic fervor.

    And while I don't agree with Huxley's Malthusian undertones and find some problems not sufficiently analyzed (e.g., the distribution of political power on Pala), the societal vision Huxley draws is absolutely fascinating: People being attentive of themselves and each other, a community which prioritizes self-realization, assigns at least as much (if not more) value to direct experience of the world than to "symbol manipulation", stresses that life is primarily relationships to other living beings, puts happiness before "economic efficiency", etc. To me, it is clearly preferable over the arrangement we currently find ourselves in. Unfortunately – and Huxley seems to have been keenly aware of this – his preferred societal arrangement is extremely fragile to outside intervention.

  2. REREAD Brave New World
    AUTHOR: Aldous Huxley
PUBLISHED: 1932
SOURCE: https://www.fadedpage.com/showbook.php?pid=20160545
  3. The Pickwick Papers
    AUTHOR: Charles Dickens
PUBLISHED: 1836
SOURCE: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/charles-dickens/the-pickwick-papers
  4. The Woman Who Climbed Trees
    AUTHOR: Smriti Ravindra
  5. All Fours
    AUTHOR: Miranda July
  6. The Satanic Verses
    AUTHOR: Salman Rushdie
  7. Bhagavad Gita
    AUTHOR: Vyasa
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Sanskrit
SOURCE: https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/2388
  8. Ramayana
    AUTHOR: Valmiki
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Sanskrit
SOURCE: https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/24869
  9. Daughter
    AUTHOR: Tamara Duda
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Ukrainian
PUBLISHED: 2019
  10. Père Goriot
    AUTHOR: Honoré de Balzac
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: French
PUBLISHED: 1835
SOURCE: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/honore-de-balzac/father-goriot/ellen-marriage
  11. The Savage Detectives
    AUTHOR: Roberto Bolaño
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Spanish
PUBLISHED: 1998
  12. The City of the Sun
    AUTHOR: Tommaso Campanella
PUBLISHED: 1602
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Italian
READ_LANGUAGE: English
SOURCE: https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/2816
  13. The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas
    AUTHOR: Ursula K. Le Guin
PUBLISHED: 1973
  14. The Library of Babel
    AUTHOR: Jose Luis Borges
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Spanish
  15. Satantango
    AUTHOR: László Krasznahorkai
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Hungarian
  16. Halbinsel
    AUTHOR: Kristine Bilkau
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: German
READ_LANGUAGE: German
  17. Russische Spezialitäten
    AUTHOR: Dmitrij Kapitelmann
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: German
READ_LANGUAGE: German
  18. FINISHED A Farewell to Arms
    AUTHOR: Ernest Hemingway
SOURCE: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/ernest-hemingway/a-farewell-to-arms
RATING: 4

    The novel describes how an American lieutenant and British nurse enter an affair during WWI on the Italian front. Despite Hemingway's signature paratactical, no-frills writing style, the book is evocative: the characters, their concerns, and the things happening to them are palpable. Quite unlike the "relationship" Henry and Catherine enter which I interpreted as an escape from the butchery surrounding them. Both characters try to keep up a kitschy romantic illusion of a relationship ("marriage") where the partners dissolve as individuals in a union.

  19. Rebecca
    AUTHOR: Daphne du Maurier
  20. The Penelopiad
    AUTHOR: Margaret Atwood
  21. Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072
    AUTHOR: M. E. O'Brien, Eman Abdelhadi
  22. The Door in the Wall
    AUTHOR: H. G. Wells
  23. The People in the Trees
    AUTHOR: Hanya Yanagihara
  24. A Little Life
    AUTHOR: Hanya Yanagihara
  25. The Royal Game
    AUTHOR: Stefan Zweig
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: German
READ_LANGUAGE: German
  26. Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors
    AUTHOR: Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Ukrainian
  27. A Woman
    AUTHOR: Sibilla Aleramo
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Italian
  28. Fahrenheit 451
    AUTHOR: Ray Bradbury
  29. The Glass Bead Game
    AUTHOR: Hermann Hesse
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: German
READ_LANGUAGE: German
  30. A Fable
    AUTHOR: William Faulkner
  31. Nagareru
    AUTHOR: Aya Kōda
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Japanese
  32. Morphine
    AUTHOR: Szczepan Twardoch
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Polish
  33. Null
    AUTHOR: Szczepan Twardoch
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Polish
  34. Adventures in Immediate Irreality
    AUTHOR: Max Blecher
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Romanian
  35. Scarred Hearts
    AUTHOR: Max Blecher
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Romanian
  36. The Painted Bird
    AUTHOR: Jerzy Kosiński
  37. The Well of Loneliness
    AUTHOR: Radclyffe Hall
SOURCE: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/radclyffe-hall/the-well-of-loneliness
  38. FINISHED The Elementary Particles
    AUTHOR: Michel Houellebecq
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: French
READ_LANGUAGE: English
  39. 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?

  40. Lila: An Inquiry into Morals
    AUTHOR: Robert M. Pirsig
  41. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values
    AUTHOR: Robert M. Pirsig
  42. 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.

  43. Ecotopia
    AUTHOR: Ernest Callenbach
  44. Demons
    AUTHOR: Fyodor Dostoevsky
  45. 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.

  46. The Ursitory
    AUTHOR: Matéo Maximoff
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: French
  47. The Monkey Wrench Gang
    AUTHOR: Edward Abbey
  48. 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.

  49. Trainspotting
    AUTHOR: Irvine Welsh
  50. Uncle Tom's Cabin
    AUTHOR: Harriet Beecher Stowe
SOURCE: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/harriet-beecher-stowe/uncle-toms-cabin
  51. Women
    AUTHOR: Charles Bukowski
  52. Ham on Rye
    AUTHOR: Charles Bukowski
  53. Post Office
    AUTHOR: Charles Bukowski
  54. Neighbors
    AUTHOR: Diane Oliver
  55. FINISHED Journey to the End of the Night
    AUTHOR: Louis-Ferdinand Céline
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: French
READ_LANGUAGE: German
  56. Diary of a Drug Fiend
    AUTHOR: Aleister Crowley
  57. The Meursault Investigation
    AUTHOR: Kamel Daoud
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: French
  58. Im Schloß
    AUTHOR: Theodor Storm
SOURCE: https://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Im_Schlo%C3%9F
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: German
READ_LANGUAGE: German
  59. Immensee
    AUTHOR: Theodor Storm
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: German
READ_LANGUAGE: German
SOURCE: https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/6651
  60. The Rider on the White Horse
    AUTHOR: Theodor Storm
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: German
READ_LANGUAGE: German
SOURCE: https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/74008
  61. The Nickel Boys
    AUTHOR: Colson Whitehead
  62. The Trial
    AUTHOR: Franz Kafka
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: German
READ_LANGUAGE: German
  63. Prins Charles känsla
    AUTHOR: Liv Strömquist
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Swedish
  64. Dr. Leonardo’s Journey to Sloboda Switzerland with his Future Lover, the Beautiful Alcesta
    AUTHOR: Maik Yohansen
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Ukrainian
  65. 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
  66. Tiger Trappers
    AUTHOR: Ivan Bahrianyi
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Ukrainian
READ_LANGUAGE: Ukrainian
  67. REREAD 1984
    AUTHOR: George Orwell
  68. 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.

  69. Lolita
    AUTHOR: Vladimir Nabokov
  70. Fight Club
    AUTHOR: Chuck Palahniuk
  71. Wrong Way
    AUTHOR: Joanne McNeil
  72. Poor Things
    AUTHOR: Alasdair Gray
  73. My Struggle
    AUTHOR: Karl Ove Knausgård
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Norwegian
  74. American Street
    AUTHOR: Ibi Zoboi
  75. American Pastoral
    AUTHOR: Philip Roth
  76. Dying Animal
    AUTHOR: Philip Roth
  77. Serenade for Nadia
    AUTHOR: Ömer Zülfü Livanelioğlu
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Turkish
  78. Invisible Cities
    AUTHOR: Italo Calvino
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Italian
  79. FINISHED The Leopard
    AUTHOR: Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Italian
READ_LANGUAGE: German
RATING: 3

    A historical novel centered on the Duke of Salina and his family during the time of the Risorgimento. It's a magniloquent study of the aristocratic society and the changes it undergoes. The novel's throughout ironic undertone - most strongly expressed in Tancredi's fascinating sentence that "everything has to change to stay the same" - makes it a pleasure to read; even if one tends to dislike the depicted society (with its religious hypocrisy, the economic inequality and feudal structure) itself. I also found the character of the Duke likeable: especially his lamentations about death and preoccupation with stars/eternity. But I never warmed up to the rest of the novel as the content felt very mundane to me. Maybe that's partially the point though.

  80. Dom Casmurro
    AUTHOR: Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Portuguese
  81. The Green Berets
    AUTHOR: Robin Moore
  82. In Cold Blood
    AUTHOR: Truman Capote
  83. 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
  84. 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, cultured 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.

  85. Der schwarze Obelisk
    AUTHOR: Erich Maria Remarque
  86. Drei Kameraden
    AUTHOR: Erich Maria Remarque
  87. The Bonfire of the Vanities
    AUTHOR: Tom Wolfe
  88. Der Zauberberg
    AUTHOR: Thomas Mann
  89. Tropic of Cancer
    AUTHOR: Henry Miller
  90. 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.

  91. REREAD Slaughterhouse-Five
    AUTHOR: Kurt Vonnegut
  92. The Passion According to G.H.
    AUTHOR: Clarice Lispector
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Portuguese
  93. FINISHED Mrs. Dalloway
    AUTHOR: Virginia Woolf
SOURCE: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/virginia-woolf/mrs-dalloway
  94. Piranesi
    AUTHOR: Susanna Clarke
  95. All the Pretty Horses
    AUTHOR: Cormac McCarthy
  96. The Vegetarian
    AUTHOR: Han Kang
  97. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
    AUTHOR: Hunter S. Thompson
  98. House of Leaves
    AUTHOR: Mark Z. Danielewski
  99. The Road
    AUTHOR: Cormac McCarthy
  100. Infinite Jest
    AUTHOR: David Foster Wallace
  101. The Tartar Steppe
    AUTHOR: Dino Buzzati
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Italian

1.2. Non-Fiction

1.2.1. Psychology

  1. The Principles of Psychology
    AUTHOR: William James
PUBLISHED: 1890
  2. What Is Thought?
    AUTHOR: Eric B. Baum
PUBLISHED: 2003
  3. Sparse Distributed Memory
    AUTHOR: Pentti Kanerva
PUBLISHED: 1988
  4. REREAD Thinking, Fast and Slow
    AUTHOR: Daniel Kahneman
PUBLISHED: 2011
  5. READING The Analysis of Mind
    AUTHOR: Bertrand Russell
PUBLISHED: 1921
SOURCE: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2529
  6. The Psychology of Espionage
    AUTHOR: Ursula M. Wilder
SOURCE: https://www.cia.gov/resources/csi/static/psychology-of-espionage.pdf
  7. REREAD How Emotions Are Made
    AUTHOR: Lisa Feldman Barrett
  8. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
    AUTHOR: Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi
  9. Dream and Existence
    AUTHOR: Ludwig Binswanger
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: German
READ_LANGUAGE: German
  10. Basic Forms and Knowledge of Human Existence
    AUTHOR: Ludwig Binswanger
READ_LANGUAGE: German
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: German
  11. Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History
    AUTHOR: Norman O. Brown
  12. On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society
    AUTHOR: Dave Grossman
  13. The Design of Everyday Things
    AUTHOR: Donald Norman
  14. Atomic Habits
    AUTHOR: James Clear
  15. Selfless: The Social Creation of "You"
    AUTHOR: Brian Lowery
  16. Solve for Happy
    AUTHOR: Mo Gawdat
  17. The Denial of Death
    AUTHOR: Ernest Becker
  18. Man and His Symbols
    AUTHOR: Carl Gustav Jung
  19. FINISHED Humor, Seriously: Why Humor Is a Secret Weapon in Business and Life
    AUTHOR: Jennifer Aaker, Naomi Bagdonas
  20. Radical Honesty: How to Transform Your Life by Telling the Truth
    AUTHOR: Brad Blanton
  21. The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture
    AUTHOR: Gabor Maté, Daniel Maté
  22. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma
    AUTHOR: Bessel van der Kolk
  23. Your Erroneous Zones
    AUTHOR: Wayne W. Dyer
  24. 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. Computational Thinking
    AUTHOR: Jeannette M. Wing
SOURCE: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/1118178.1118215
PUBLISHED: 2006
  2. Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
    AUTHOR: Harold Abelson, Gerald Jay Sussman, Julie Sussman
SOURCE: https://mitp-content-server.mit.edu/books/content/sectbyfn/books_pres_0/6515/sicp.zip/index.html
  3. Computer Science: Do It Yourself Wiki
    AUTHOR: Yinmin Zhong
SOURCE: https://csdiy.wiki/en/
  4. Crafting Interpreters
    AUTHOR: Robert Nystrom
SOURCE: https://craftinginterpreters.com/contents.html
  5. Hacking: The Art of Exploitation
    AUTHOR: Jon Erickson
  6. The Secret Life of Programs: Understand Computers – Craft Better Code
    AUTHOR: Jon Steinhart
  7. The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering
    AUTHOR: Frederick P. Brooks Jr.
  8. The Little Schemer
    AUTHOR: Daniel P. Friedman, Matthias Felleisen
  9. Implementation Patterns
    AUTHOR: Kent Beck
  10. 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 Works
    AUTHOR: Peter Gelderloos
SOURCE: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/peter-gelderloos-anarchy-works
PUBLISHED: 2010
  2. Jeder Mensch
    ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: German
AUTHOR: Ferdinand von Schirach
PUBLISHED: 2021
  3. The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups
    AUTHOR: Mancur Olson Jr.
PUBLISHED: 1965
  4. Post-Scarcity Anarchism
    AUTHOR: Murray Bookchin
PUBLISHED: 1971
  5. Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World
    AUTHOR: Naomi Klein
  6. Politics and Morals
    AUTHOR: Benedetto Croce
  7. How Nonviolence Protects the State
    AUTHOR: Peter Gelderloos
SOURCE: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/peter-gelderloos-how-nonviolence-protects-the-state
  8. Anarchy explained to children
    AUTHOR: José Antonio Emmanuel
SOURCE: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/jose-antonio-emmanuel-anarchy-explained-to-children
  9. 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
  10. How to Spot a Fascist
    AUTHOR: Umberto Eco
  11. The Myth of the Strong Leader
    AUTHOR: Archie Brown
  12. Blackshirts & Reds
    AUTHOR: Michael Parenti
  13. 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/
  14. The Human Condition
    AUTHOR: Hannah Arendt
  15. The Quest for Cosmic Justice
    AUTHOR: Thomas Sowell
  16. Ethics: Origin and Development
    AUTHOR: Peter Kropotkin
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Russian
  17. Mutual Aid
    AUTHOR: Peter Kropotkin
SOURCE: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/peter-kropotkin/mutual-aid
  18. The Origins of Totalitarianism
    AUTHOR: Hannah Arendt
  19. The Road to Serfdom
    AUTHOR: Friedrich A. Hayek
  20. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism
    AUTHOR: Benedict Anderson
  21. What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets
    AUTHOR: Michael Joseph Sandel
  22. Orientalism
    AUTHOR: Edward Said

1.2.6. Economics

  1. The Political Economy of Participatory Economics
    AUTHOR: Michael Albert, Robin Hahnel
SOURCE: https://znetwork.org/wp-content/uploads/zbooks/htdocs/books/polpar.htm
  2. Looking Forward: Participatory Economics for the Twenty First Century
    AUTHOR: Michael Albert, Robin Hahnel
SOURCE: https://znetwork.org/looking-forward/
  3. Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action
    AUTHOR: Elinor Ostrom
  4. The Wealth of Nations
    AUTHOR: Adam Smith
SOURCE: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/adam-smith/the-wealth-of-nations
  5. Moneyland: Why Thieves and Crooks Now Rule the World and How To Take It Back
    AUTHOR: Oliver Bullough
  6. FINISHED Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism
    AUTHOR: Yanis Varoufakis
PUBLISHED: 2023
  7. The Intelligent Investor
    AUTHOR: Benjamin Graham
  8. Fractals and Scaling in Finance
    AUTHOR: Benoit Mandelbrot
  9. Trade Wars are Class Wars
    AUTHOR: Matthew C. Klein, Michael Pettis
  10. Cloudmoney: Cash, Cards, Crypto, and the War for Our Wallets
    AUTHOR: Brett Scott
  11. Der Wachstumszwang: Warum die Volkswirtschaft immer weiterwachsen muss, selbst wenn wir genug haben
    AUTHOR: Mathias Binswanger
  12. FINISHED Debt: The First 5000 Years
    AUTHOR: David Graeber
  13. Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We'll Win Them Back
    AUTHOR: Rebecca Giblin, Cory Doctorow
  14. Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist
    AUTHOR: Kate Raworth
  15. Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World
    AUTHOR: Liaquat Ahamed
  16. Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered
    AUTHOR: Ernst F. Schumacher
  17. FINISHED Good Economics for Hard Times
    AUTHOR: Abhijit V. Banerjee, Esther Duflo
  18. FINISHED Why Nations Fail
    AUTHOR: Daron Acemoglu, James A. Robinson
  19. Too Big to Fail: Inside the Battle to Save Wall Street
    AUTHOR: Andrew Ross Sorkin

1.2.7. Biology

  1. The Wisdom of the Hive
    AUTHOR: Thomas Dyer Seeley
PUBLISHED: 1995
  2. Evolutionary Dynamics: Exploring the Equations of Life
    AUTHOR: Martin Nowak
  3. Blueprint
    AUTHOR: Robert Plomin

1.2.8. History

  1. The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors
    AUTHOR: James D. Hornfisher
  2. Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook
    AUTHOR: Mark Bray
  3. Auschwitz
    AUTHOR: Laurence Rees
  4. The Volunteer
    AUTHOR: Jack Fairweather
  5. Berlin: The Downfall 1945
    AUTHOR: Antony Beevor
  6. Stalingrad
    AUTHOR: Antony Beevor
  7. Berlin Diary
    AUTHOR: William L. Shirer
  8. A Small, Stubborn Town: Life, death and defiance in Ukraine
    AUTHOR: Andrew Harding
  9. The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine
    AUTHOR: Serhii Plokhy
  10. The Anatomy of a Moment: Thirty-Five Minutes in History and Imagination
    AUTHOR: Javier Cercas
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Spanish
  11. Band of Brothers
    AUTHOR: Stephen E. Ambrose
  12. Das Schwarzbuch des Kommunismus
    AUTHOR: Stéphane Courtois
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: French
  13. A People's History of the United States
    AUTHOR: Howard Zinn
  14. We Were Soldiers Once…and Young: la Drang - The Battle That Changed the War in Vietnam
    AUTHOR: Harold G. Moore, Joseph L. Galloway
  15. Space Rogue: How the Hackers Known As L0pht Changed the World
    AUTHOR: Cris Thomas
  16. HOLD The Best and the Brightest
    AUTHOR: David Halberstam
  17. Red Famine
    AUTHOR: Anne Applebaum
  18. 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. A Graduate Course in Applied Cryptography
    AUTHOR: Dan Boneh, Victor Shoup
  2. Fractal Geometry
    AUTHOR: Michael Frame, Benoit Mandelbrot, Nial Neger
SOURCE: https://gauss.math.yale.edu/public_html/People/frame/Fractals/
  3. Statistics Done Wrong
    AUTHOR: Alex Reinhart
SOURCE: https://www.statisticsdonewrong.com/
  4. The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives
    AUTHOR: Leonard Mlodinow
  5. 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. Desert Solitaire
    AUTHOR: Edward Abbey
  2. Homage to Catalonia
    AUTHOR: George Orwell
  3. L'Effondrement
    AUTHOR: Édouard Louis
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: French
  4. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano
    AUTHOR: Olaudah Equiano
SOURCE: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/olaudah-equiano/the-interesting-narrative-of-the-life-of-olaudah-equiano
  5. The Girl in the Green Sweater
    AUTHOR: Krystyna Chiger, Daniel Paisner
  6. Between the World and Me
    AUTHOR: Ta-Nehisi Coates
  7. FINISHED Maus
    AUTHOR: Art Spiegelman

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

  8. Physics and Beyond
    AUTHOR: Werner Heisenberg
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: German
READ_LANGUAGE: German
  9. The World of Yesterday
    AUTHOR: Stefan Zweig
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: German
READ_LANGUAGE: German
  10. The Pianist
    AUTHOR: Władysław Szpilman
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Polish
  11. Diary of an Invasion
    AUTHOR: Andrey Kurkov
  12. REREAD The Doors of Perception
    AUTHOR: Aldous Huxley
  13. A Tale of Love and Darkness
    AUTHOR: Amos Oz
  14. The African
    AUTHOR: J. M. G. Le Clézio
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: French
  15. FINISHED Lincoln's Virtues: An Ethical Biography
    AUTHOR: William Lee Miller
  16. 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.

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

1.2.12. Free Culture, Open Content and FLOSS

  1. The Seven Rules of Trust
    AUTHOR: Jimmy Wales
  2. Digital Copyright
    AUTHOR: Jessica Litman
SOURCE: https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/maize/mpub9798641
  3. Against Intellectual Monopoly
    AUTHOR: Michele Boldrin, David K. Levine
SOURCE: http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/againstnew.htm
  4. Athena Unbound: Why and How Scholarly Knowledge Should Be Free for All
    AUTHOR: Peter Baldwin
  5. Internet for the People
    AUTHOR: Ben Tarnoff
  6. The Copyright Wars: Three Centuries of Trans-Atlantic Battle
    AUTHOR: Peter Baldwin
  7. Free Culture
    AUTHOR: Lawrence Lessig
  8. 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).

  9. You Are Not a Gadget
    AUTHOR: Jaron Lanier

1.2.13. Philosophy

  1. Essays in Radical Empiricism
    AUTHOR: William James
PUBLISHED: 1912
SOURCE: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/32547
  2. The Taming of Chance
    AUTHOR: Ian Hacking
PUBLISHED: 1990
  3. The Emergence of Probability
    AUTHOR: Ian Hacking
PUBLISHED: 1975
  4. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
    AUTHOR: Ludwig Wittgenstein
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: German
READ_LANGUAGE: German
SOURCE: https://www.wittgensteinproject.org/w/index.php/Logisch-philosophische_Abhandlung
  5. Minima Moralia
    AUTHOR: Theodor W. Adorno
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: German
READ_LANGUAGE: German
  6. REREAD Meditations
    AUTHOR: Marcus Aurelius
READ_LANGUAGE: English
  7. Philosophy and Psychedelics
    AUTHOR: Christine Hauskeller, Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes
  8. The Mind's I
    AUTHOR: Douglas Hofstadter, Daniel C. Dennett
  9. Consciousness Explained
    AUTHOR: Daniel C. Dennett
  10. The Mystery of Consciousness
    AUTHOR: John Searle
  11. READING The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory
    AUTHOR: David Chalmers
  12. Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life
    AUTHOR: Arthur Schopenhauer
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: German
READ_LANGUAGE: German
SOURCE: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/47406
  13. 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
  14. The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self
    AUTHOR: Thomas Metzinger
  15. On the Duty of Civil Disobedience
    AUTHOR: Henry David Thoreau
SOURCE: https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/71
  16. FINISHED Walking
    AUTHOR: Henry David Thoreau
SOURCE: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1022

    Found this to be a very weird essay. It's a mixture of praise to the benefits of walking Thoreau experienced personally, interspersed with reflections on man's relationship to Nature as opposed to culture. While the latter contain some (mildly) interesting thoughts (importance of living in the moment, "Here is his library, but his study is out of doors.", servility of looking for laws to obey), the ideas that "wildness" is essential to life, that westward movement of men is an inevitability with a clear mission, and that Nature (rather than culture) is the source of intellectual and moral growth are not very convincing.

  17. Reality
    AUTHOR: Peter Kingsley
  18. Philosophical Investigations
    AUTHOR: Ludwig Wittgenstein
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: German
READ_LANGUAGE: German
SOURCE: https://www.wittgensteinproject.org/w/index.php/Philosophische_Untersuchungen
  19. HOLD Tao Te Ching
    Author: Laozi
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Chinese
READ_LANGUAGE: English
SOURCE: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/laozi/tao-te-ching/james-legge
  20. HOLD Thus Spoke Zarathustra
    AUTHOR: Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: German
READ_LANGUAGE: German
SOURCE: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7205
  21. Existentialism is a Humanism
    AUTHOR: Jean-Paul Sartre
  22. Sein und Zeit
    AUTHOR: Martin Heidegger
  23. The Myth of Sisyphus
    AUTHOR: Albert Camus
  24. The First and Last Freedom
    AUTHOR: Jiddu Krishnamurti
  25. How to Be an Existentialist
    AUTHOR: Gary Cox
  26. Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False
    AUTHOR: Thomas Nagel
  27. The Foundations of Science
    AUTHOR: Henri Poincaré
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: French
SOURCE: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/39713
READ_LANGUAGE: English
  28. Beyond Freedom and Dignity
    AUTHOR: Burrhus Frederic Skinner
  29. On Bullshit
    AUTHOR: Harry G. Frankfurt

1.2.14. Physics

  1. The Feynman Lectures on Physics
    AUTHOR: Richard Phillips Feynman
SOURCE: https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/
  2. Quantum Computation and Quantum Information
    AUTHOR: Michael Nielsen, Isaac Chuang
  3. Candide and the Physicist
    AUTHOR: Bernard d'Espagnat

1.2.15. Technology

  1. Cult of the Dead Cow
    AUTHOR: Joseph Menn
PUBLISHED: 2025
  2. Internet, Mon Amour
    AUTHOR: Agnese Trocchi
PUBLISHED: 2019
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Italian
  3. Resisting AI
    AUTHOR: Dan McQuillan
  4. Tools for Conviviality
    AUTHOR: Ivan Illich
  5. Addiction by Design
    AUTHOR: Natasha Dow Schüll
  6. The Cultural Logic of Computation
    AUTHOR: David Golumbia
  7. Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI
    AUTHOR: Karen Hao
  8. Artificial Communication: How Algorithms Produce Social Intelligence
    AUTHOR: Elena Esposito
SOURCE: https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/5338/Artificial-CommunicationHow-Algorithms-Produce
  9. Code: And Other Laws of Cyberspace version 2
    AUTHOR: Lawrence Lessig
SOURCE: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Code_v2.pdf
  10. The AI Con
    AUTHOR: Emily M. Bender, Alex Hanna
  11. Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution
    AUTHOR: Steven Levy
  12. Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech
    AUTHOR: Brian Merchant
  13. Where Wizards Stay Up Late
    AUTHOR: Katie Hafner, Matthew Lyon
  14. Data Cartels: The Companies That Control and Monopolize Our Information
    AUTHOR: Sarah Lamdan
  15. Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy
    AUTHOR: Cathy O'Neil
  16. Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence
    AUTHOR: Kate Crawford
  17. New Dark Age:Technology and the End of the Future
    AUTHOR: James Bridle

1.2.16. Sociology

  1. An Essay on the Principle of Population
    AUTHOR: Thomas Robert Malthus
SOURCE: https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/4239
  2. Digital Authoritarianism in the Making
    AUTHOR: Françoise Daucé, Benjamin Loveluck, Francesca Musiani
SOURCE: https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-edited-volume/6043/Digital-Authoritarianism-in-the-MakingRepression
PUBLISHED: 2025
  3. Pleasure Activism
    AUTHOR: adrienne maree brown
PUBLISHED: 2019
  4. Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs to Know
    AUTHOR: Erica Chenoweth
  5. Growing Up Absurd
    AUTHOR: Paul Goodman
  6. Madness and Civilization
    AUTHOR: Michel Foucault
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: French
  7. The Utopia of Rules
    AUTHOR: David Graeber
  8. Cowardice: A Brief History
    AUTHOR: Chris Walsh
  9. Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World
    AUTHOR: Anand Giridharadas

1.2.17. 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

1.2.18. Science

  1. Towards Convivial Sciences: Uniting Strands of Critical Inquiry
    AUTHOR: Ephraim Pörtner, Tamara Lebrecht, Critical Scientists Switzerland
SOURCE: https://www.oekom.de/buch/towards-convivial-sciences-9783987261664
  2. Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science
    AUTHOR: Michael Nielsen
  3. Exceeding Our Grasp: Science, History, and the Problem of Unconceived Alternatives
    AUTHOR: P. Kyle Stanford
  4. Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth
    AUTHOR: Stuart J. Ritchie
  5. Conversations with a Mathematician: Math, Art, Science and the Limits of Reason
    AUTHOR: Gregory J. Chaitin

1.2.19. Religion

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

1.2.20. Environment

  1. Industrial Society and Its Future
    AUTHOR: Ted Kaczynski
  2. Fire Weather
    AUTHOR: John Vaillant
  3. Silent Spring
    AUTHOR: Rachel Carson
SOURCE: https://www.fadedpage.com/showbook.php?pid=20151002

1.2.21. Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence

  1. Artificial Intelligence: Foundations of Computational Agents
    AUTHOR: David L. Poole, Alan K. Mackworth
SOURCE: https://artint.info/
  2. Neural Networks and Deep Learning
    AUTHOR: Michael Nielsen
SOURCE: http://neuralnetworksanddeeplearning.com/
  3. Deep Learning
    AUTHOR: Ian Goodfellow, Yoshua Bengio, Aaron Courville
SOURCE: https://www.deeplearningbook.org/

1.2.22. Uncategorized

  1. Summa Technologiae
    AUTHOR: Stanisław Lem
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Polish
PUBLISHED: 1964
  2. Attensity!
    AUTHOR: The Friends of Attention
PUBLISHED: 2026
  3. bolo'bolo
    AUTHOR: Hans Widmer
PUBLISHED: 1983
  4. Cities for a Single Planet
    AUTHOR: Hans Widmer
PUBLISHED: 2025
  5. Phi: A Voyage from the Brain to the Soul
    AUTHOR: Giulio Tononi
PUBLISHED: 2012
  6. Kritik der Kompetenz
    AUTHOR: Andreas Gelhard
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: German
  7. Revolting Librarians
    AUTHOR:
  8. Crisis Engineering
    AUTHOR: Marina Nitze, Matthew Weaver, Mikey Dickerson
  9. A Guide for the Perplexed
    AUTHOR: Ernst F. Schumacher
  10. The Checklist Manifesto
    AUTHOR: Atul Gawande
  11. Against Interpretation
    AUTHOR: Susan Sontag
  12. Deschooling Society
    AUTHOR: Ivan Illich
  13. Lost People: Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in Madagascar
    AUTHOR: David Graeber
  14. Women and War
    AUTHOR: Aurélie Bros
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Ukrainian
  15. 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
  16. A Burst of Light
    AUTHOR: Audre Lorde
  17. Steal this book
    AUTHOR: Abbie Hoffman
  18. SuperCooperators: Altruism, Evolution, and Why We Need Each Other to Succeed
    AUTHOR: Martin Nowak
  19. Trust Me, I'm Lying
    AUTHOR: Ryan Holiday
  20. The Elephant and the Blind
    AUTHOR: Thomas Metzinger
  21. How We Give Now: A Philanthropic Guide for the Rest of Us
    AUTHOR: Lucy Bernholz
  22. Gomorrah
    AUTHOR: Roberto Saviano
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Italian
  23. The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
    AUTHOR: Julian Jaynes
  24. The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on The Tibetan Book of the Dead
    AUTHOR: Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner, Richard Alpert
  25. Gleich geht die Geschichte weiter, wir atmen nur aus: Essays
    AUTHOR: Tanja Maljartschuk
  26. The Revolution Will be Digitised: Dispatches from the Information War
    AUTHOR: Heather Brooke
  27. Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are
    AUTHOR: Seth Stephens-Davidowitz
  28. Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World
    AUTHOR: Carl T. Bergstrom, Jevin D. West
  29. Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another
    AUTHOR: Philip Ball
  30. Programming & Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer: Theory & Experiments
    AUTHOR: John C. Lilly
  31. Be Here Now
    AUTHOR: Ram Dass
  32. What's Our Problem?: A Self-Helf Book for Societies
    AUTHOR: Tim Urban
  33. Humankind: A Hopeful History
    AUTHOR: Rutger Bregman
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Dutch
READ_LANGUAGE: English
  34. The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload
    AUTHOR: Daniel Levitin
  35. What is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell
    AUTHOR: Erwin Schrödinger
  36. Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well
    AUTHOR: Amy Edmondson
  37. Wanting
    AUTHOR: Luke Burgis
  38. Why Most Things Fail
    AUTHOR: Paul Ormerod
  39. Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
    AUTHOR: Douglas Hofstadter
  40. The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
    AUTHOR: James Gleick
  41. An Immense World
    AUTHOR: Ed Yong

2. papers

2.1. Philosophy

  1. Minds, Brains, and Programs
    AUTHOR: John Searle
SOURCE: https://home.csulb.edu/~cwallis/382/readings/482/searle.minds.brains.programs.bbs.1980.pdf
  2. What Is It Like to Be a Bat?
    AUTHOR: Thomas Nagel
  3. Philosophy of AI
    AUTHOR: Vincent C. Müller
SOURCE: https://philpapers.org/archive/MLLPOA.pdf
  4. 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. Computer Science

  1. Attention Is All You Need
    AUTHOR: Ashish Vaswani, Noam Shazeer, Niki Parmar, Jakob Uszkoreit, Llion Jones, Aidan N. Gomez, Łukasz Kaiser, Illia Polosukhin
SOURCE: https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper_files/paper/2017/file/3f5ee243547dee91fbd053c1c4a845aa-Paper.pdf
PUBLISHED: 2017
  2. No Silver Bullet—Essence and Accident in Software Engineering
    AUTHOR: Fred Brooks
PUBLISHED: 1986
  3. Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System
    AUTHOR: Leslie Lamport
PUBLISHED: 1978
  4. Go To Statement Considered Harmful
    AUTHOR: Edsger W. Dijkstra
PUBLISHED: 1968
  5. Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine
    AUTHOR: John McCarthy
PUBLISHED: 1960
  6. The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine
    AUTHOR: Sergey Brin, Larry Page
PUBLISHED: 1998
SOURCE: https://snap.stanford.edu/class/cs224w-readings/Brin98Anatomy.pdf
  7. Information Management: A Proposal
    AUTHOR: Tim Berners-Lee
PUBLISHED: 1989
SOURCE: https://cds.cern.ch/record/369245/files/dd-89-001.pdf
  8. A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication
    AUTHOR: Vinton G. Cerf, Robert E. Kahn
SOURCE: https://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/fall06/cos561/papers/cerf74.pdf
PUBLISHED: 1974
  9. The Complexity of Theorem-Proving Procedures
    AUTHOR: Stephen A. Cook
SOURCE: https://www.inf.unibz.it/~calvanese/teaching/14-15-tc/material/cook-1971-NP-completeness-of-SAT.pdf
PUBLISHED: 1971
  10. A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks
    AUTHOR: Edgar F. Codd
SOURCE: https://www.seas.upenn.edu/~zives/03f/cis550/codd.pdf
  11. On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem
    AUTHOR: Alan Turing
SOURCE: https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/Turing_Paper_1936.pdf
  12. 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
  13. Reflections on Trusting Trust
    AUTHOR: Ken Thompson
SOURCE: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_ReflectionsonTrustingTrust.pdf

2.3. Physics

  1. Search for Artificial Stellar Sources of Infrared Radiation
    AUTHOR: Freeman J. Dyson

2.4. 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."

2.5. 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

2.6. Anthropology

2.7. Economics

  1. Ostrom's Law: Property Rights in the Commons
    AUTHOR: Lee Anne Fennell
SOURCE: https://thecommonsjournal.org/articles/10.18352/ijc.252
  2. 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. Neuroscience

  1. A Framework for Intelligence and Cortical Function Based on Grid Cells in the Neocortex
    AUTHOR: Jeff Hawkins, Marcus Lewis, Mirko Klukas, Scott Purdy, Subutai Ahmad
SOURCE: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/neural-circuits/articles/10.3389/fncir.2018.00121/full

2.9. Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

  1. The Illusion of Thinking: Understanding the Strengths and Limitations of Reasoning Models via the Lens of Problem Complexity
    AUTHOR: Parshin Shojaee, Iman Mirzadeh, Keivan Alizadeh, Maxwell Horton, Samy Bengio, Mehrdad Farajtabar
SOURCE: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.06941
  2. Universal and Transferable Adversarial Attacks on Aligned Language Models
    AUTHOR: Andy Zou, Zifan Wang, Nicholas Carlini, Milad Nasr, J. Zico Kolter, Matt Fredrikson
SOURCE: https://llm-attacks.org/
  3. Computing Machinery and Intelligence
    AUTHOR: Alan Turing
PUBLISHED: 1950
SOURCE: https://courses.cs.umbc.edu/471/papers/turing.pdf
  4. 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.

  5. Delving into LLM-assisted writing in biomedical publications through excess vocabulary
    AUTHOR: Dmitry Kobak, Rita González-Márquez, Emőke-Ágnes Horvát, Jan Lause
SOURCE: https://www.science.org/doi/epdf/10.1126/sciadv.adt3813

2.10. Uncategorized

  1. Epistemic Vigilance
    AUTHOR: Dan Sperber
SOURCE: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-0017.2010.01394.x
  2. From honeybees to Internet servers: biomimicry for distributed management of Internet hosting centers
    AUTHOR: Sunil Nakrani, Craig Tovey
SOURCE: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-3182/2/4/S07
  3. The Environmental Paradox of Bicycling
    AUTHOR: Karl T. Ulrich
SOURCE: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1335210
PUBLISHED: 2006
  4. The economic and environmental sustainability of digital commons: Lessons from the 2023 Debian project survey
    AUTHOR: Mathieu O’Neil, Sébastien Broca, Xiaolan Cai, Angela Daly, Cecilia Rikap, Sébastien Shulz, Stefano Zacchiroli
SOURCE: https://dcpc.info/publications/the-economic-and-environmental-sustainability-of-digital-commons-lessons-from-the-2023-debian-project-survey/
  5. The Science of Visual Data Communication: What Works
    AUTHOR: Steven L. Franconeri, Lace M. Padilla, Priti Shah, Jeffrey M. Zacks, Jessica Hullman
SOURCE: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/epdf/10.1177/15291006211051956
  6. No Community Can Do Everything: Why People Participate in Similar Online Communities
    AUTHOR: Nathan TeBlunthuis, Charles Kiene, Isabella Brown, Laura (Alia) Levi, Nicole McGinnis, and Benjamin MakoHill
SOURCE: https://dl.acm.org/doi/epdf/10.1145/3512908
PUBLISHED: 2022
  7. Do Artifacts Have Politics?
    AUTHOR: Langdon Winner
SOURCE: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20024652
PUBLISHED: 1980
  8. FINISHED How Much Technology Is Needed to Build a Smart Community Space?
    AUTHOR: Panayotis Antoniadis
SOURCE: https://www.computer.org/csdl/magazine/co/2025/12/11285919/2ckeXT1Fngs
PUBLISHED: 2025

    The paper raises a few important points for the conceptualization of "smart" cities (or local communities more generally) with respect to technology:

    1. The socializing aspect of human interactions cannot be replaced by machines.
    2. Analog friction might be desired when it leads to meaningful interactions.
    3. People must be able to choose to use technology as much as is necessary, not as much as possible. This implies that using less technology is an option, too.
    4. Effective choice of technological solutions is only possible if people can assess the workings, data flows and requirements/dependencies of the technology in question.

    It showcases how context-aware organizational and technological choices help run a successful, centrally-located community space in Zurich.

  9. The Banality of "Ethnic War"
    AUTHOR: John Mueller
SOURCE: https://politicalscience.osu.edu/faculty/jmueller/is2000.pdf

3. other

3.1. essays

  1. The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet
    AUTHOR: Bogna Konior
SOURCE: https://flugschriften.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/flugschriften-6-bogna-konior-the-dark-forest-theory-of-the-internet-v.2.pdf
  2. Existential Technologies
    AUTHOR: Bogna Konior
SOURCE: https://existentialtech.antikythera.org/
  3. FINISHED Science, Liberty and Peace
    AUTHOR: Aldous Huxley
PUBLISHED: 1946
SOURCE: https://www.fadedpage.com/showbook.php?pid=20150551

    Huxley discusses the role of science (and scientists) and technology (and technologists) in the ever increasing power in the hands of few, the exploited & manipulated position workers find themselves in, blind belief in inevitable progress used to defend all kinds of injustices in the present, the dangers of nationalism, the role of war, and frailty of arms control. He also sketches out alternative ways forward into a better future: more personal moral responsibility, decentralisation, self-reliance, and non-violent protest.

  4. Who Goes Nazi?
    AUTHOR: Dorothy Thompson
SOURCE: https://harpers.org/archive/1941/08/who-goes-nazi/
  5. The Californian Ideology
    AUTHOR: Richard Barbrook, Andy Cameron
PUBLISHED: 1995
SOURCE: https://web.archive.org/web/20061109180733/http://www.hrc.wmin.ac.uk/theory-californianideology.html
  6. Nine Things I Learned in Ninety Years
    AUTHOR: Edward Packard
SOURCE: https://edwardpackard.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/Nine-Things-I-Learned-In-Ninety-Years.pdf
  7. A Short Rebuttal to Searle
    AUTHOR: Nils John Nilsson
PUBLISHED: 1984
SOURCE: https://ai.stanford.edu/~nilsson/OnlinePubs-Nils/General%20Essays/OtherEssays-Nils/searle.pdf
  8. Meditation on Obedience and Liberty
    AUTHOR: Simone Weil
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: French
PUBLISHED: 1940
  9. The Power of Words
    AUTHOR: Simone Weil
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: French
PUBLISHED: 1937
  10. Die Krise der Sozialdemokratie
    AUTHOR: Rosa Luxemburg
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: German
PUBLISHED: 1916
  11. Review of Adolph Hitler's "Mein Kampf"
    AUTHOR: George Orwell
SOURCE: http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks16/1600051h.html
  12. Fascinating Fascism
    AUTHOR: Susan Sontag
SOURCE: https://marcuse.faculty.history.ucsb.edu/classes/33d/33dTexts/SontagFascinFascism75.htm
  13. Ur-Fascism
    AUTHOR: Umberto Eco
SOURCE: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/umberto-eco-ur-fascism
  14. The Promised LAN
    AUTHOR: Paul Tagliamonte
SOURCE: https://notes.pault.ag/tpl/
  15. The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction
    AUTHOR: Ursula K. Le Guin
SOURCE: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/mirror/u/uk/ursula-k-le-guin-the-carrier-bag-theory-of-fiction.pdf
  16. FINISHED This World of Ours
    AUTHOR: James Mickens
SOURCE: https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1401_08-12_mickens.pdf

    A (sarcastic) plea for cryptographers to appreciate everyday scenarios and constraints.

  17. The Night Watch
    AUTHOR: James Mickens
SOURCE: https://web.archive.org/web/20150212021416/http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/mickens/thenightwatch.pdf
  18. FINISHED The Slow Winter
    AUTHOR: James Mickens
SOURCE: https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/mickens/files/theslowwinter.pdf

    Hilarious short story about the pitfalls of CPU design and the ridiculousness of optimization beyond a certain point - especially when they come at the price of incredible complexity.

  19. FINISHED Review of 1984
    AUTHOR: Isaac Asimov
SOURCE: https://www.newworker.org/ncptrory/1984.htm

    A scathing review of Orwell's 1984: Asimov sees the book as a unimaginative, personal vendetta with Stalinism, rather than a work of science fiction denouncing totalitarianism. In his opinion, Orwell stays too close to the technological level of the 1940s, comes up with unrealistic setups in the world of 1984 (institutionalized hate events, perpetual war and rewriting of history [historically not necessary], or total denunciation and control [how would that work?]), and completely leaves non-Stalinist totalitarians out of the picture.

  20. Resisting the Techno-Fascist Takeover: Are We Ready for Decomputing?
    AUTHOR: Dan McQuillan
SOURCE: https://berlinergazette.de/resisting-the-techno-fascist-takeover-are-we-ready-for-decomputing/
  21. The Psychology of Political Violence
    AUTHOR: Emma Goldman
SOURCE: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/emma-goldman-the-psychology-of-political-violence
  22. A Cypherpunk's Manifesto
    AUTHOR: Eric Hughes
SOURCE: https://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/manifesto.html
  23. What is Philosophy of Science good for?
    AUTHOR: Massimo Pigliucci
SOURCE: https://philosophynow.org/issues/44/What_is_Philosophy_of_Science_Good_For
  24. Die Rackets und der Geist
    AUTHOR: Max Horkheimer
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: German
READ_LANGUAGE: German
  25. On the Shortness of Life
    AUTHOR: Seneca the Younger
SOURCE: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/seneca/dialogues/aubrey-stewart
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: Latin
READ_LANGUAGE: English
  26. Self-Reliance
    AUTHOR: Ralph Waldo Emerson
SOURCE: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/ralph-waldo-emerson/essays/text/self-reliance
  27. A Room of One's Own
    AUTHOR: Virginia Woolf
  28. The Nooscope Manifested
    AUTHOR: Vladan Joler, Matteo Pasquinelli
SOURCE: https://fritz.ai/nooscope/
  29. On the foolishness of "natural language programming"
    AUTHOR: Edsger W. Dijkstra
SOURCE: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD667.html
  30. The Tyranny of Structurelessness
    AUTHOR: Jo Freeman
SOURCE: https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm
  31. BITCH Manifesto
    AUTHOR: Jo Freeman
SOURCE: https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/bitch.htm
  32. Life Without Law
    AUTHOR: Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness
  33. The Abolition of Work
    AUTHOR: Bob Black
SOURCE: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/bob-black-the-abolition-of-work
  34. Why Socialism?
    AUTHOR: Albert Einstein
SOURCE: https://monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-socialism/
  35. 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
  36. Politics as a Vocation
    AUTHOR: Max Weber
READ_LANGUAGE: German
SOURCE: https://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Politik_als_Beruf
ORIGINAL_LANGUAGE: German
  37. 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. Cars Are the Worst Product Category We Have Ever Reviewed for Privacy
    AUTHOR: Jen Caltrider, Misha Rykov, Zoë MacDonald
  2. FINISHED How easy is it to fudge your scientific rank
    AUTHOR: Christie Wilcox

    Illustrates how (easily) metrics can be gamed, in this case the h-index (as measured by Google Scholar) in the scientific community: Citation mills will boost that rating for money, or you can just implement their modus operandi yourself.

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

3.4. blog posts

3.4.1. Programming

  1. How To Become A Hacker
    AUTHOR: Eric Steven Raymond
SOURCE: http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html
  2. Epigrams in Programming
    AUTHOR: Alan J. Perlis
SOURCE: https://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/perlis-alan/quotes.html
  3. FINISHED Why Rewriting Emacs is Hard
    AUTHOR: Kana
SOURCE: https://kyo.iroiro.party/en/posts/why-rewriting-emacs-is-hard/

    Describes some intricacies of Emacs string handling which Emacs rewrites have to take care of.

  4. How To Write Unmaintainable Code
    AUTHOR: Roedy Green
SOURCE: https://github.com/Droogans/unmaintainable-code/blob/master/README.md
  5. Worse is Better is Worse
    AUTHOR: Richard P. Gabriel
SOURCE: https://dreamsongs.com/Files/worse-is-worse.pdf
  6. The Rise of Worse is Better
    AUTHOR: Richard P. Gabriel
SOURCE: https://dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html
  7. FINISHED -2000 Lines Of Code
    AUTHOR: Andy Hertzfeld
SOURCE: https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html

    A nice story illustrating how bad of a metric LOC are for productivity for software devs.

  8. The Grug Brained Developer
    SOURCE: https://grugbrain.dev
  9. How to conduct an effective code review
    AUTHOR: Otto Kekäläinen
SOURCE: https://optimizedbyotto.com/post/how-to-code-review/
  10. Debian source packages in git explained
    AUTHOR: Otto Kekäläinen
SOURCE: https://optimizedbyotto.com/post/debian-source-package-git/
  11. Creating Debian packages from upstream Git
    AUTHOR: Otto Kekäläinen
SOURCE: https://optimizedbyotto.com/post/debian-packaging-from-git/
  12. Permacomputing
    AUTHOR: viznut
SOURCE: http://viznut.fi/texts-en/permacomputing.html
  13. Permacomputing update 2021
    AUTHOR: viznut
SOURCE: http://viznut.fi/texts-en/permacomputing_update_2021.html

3.4.2. Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Data Science

  1. Decision Trees: The unreasonable power of nested decision rules
    AUTHOR: Jared Wilber, Lucía Santamaría
SOURCE: https://mlu-explain.github.io/decision-tree/
  2. The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Recurrent Neural Networks
    AUTHOR: Andrej Karpathy
SOURCE: https://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn-effectiveness/
  3. The AI-collapse pre-mortem
    AUTHOR: Bert Hubert
SOURCE: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/an-ai-premortem/
  4. FINISHED Lies, Damn Lies, and LLM Output
    AUTHOR: Christophe Pettus

    LLMs don’t know what is “true,” just what they’ve read.

    […] We as an industry (and as a society) are setting ourselves for failure by relying on the intelligence of something that can’t think and can’t check its work.

  5. The Bitter Lesson
    AUTHOR: Richard S. Sutton
SOURCE: http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html
  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

3.4.3. Anarchism

  1. Anarchism as a Way of Life
    AUTHOR: Zoe Baker
SOURCE: https://anarchozoe.com/2021/09/25/anarchism-as-a-way-of-life/
  2. Anarchists Are Not Naive About Human Nature
    AUTHOR: Zoe Baker
SOURCE: https://anarchozoe.com/2022/02/28/anarchists-are-not-naive-about-human-nature/

3.4.4. Other

  1. Augmenting Long-Term Memory
    AUTHOR: Michael Nielsen
SOURCE: https://augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html
  2. The Internet of Consent
    AUTHOR: Anil Dash
SOURCE: https://www.anildash.com/2025/05/27/internet-of-consent/
  3. The Grug Brained Designer
    AUTHOR:
SOURCE: https://www.grug.design/know

    [The analogue to The Grug Brained Developer for designers.]

  4. 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
  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