Reading list

A few days ago, my stats showed yet another one of those inexplicable spikes that probably mean this blog is being slurped up by some LLM again. While poking around in the referrers, I stumbled across another blog. Real blogs have become somewhat rare. It seems as if most people only write on social networks now, as real-life set dressing and algorithm fodder, wedged between LLM-generated junk, pictures with the same aesthetic over and over, and automated reply spam meant to push some political narrative. I know that’s a gross exaggeration, but sometimes it feels that way.

That blog had a reading list. Books this person had read. And somehow I liked the idea. I like looking at other people’s bookshelves, just as I like letting my eyes wander over their CDs, should those still be lying in state on a shelf for all to see. After all, at some point these people decided on a book, on a CD. And I think that says something about them. I know it says a lot about a person when there’s a Kuschelrock LP between Störkraft and the Onkelz.¹ Or nothing but Kuschelrock CDs. Just as, of course, you have your prejudices when all you find there is Harry Potter. But let him who is without prejudice stand next to Reich-Ranicki and cast the first canon.²

I’ve decided to put my bookshelf on the internet. Technically, the whole thing runs on my blog, but it’s independent of it. You won’t suddenly see a constant stream of posts in which I introduce a book. This will remain the only article pointing to the project. It has its own overview page and even its own RSS feed. The first books are already up.

I have a few ideas for this project:

1. What I read today is very different from what I read 40, 30 or even just 20 years ago. The list is meant to reflect that.
2. That’s why I’ll build the list from both ends: what I read back then, and what I read now. At some point they’ll meet in the middle. If I started at one end, the other would lie in the distant future. And somehow a good part of the fun of a list like this seems to lie in the things that are long past.
3. I explicitly don’t want to review the books. Still, there will be at least a short text for each one. About what I think, and what I remember, when I pick the book up. Sometimes for the first time in decades, not counting house moves.
4. Which leads to another rule: paper books only, eBooks don’t count. For that moment of thought when you look at the cover and remember.
5. For now, the books link to a website, usually the publisher’s, sometimes Wikipedia. In the next few days I’ll also add a link to Amazon as a universally available bookseller.³
6. I’ll probably keep quiet about bad books. Unless they’re so bad that their sheer badness makes them worth mentioning. And I don’t mean books that just weren’t for me, I mean bad in the sense of “I’d actually like my money and my time back.”
7. Embarrassing books, on the other hand, I won’t keep quiet about. Especially not the ones that are the reason I started buying books on paper again, not just as eBooks. Because it wasn’t only that I simply prefer reading on paper. Deep in the back of my mind there was also this: so that I won’t be judged by the books I bought 30 years ago when someday someone has to clear out my junk. Because everything that came later is safely hidden away on an eBook reader, and for all that money I apparently didn’t buy a license that extends beyond my exit from the stage of life. Yes, I know that’s a rather odd reason, but not every reason has to be a good one. So you’ll also find books here from what is now my slightly embarrassing restricted section, books I nonetheless enjoyed reading back then. In the future, Tom Clancy will stand on equal footing next to Yeats. Technical book next to picture book.