7 books were added to my reading list in week 43 (October 19, 2026 to October 25, 2026). Here they are at a glance; the full review is on each book’s own page.
19 Oct 2026 – Wen rette ich - und wenn ja, wie viele?
No, this book was certainly not light Sunday-evening-tea-on-the-sofa fare. I recently picked it up as part of a stack of the Reclam books I mentioned before. These are often 200 pages at most, so they are read fairly quickly. Snack-sized, but in this case definitely not fast food.
19 Oct 2026 – ta’ puq mach
ta’ puq mach? Huh? Emperor-child-small? Why do I actually own this book? To be honest, I don’t really know. I like the story. Well … that’s probably a non-statement … I think there are very few readers who don’t like The Little Prince, I mean really don’t like it. Not everyone elevates the story the way some people do, but I don’t know anyone who doesn’t find it at least “pretty okay”. But why do I have the book in both German and Klingon?
20 Oct 2026 – Arctic Meltdown: Die Neuvermessung der Welt
The newest book of Robert Habeck. Former Vice Chancellor of Germany. Member of the Green Party. Well, for a long time I was an SPD voter. Although I certainly had a certain affinity for green issues, I still didn’t vote for the Greens. That changed, however, with the 2021 federal election. As a voter, I had increasingly felt that I had lost my political home in the SPD.
21 Oct 2026 – Bis zur Unendlichkeit und noch viel weiter
Whenever I hear about Neil deGrasse Tyson, I immediately think of Carl Sagan. And yet the two differ greatly, at least in public. Both are – or were – great science communicators. But each of them is also a product of his time.
22 Oct 2026 – Heller als tausend Sonnen
My paternal grandparents had a guest room. It was a somewhat strange room. It was lower than all the other – in themselves rather high-ceilinged – rooms in the house. Three steps led up into it. Inside there was a bed, a sofa. And many, many books. Much of it wasn’t my thing: Johannes Mario Simmel (yes, really Simmel, not Schimmel – German for mould) in every shape and colour. Lots of really old books. The explanation for the steps and the height of the room was simple: beneath it lay the pantry cellar. It had a higher ceiling than the rest of the basement, which was little more than a crawl space – and so it stole a little of the height of the room above. The cellar always felt a little eerie to me. But that was where the preserving jars stood, with the delicious pears and the pumpkin with cinnamon sticks. I don’t really know where the books ended up later, when my grandmother (my grandfather had already passed away by then) moved into a care home. Some of them also belonged to my father, who had never taken them with him.
25 Oct 2026 – Gott und der tropfende Wasserhahn
Recently, while working on another text about a book by Carl Sagan, I was looking for a video on YouTube. I really liked one of the comments there: “Every disaster begins with a scientist who was ignored.”
25 Oct 2026 – Blauer Punkt im All
Neil deGrasse Tyson called it “The Book of Carl”: “Pale Blue Dot” (in German: “Blauer Punkt im All”). The name refers to the small blue dot in one of the most famous images taken by Voyager 1. It was taken from a distance of “billions and billions” of kilometres (six billion, to be exact) and shows our Earth. Not even a single pixel, with a hint of blue. If you look very closely.
