Reading List

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

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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

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

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” (

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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,

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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

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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,

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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.

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