2023 in books
All readings, ranked.
Here’s all the books i’ve read in 2023, ranked from worst to best. I didn’t link to Amazon when i started to review all my readings, so this goes a bit haywire. It is what it is.
I’ve read 55 books this year, and reviewed 9 of those with five stars. Only three I’d consider true stinkers, and no book i hated so hard i had to give zero. Good turnout.
23 of these books are nonfiction, and maybe i should’ve split this ranking into fiction/nonfiction sections, but i didn’t. Maybe next year.
The best five as per this list would be:
Thomas Mann - The Magic Mountain (dt. Der Zauberberg)
Andrea Wulf - Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self
Benjamín Labatut - MANIAC
Knut Hamsun - Growth of the Soil
Carlo Rovelli - Helgoland: Making Sense Of The Quantum Revolution
Two nobel prize winning novels with wildly different prose, a philosophical history book, a novel about the history of AI and a booklength essay on Quantum mechanics. I’m quite happy with that.
The first book i’m reading in 2024 will be another Tchaikovsky, Children of Ruin, the second part to his Children of Time-series. On to another 50+ great pageturners.
Happy 2024, everyone!
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Olivie Blake - The Atlas Six ★☆☆☆☆ “Stupid and dumb.” (full review here)
Andreas Eschbach - Der schlauste Mann der Welt (eng. The smartest man in the world) ★☆☆☆☆ “Fuck this book.” (full review here)
Arkady Martine - A Memory Called Empire (Teixcalaan, #1) (dt. Im Herzen des Imperiums) ★☆☆☆☆ “[A] boring, clichéd, unintentionally fuzzy book full of sloppy writing and missed chances”. (full review here)
Richard Bach - Jonathan Livingston Seagull (dt. Die Möwe Jonathan) ★★☆☆☆ ”Too kitschy for my taste, and while this is a kids book, it's message is still too banal and shallow. Yes sure freedom be yourself you're special yada yada. Kids can take a little more complexity than this, i think.” (full mini review here)
Colin Wilson - The Space Vampires (dt. Vampire aus dem Weltall) (★★☆☆☆)
”I love Tobe Hoppers underrated classic 80s schlock Lifeforce, and this is the novel it is based on. The film is far superrior, and changes quite a lot.” (full mini review here)
Diane Cook - The New Wilderness (dt. Die Neue Wildniss) ★★☆☆☆ ”[Diane Cook] just wants to tell a banal, clichéd mother-daughter-story dressed as Climate Fiction. Fine. You did it.” (full mini review here)
Yuval Noah Harari - Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow (dt. Homo Deus: Eine Geschichte von Morgen) ★★☆☆☆ “A bloated, shallow broken promise full of random factoids and unproven claims”. (full mini review here)
Irene Vallejo - Papyrus: The Invention of Books in the Ancient World (dt. Papyrus: Die Geschichte der Welt in Büchern) ★★☆☆☆ ”Instead of a concisive, coherent history of books, she wildly jumps around in world history, loosely follows the history of antic greece and rome, and constantly breaks off into personal annecdotes that sometimes are sweet, more often read like random interrupts. She does this so excessively that she makes the biggest mistake of any book-writer: It's annoying.” (full mini review here)
Lee Child - Blue Moon (Jack Reacher #24) (dt. Die Hyänen) (★★☆☆☆) ”Bad Reacher stories do not exist, i wrote, and then i read Blue Moon.” (full review here)
Philip K. Dick - Simulacra ★★☆☆☆ ”I really disliked this. It has enough of Dicks weird ideas to keep me somewhat entertained, but this just felt randomly put together.” (full mini review here)
Delilah S. Dawson - The Violence ★★★☆☆ “I wanted to like this book, i like the prose and i dig the characters even when they are somewhat flat and cliched. But this is a story about killing someone during a pandemic of a virus that causes violent outbreaks, and the morals of this is barely explored, if at all.” (full mini review here)
Annaka Harris - Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind (dt. Das Bewusstsein: Annäherung an ein Mysterium) ★★★☆☆ “A nice introduction to the topic, but don’t expect any well researched in depth analysis”. (full mini review here)
Anthony McCarten - Going Zero (dt. Going Zero) ★★★☆☆ “While i did enjoy McCartens tech-thriller, he's just too clueless with the technology he's writing about and the eyerolls just add up to the impression that the guy did not really do any research on what is possible and what isn't, culminating in the moment when he uses Flops as a unit for bandwith (Flops are a unit of CPU-speed). These moments add up and left me with a very eyerolling reading experience.” (full review here)
Axel Hacke - Über die Heiterkeit in schwierigen Zeiten und die Frage, wie wichtig uns der Ernst des Lebens sein sollte (eng. On Lightheartedness in serious times) ★★★☆☆ “Being an essay on earnest lightheartedness, touching on many philosophical positions about the function of humor for society and psychology, this book is a nice read. I just wish it was a bit more structured and that Hacke spent some more time with the philosophers and thinkers, instead of delivering more of a collection of personal anecdotes interpersed with the history of writings on mirth and joy.” (full mini review here)
Arthur C. Clarke - Rendezvous with Rama (dt. Rendezvous mit 31/439) ★★★☆☆
”While I do like his imaginative worlds and descriptions, his stories are mostly just people looking at weird stuff, and this is a prime example of this.” (full mini review here)
Silvia Moreno-Garcia - Mexican Gothic (dt. Der mexikanische Fluch) ★★★☆☆ “An okay neogothic story about another haunted house that doesn’t make too much of it’s mexican setting”. (full mini review here)
Michael Kempe - Die beste aller möglichen Welten: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in seiner Zeit ★★★☆☆ “It’s not a very good Bio because it lacks his early years, and it’s not detailed enough on his work, focussing way to much on who he conversed with in his thousands of letters and with which kings and queens he drank tea.” (full mini review here)
Lee Child - Tripwire (dt. Sein wahres Gesicht) ★★★☆☆ ”My sixth Reacher novel, the third part in Lee Childs series, turned out to be a bit of a bore.” (full mini review here)
Sabine Hossenfelder - Existential Physics: A Scientist's Guide to Life's Biggest Questions (dt. Mehr als nur Atome: Was die Physik über die Welt und das Leben verrät) ★★★☆☆ ”a bit frustrating at times, but she makes up for it with wit and the occasional insight into scientific process.” (full mini review here)
Quentin Tarantino - Cinema Speculation ★★★☆☆ “I liked this, but Tarantino clearly is not an author of books. The sloppy, 'cool' language works on a screen, but not really for a nonfiction book, at least not for me.” (full mini review here)
John Varley - The Persistence of Vision (dt. Voraussichten I) ★★★★☆ “As shortstories go, it’s a mixed bag, but a good one.” (full mini review here)
Lucien Malson - Die wilden Kinder ★★★★☆ “Highly interesting for anyone interested in human nature, cognition and consciousness studies, how these things relate to each other, by presenting the very opposite of these things: Wild childs are barely human at all, sometimes are unable to learn any language, and lack basic cognitive human functions.” (full mini review here)
Lee Child - Echo Burning (Jack Reacher #5) (dt. In Letzter Sekunde) ★★★★☆ ”I liked the clever plot that is well constructed and surprises you until the end.” (full mini review here)
Peter Watts - Blindsight (dt. Blindflug) ★★★★☆ “I read a ton of praise about this book and had high expectation which were a tad disappointed, but not by much.” (full mini review here)
C.C.W. Taylor - Socrates: A Very Short Introduction ★★★★☆ “Good short introduction to the ‘ideal philosopher’, as Plato put it.” (full mini review here)
Nils Westerboer - Athos 2643 ★★★★☆ “Touches on some more philosophical questions about AI-safety and ethics and free will, and with the robot meat factory, it features one of the creepiest images i read in a scifi-novel ever.” (full mini review here)
Noam Zadoff - Geschichte Israels: Von der Staatsgründung bis zur Gegenwart (engl. History of Israel: From its foundations to the present) ★★★★☆ “To say i enjoyed this book would be wrong, considering the tragic and incredibly complex standoff all sides are entangled in here, but it surely made me understand history a bit more and it did so by moving not just my braincells. That's anything a short book like this can wish for.” (full review here)
Erich Maria Remarque - All Quiet on the Western Front (dt. Im Westen nichts Neues) ★★★★☆ “Should be mandatory reading in all schools.” (full mini review here)
Robert Louis Stevenson - Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (dt. Dr. Jekyll und Mr. Hyde) ★★★★☆ “Absolutely holds up today as a classical psychological thriller.” (full mini review here)
Stephen Fry - Mythos ★★★★☆ “Maybe a bit too humorous for my taste from time to time, but Fry makes up for it.” (full mini review here)
Thomas Halliday - Otherlands (dt. Urwelten) ★★★★☆ “A trip backwards through time to the beginnings of life on earth, starting with the Pleistocene 20000 years ago and ending with the Ediacarium in 500 Million bc. Beautifully written and with a flood of information about evolution, geology, the formation of continents, and climate.” (full mini review here)
Arkadi and Boris Strugatzki - Stalker ★★★★☆ “Loved the language and the prose which was surprisingly unpretentious and down to earth. I also loved the structure of the story and the characters, despite me being really really over postapocalyptic settings.” (full mini review here)
Byung-Chul Han - Vita Contemplativa ★★★★☆ “Aimless lazyness is a desirable trait in this day and age, and maybe the world wouldn’t be such a cacophonic mess if more people dared to, you know, let it be.” (full mini review here)
H. P. Lovecraft - Cthulhus Ruf ★★★★☆ “An innovative classic of the genre, flawed by his racist views”. (full mini review here)
Dietmar Dath - Stephen King ★★★★☆ “Essay on the horror-genre itself and why the writings of the most famous, most prolific and the richest of all genre authors qualifies as high art too. Loved it.” (full mini review here)
Robin Lane Fox - The Classical World: An Epic History from Homer to Hadrian (dt. Die klassische Welt) ★★★★☆ “It’s quite a tome, but maybe the best book I’ve read featuring a comprehensive overview on this broad topic, which is not a multi-volume history-series on thousands of pages.” (full mini review here)
Michael Tomasello - The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition (dt. Die kulturelle Entwicklung des menschlichen Denkens) ★★★★☆ “Highly relevant especially if you are interested in artificial intelligence, and how it differentiates from human cognition.” (full mini review here)
Adrian Tchaikovsky - Shards of Earth (dt. Die Scherben der Erde) ★★★★☆ “It's a dense novel with a lot of infodump in the beginning which can overwhelm you, but i really liked it for its sheer scope, even when it lacks the overarching evolution-spanning narrative which gave Children of Time some inherent coherence.” (full mini review here)
Stephen King - Holly ★★★★☆ “I loved this blend of pulp, reminding me so much of those old 70s horror house movies in which elderly couples hide a dark secret and a very bloody axe, and this meta-talk about poetry, and the hardboiled crime detective story, and if King would've made the meta-narrative stuff a bit more clever with some more implicit symbolism like in, say, It, this could've been a late masterpiece.” (full review here)
P. Djèlí Clark - Ring Shout ★★★★☆ “This is what happens when an author stops giving a damn and throws Horror pulp, High Fantasy, racism and the ku-klux clan, african mythology, some voodoo and slavery, and the history of cinema into a blender.” (full mini review here)
Ted Chiang - Die große Stille ★★★★☆ ”Loved it, with some minor quibbles in aesthetic choices (I’m so tired of steampunk).” (full mini review here)
Wilhelm Weischedel - Die philosophische Hintertreppe (engl. The Backstairs to Philosophy) ★★★★☆ “It's quite a wonderful read, albeit a bit outdated occasionally in tone and focus, and does exactly what it wants: To give you a good summary of philosophical theories ranging from metaphysics, existentialism to linguistic thought.” (full review here)
Wolfram Eilenberger - Zeit der Zauberer ★★★★☆ “Some people critizise this book for being historically inaccurate, but i liked it, knowing next to nothing about the philosophy and history of Heidegger or Wittgenstein, only read marginally on Benjamin and knowing some Cassirer, who still, after reading this book, remains my favorite of the bunch”. (full mini review here)
Carlo Rovelli - Seven Brief Lessons On Physics (dt. Sieben kurze Lektionen über Physik) ★★★★☆ “sweet, very good and sometimes brillant gems on Quantumphysics featuring some of the clearest explanations i ever read” (full mini review here)
Tobias Hürter - The Age of Uncertainty (dt. Das Zeitalter der Unschärfe) ★★★★☆
”Great history book on the scientific discoveries in the period between the end of the 19th century and the 1940s, starting with Marie Curie research on radioactivity, featuring the paradigm shift and seismic waves of the discovery of Quantum Mechanics, ending with the explosion of the atom bomb.” (full mini review here)
Adrian Tchaikovsky - Children of Time (dt. Die Kinder der Zeit) ★★★★☆ “Loved it, especially the character who fuses with an AI orbiting a planet for thousands of years, going crazy in the process.” (full mini review here)
Carl Nixon - The Tally Stick (dt. Kerbholz) ★★★★★ ”In the Seventies, John Boorman would've made an fantastic movie out of this and critics would compare it to Deliverance.” (full mini review here)
Peter Schäfer - Kurze Geschichte des Antisemitismus (eng. A short history of Antisemitism) ★★★★★ “This book tries to condense the history of antisemitism ranging from it's ancient roots to the present day into 400 pages and while this does sound like an impossible feat, Schäfer succeeds.” (full review here)
James Baldwin - If Beale Street Could Talk (dt. Beale Street Blues) ★★★★★ “I loved the main characters’ mix of naivete and street wisdom, the subtle discussion of racism and sexuality, and the overall tone of this novella.” (full mini review here)
Sayaka Murata - Earthlings (dt. Das Seidenraupenzimmer) ★★★★★ “One of the most fucked up and beautiful stories i've read in a very long time. Definitely recommended, with the climax being like when Junji Ito and Takashi Miike made that cannibal romance movie I've once seen in my dreams.” (full mini review here)
Carlo Rovelli - Helgoland: Making Sense Of The Quantum Revolution (dt. Helgoland: Wie die Quantentheorie unsere Welt verändert) ★★★★★ ”Rovelli gets to the paradoxons of the quantum realm in clear, non-scientific language but doesn’t fall into the trap of oversimplifying the topic.” (full mini review here)
Knut Hamsun - Growth of the Soil (dt. Segen der Erde) ★★★★★ “I love sparse, minimal prose that turns epic, and this is a justified masterpiece.” (full mini review here)
Benjamín Labatut - MANIAC ★★★★★ “If you want to understand AI, read this book. It's better than any paper or book i've read about Large Language Models and Artificial Intelligence, and it surely is much more entertaining than those.” (full review here)
Andrea Wulf - Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self (dt. Fabelhafte Rebellen: Die frühen Romantiker und die Erfindung des Ich) ★★★★★ “Those ideas, that humans are part of nature, that our self is deeply connected to the network of all living things, that poetry and art are a mode of understanding the world complementary to the language of science, resonate today where we see a reemergence of these ideas in the form of pan- and cosmopsychism and new schools of thoughts about artificial intelligence, which makes this book highly relevant to our times.” (full review here)
Thomas Mann - The Magic Mountain (dt. Der Zauberberg) ★★★★★
”Thomas Mann is effing psychedelic, man. He can send you on a trip through fifty densely written pages about space and time and then return you to a mundane dinner at a mountain ressort, just to start a worldwide war that will kill millions. Quite a trip, quite a trip, and one of the most beautiful ones i ever had.” (full review here)