Reading List

In my piece on the Three-Body trilogy, I mentioned that my reading map has some sizeable blank spots when it comes to Asia and Africa. So I simply googled what you absolutely have to have read in Chinese literature. One name and one title kept coming up: Lu Xun and “The True Story of Ah Q”. It isn’t a long story – that

We all live in our own bubble, somehow. As far as I know, there’s nobody among my acquaintances who sympathises with the AfD (Alternative for Germany). At least nobody shows it openly. That may be because an acquaintance or friendship with me and voting for the AfD are incompatible, the people around me know that, and

When Stephen King gets really good, he usually ends up in prison. The novella “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption”, on which “The Shawshank Redemption” is based, is really very good. The film deserves its excellent reputation. But I read the novella a long time ago. I saw “The Green Mile” in the cinema back then. M

I admit it: I am a Grundgesetz ultra – a die-hard fan of the Basic Law, Germany’s constitution. Unreservedly. No, I don’t constantly insist on my fundamental rights, and I don’t shout at every police officer that he or she isn’t allowed to do this or that. But I do believe that the Basic Law, as the foundation of our l

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 increasingl

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. This book is about triage. In other wo

Really, there is only one important question in life for judging people: chocolate scoop or vanilla scoop on top?

A few days ago, I watched The Life of Chuck. It’s a truly unusual film, especially considering it’s based on a Stephen King story. Tom Hiddleston’s dance scene may be what sticks with you, but Mark Hamill as the grandfather is every bit as brilliant. I bought the book right after seeing the film. The book is just as un

Konrad Zuse is one of the many giants on whose shoulders my industry stands. I still remember being a know-it-all teenager and pointing out to my English teacher, Mrs. W. (yes, the ex-wife of my German teacher, Mr. W.), that the computer wasn’t actually invented in the US, as our textbook claimed, but by a German. This

Some days, you start to lose faith in humanity. On days like that, I’d recommend this book. It tells the story of how a small Canadian town opened its doors to the people stranded there when all flights were grounded.

Strictly speaking, I should hardly have any memories of Helmut Schmidt as chancellor – and I don’t really have any significant memories of my own, apart from snippets of the Tagesschau, Germany’s main evening news. Even back then I was allowed to watch it regularly. Then again, I don’t know whether even those are just

When you sit in a doctor’s waiting room with a book, you almost feel like a snob already, while everyone around you stares into their phone, completely entangled in the net. If on top of that you’re reading a small Reclam book, it looks even a little “snobbier”. And if the title then happens to be “Über die Dummheit” (

I don’t think many people really understand how LLMs work. Why they manage to come across as if they “know” things, even though they’re “just” a model of language, not of knowledge (though this book also raises the question of whether the two can really be separated at all). Why being wrong is baked into how they work.

At some point, I was standing in a bookshop looking for a present for my niece. And then I found it: a story I’ve known since childhood. It was in my reader back in primary school. My parents tell me that at some point they knew it almost by heart. I have five siblings, and they practised reading this story with every

Reclam publishes a small but, in my opinion, very fine series of little books. The series is called “Was bedeutet das alles?” (“What does it all mean?”). The books are roughly the size of the Reclam booklets I knew from school. Only they aren’t yellow, but colourful. “What does it all mean?” is indeed a question I ask

I recently wrote in a text about a book on the Basic Law, Germany’s constitution , that I am a Basic Law ultra. Despite the weaknesses of our state, I allow myself to be very glad to live in Germany. In some respects, the relationship status “It’s complicated” would admittedly be appropriate, but I like this country no

I want to get around to some heavier literature on my reading list. What a doorstopper. It’s the Three-Body trilogy – “Trisolaris” in German – in a single volume: 1,740 pages. The book weighs quite a bit. This was the book that ultimately accompanied me through my surgery. I came to it through the Netflix series and my

It was one of the books I took with me to hospital last year. I didn’t actually get round to reading it until after rehab, though: Project Hail Mary. The film does the book justice in many respects. It shows that a five-armed (or five-legged?) “rock creature” can be more interesting than entire Marvel universes. Still,

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. I always saw Carl Sagan as the calm, quiet scholar with an uncanny gift for explaining thing

The news caught me at a bad moment last week. On 24 October I had to let Henry go, and I was pretty off the rails all week. I still am. Then, on 28 October, Patrick Stewart died. Yet another piece of bad news in a time already full of bad news. Of course I didn’t know the actor personally. And of course the loss of Hen

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,

In 2023 I gave away this book-shaped blend of candy floss, halva and the entire display case of a Turkish bakery as a gift. Fortune-cookie wisdom on every page. But sometimes that’s exactly what you need. A boy meets a mole, a fox and a horse, and together they talk about friendship, courage and accepting help. Yes, th

At some point, you burn your last CD without knowing it’s the last time. At some point, you buy your last DVD without knowing your collection will never grow again. I bought this book in 2023. It probably has the dubious honour of being the last technical book I’ll ever buy. When I bought it, I had no idea it would be

If astrophysics weren’t – as the name suggests – part of physics, and therefore full of formulas with letters and strange symbols, this science would have a clear advantage over the study of history. While in history you have to piece the truth together from many subjective and few objective data points, astrophysics –

If you read a lot, you always get the feeling that you have basically never had a new thought in your entire life. A truly fresh thought, I mean. Somebody has always had that thought before you and written it down, too. With eight billion people on the planet, it’s hard to have such a thought anyway, when so many brain

I’ll admit it right away: I bought this book for one reason only. I had seen the film Arrival and liked it immediately. The film is based on Ted Chiang’s novella “Story of Your Life”, which is part of the German collection Die Hölle ist die Abwesenheit Gottes (“Hell Is the Absence of God”). When I learned that, I natur

There is science fiction like “Armageddon” or, if you insist, “The Core”, which is occasionally somewhat entertaining but has about as much to do with science as the Pope has to do with artificial contraception. And there is science fiction that doesn’t make every halfway science-minded brain attempt a suicidal leap ou

There are images of events that have burned themselves indelibly into my memory: the falling towers on September 11, the crumpled ICE train at Eschede. And that image of the “major malfunction” on January 28, 1986: the Space Shuttle “Challenger”, having just exploded. The cloud at the end of the flight, out of which th

“Failure Is Not an Option” is a book by Gene Kranz. Most people will know the name from his role as Flight Director on Apollo 13, but his career extends far beyond that – both before and after. And it includes situations that are no less significant just because it’s harder to make a film about them. The Apollo 1 disas

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.” It is, after all, a recurring trope in films: a scientist is ignored by a politician, and the politician later die

I can’t say exactly when I bought this book. My edition came out in 1999, and the price on the back is still in Deutschmarks. I think it was 2001. I do remember where I bought it: in a bookshop in Oldenburg. It was a weekend. I’d been out for breakfast in town with someone beforehand. At the time I was still living in

This book is a bit problematic. It’s one I only read after I had seen the film adaptation: Robert Heinlein’s “Starship Troopers”. The book is often counted among the important novels of science fiction, and you can see its significance for military science fiction. Even so, I find it decidedly questionable and difficul

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

You’re up to your neck in it! In myth? No – in religion. That was the first thing that struck me when I held this book in my hands. The battle of good versus evil, built on a massive biblical and religious foundation. I found that pretty tiring to read. I read It with far more enthusiasm. It’s certainly not a bad book,

I still remember exactly where I bought this book: Münster. In a bookshop in town. The Bundeswehr had sent me there, and the barracks were fairly close to the city centre. So, plenty of opportunities to buy books. It must have been winter, because I picture a brightly lit bookshop while it was already getting dark outs

Well, what can I say? No – strictly speaking, the question should be: what should I say? And to that, there’s a clear answer: nothing, really. This book is my final boss. I’ve owned it for more than 30 years and still haven’t managed to finish it. Not for lack of trying – but every time, at some point, I give up (never

This book was another Christmas present – though one I picked out myself. I think it was 1993, though it may have been a year earlier. I was out Christmas shopping with my parents. Since they weren’t quite sure which book to get me this time, we simply went into a bookshop, and this is the one we came out with. Not bei

It is the Stephen King book I’ve owned the longest: “It”. Hmm. That sounds kind of strange. “It” – that works twice over here as well – is also the book that, when I picked it up again, showed me most clearly that I urgently need to buy glass doors for my bookshelf and then cover them with UV protection film. The once

It was the first book I ever read in English, out of necessity: for a long time, it simply wasn’t available in German (the translation, “Im Sturm,” only came out much later). A classmate lent it to me. The pro-American slant was even more obvious in this one. The ending felt like a bit of a deus ex machina to me, but I

As a teenager and young adult, I loved reading Tom Clancy. I lost interest at some point, but I really enjoyed his early books. Yes, his writing was very pro-American, to put it mildly. Still, he was the master of the techno-thriller. And The Hunt for Red October was simply brilliant, both as a book and later as a film

As a fourth-grader, staying up late isn’t exactly easy. I had to promise not to be grumpy the next morning, however tired I was. I kept that promise, and so I was actually allowed to stay up, for weeks on end. What for? In 1983, Cosmos was on TV, and I got to watch every episode – together with my parents. It’s one of

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,