Booksbooksbooks 01/2023

I which i read a lot.

I already finnished 28 books of my set goal of 50 this year, so here are some teeny tiny reviews for all of them in chronological order of how i read them. All of these books were at least okay, most of them good, a few were excellent — with one very annoying and bad exception.

My favorites of these were the books by Carlo Rovelli on Quantumphysics, James Baldwins If Beale Street Could Talk, Ted Chiangs first collection of shortstories and Knut Hamsuns Growth of the Soil. All of these encode complex topics and complicated life situations in simple, clear, beautiful language.

I also really liked Tchaikowskys Childrens of Time for it’s sheer scope following the sped up evolution of an alien planet, and Nils Westerboers Athos 2643 for his subtle discussion of philosophical topics in an AI-murder story in a sort of Name of the Rose-SciFi-Setting (the book is not available for international readers at this point).

The biggest disapointment has to be Yuval Noah Hararis Homo Deus, which is, now after I’ve read it, just Sapiens reloaded with some shallow thoughts about some nebulous future tech attached. I like the guy, but i guess i’ll stick to his shorter essays, which serve the same job but more to the point. Olivia Blakes Atlas Six was no disappointment because i already don’t like the common standard Young Adult Fantasy stuff very much as it’s mostly just formulaic crap, but i bought it on a whim and, well, it was bad.

1. Adrian Tchaikovsky - Children of Time (dt. Die Kinder der Zeit) (★★★★☆)
   Humans accidentally speed up alien evolution on a planet that’s supposed to be the destiny of a space ark to save humanity from a destroyed earth. Loved it, especially the character who fuses with an AI orbiting a planet for thousands of years, going crazy in the process. A minor objection would be the choice of aliens as pretty down-to-earth spiders and ants and bugs, which is just too geocentric for my taste in SciFi.

2. Ted Chiang - Die große Stille (★★★★☆)
   First collection of two of Ted Chiangs shortstories. Loved it, with some minor quibbles in aesthetic choices (I’m so tired of steampunk). I really dig his clear and precise language and his human-centric approach to Science-Fiction.

3. Arthur C. Clarke - Rendezvous with Rama (dt. Rendezvous mit 31/439) (★★★☆☆)
   I’m not a big fan of Clarke. I loved 2001, but found the follow-ups only so-so. 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. Alien spaceship arrives, people enter the thing, explore, and leave, and that’s the story. I still liked it and thought it was okay, but i don’t think it deserves its status as a classic. Looking forward to what Denis Villeneuve will do with this in his upcoming movie.

4. Robert Louis Stevenson - Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (dt. Dr. Jekyll und Mr. Hyde) (★★★★☆)
   Loved the three part structure in this one with each section building on each other and finally revealing the private notes of the tragic janussian Dr. Jekyll. Absolutely holds up today as a classical psychological thriller.

5. Stephen Fry - Mythos (★★★★☆)
   A great retelling of classic greek mythology, maybe a bit too humorous for my taste from time to time, but Fry makes up for it.

6. Knut Hamsun - Growth of the Soil (dt. Segen der Erde) (★★★★★)
   A nobel priced classic about the simple life of farming in Norway at the turn of the 20th century. I love sparse, minimal prose that turns epic, and this is a justified masterpiece. Immediately bought his classic novel “Hunger“ after reading this.

7. Olivie Blake - The Atlas Six (★☆☆☆☆)
   What a bad book.
   Young people have sex in a building that is supposed to by mysterious, but isn't. The magic just happens, and the magic system is superficial at best. None of the characters are likable, all of them are assholes, and they are inconsistent in their personality. I get that they are supposed to distrust each other, but this level of vitriol is ridiculous. There's a subplot about some guy who can enter dreams and his water-mom which is just irrelevant to the story.
   You can absolutely see how this author simply constructed a tired, clichéd Potter-Ripoff (a bunch of kids come to a secretive magic school) for young adults, sexed it up, and then simply threw some shit against the wall that is absolutely meaningless for the miniscule plot. Wizards make a wormhole, and can teleport with it. Why do they do this? They are wizards, they are able to manifest and levitate stuff all the time, so why do they create wormholes over months in one chapter, and then that's just some random factoid that has no impact on the story? It just happens and then fades away. The science is shallow, and everytime a character utters "Quantum" i'd like to punch them in the pretty faces (the book comes with illus of the characters and all of them look gorgeous, ofcourse, and they all look the same). The prose is sometimes grandiose meaningless crap followed by confused dialogue.
   Also, i know nothing about the secret society of the alexandrian library, arguably the most interesting thing about this book, and the reason why i bought this in the first place. I know they have a house, its shaped in a H-Form, and that there is a curator and his assistant, they are wizards (duh), but else? I'm baffled how Blake didn't throw in a historical excurse to tell the story of the library and their secret society. There's one paragraph: It went from Alexandria to Praque and to London and... thats it.
   Horrible dialogue. Constantly half sentences, weird topical jumps mid talking, stupid paragraphs full of "did you?" "no, did you?" "i dont know" "me neither" and so forth, and then suddenly they talk like poets who are also scholars on quantumphysics. When one of two wizards levitates a lamp and it breaks — they immediately start to talk about, wait for it... not magic, not the lamp, but her boyfriend. This is bad.
   Ofcourse, this book is a tiktok hype. No social media hype ever produced anything of substance, and this will surely be the first and last "romantic dark academia fantasy" novel i'll ever read. (Also, there is not much "academia" or "dark" in here, everything stays on the surface level of teenage sex drama, painted thin with words the author doesn't understand). The blurb about hidden knowledge and the library of Alexandria is just fake, that hidden knowledge is just ornamentally mentioned, and the library of Alexandria is just an archive that is constantly mentioned, but never described, never visited, and they simply "order" some books which "manifest" out of the air (not that those books really play a role in the plot) and that's that.
   Did i mention the characters are assholes? Like, all of them? Not one likable character? Oh, but they fuck around all the time. And all of them are rich. And all of them are at the very least brillant, the best, the elite. You get a really slimy taste from reading this neoliberal fantasy crap which utters anticapitalist phrases and ofcourse offers some nods to wokism, because what else. If this is the mindset of the young, left-of-center, media savy kids these days, they should be forced to read Bukowski or Jelinek for a week, just to get a taste of life in their mouths. Stupid and dumb.
   Some ideas about the magic are interesting, the animatures, some stuff about consciousness. But all of that is very shallow, and i will not read the second part to find out where this goes, because this is a bad book.

8. Byung-Chul Han - Vita Contemplativa (★★★★☆)
   Great short philosophy essay on the art of doing nothing, about not contributing to the endless mill of engagement and work, of just being a silent human for a while, to find yourself and come to your senses. Loved it, and in times of endless doomscrolling and AI-tech accelerating at a breathtaking speed, this is dearly needed. For a guy who spends his summer weeks hanging around in a hammock by the river most of the time, this was a very welcome confirmation: 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.

9. H. P. Lovecraft - Cthulhus Ruf (★★★★☆)
   Collection of Lovecraft-stories from his most famous Cthulhu-epics to some more special oddities like Hypnos and The Silver Key. A foreword discusses the rampant racism of Lovecraft, at least to some extend, and what else can you say about the guy: An innovative classic of the genre, but flawed by his racist views.

10. John Varley - The Persistence of Vision (dt. Voraussichten I) (★★★★☆)
    Varleys collection of shortstories was published in three parts for the german market, i read the first one. I liked the first story about two astronauts in peril at the edge of the solar system, i thought the air-pirate-story was confusing and i loved the titular story about a community of blind kids and teens and twens developing their own cognitive style and language. As for shortstories go, a mixed bag, but a good one.

11. James Baldwin - If Beale Street Could Talk (dt. Beale Street Blues) (★★★★★)
    Love and hope in times of despair, a great little story resolving around an innocent guy in jail and his wife trying to get him out. I loved the main characters’ mix of naivete and street wisdom, the subtle inclusion of racism and sexuality, and the overall tone of this novella.

12. 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, and my old translation from the 80s surely didn’t help. I have yet to find the Dick-novel that blows my mind, but Valis is on my to-read-list.

13. Carlo Rovelli - Seven Brief Lessons On Physics (dt. Sieben kurze Lektionen über Physik) (★★★★☆)

14. Carlo Rovelli - Helgoland: Making Sense Of The Quantum Revolution (dt. Helgoland: Wie die Quantentheorie unsere Welt verändert) (★★★★★)
    I read both Rovelli books back to back and both are sweet, very good and sometimes brillant gems on Quantumphysics featuring some of the clearest explanations i ever read on this realm of science that still baffles researchers today. 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.

15. Nils Westerboer - Athos 2643 (★★★★☆)
    Very good scifi thriller about an robot-whisperer trying to solve the mystery of a murder-by-AI in a monastery on an asteroid. 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. A great book, and i just put Westerboers first novel Kernschatten on my reading list too.

16. Robin Lane Fox - The Classical World: An Epic History from Homer to Hadrian (dt. Die klassische Welt) (★★★★☆)
    One of the best books about the classical period from roughly 500bc to the year 150ad which manages to switch back and forth between dry historic facts (politics and war) and the everyday life of the people of the period. 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.

17. 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. You’ll find a lot of details on the relationships of scientists in this titular “age of uncertainty“, and how those influenced the twists and turns in the development of those discoveries.

18. Wolfram Eilenberger - Zeit der Zauberer (★★★★☆)
    History-book on the developments in Philosophy between 1919 and 1929 focussing on the lives and work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger. 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 with his philosophy of symbolic forms, and his take that humans are the “symbolic animal”, which absolutely holds up with current neuroscience on the formation of cognition by e.g. Tomasello (see below). Great book for a good overview on the period in philosophy.

19. Michael Kempe - Die beste aller möglichen Welten: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in seiner Zeit (★★★☆☆)
    Biography on the life and work of Leibniz. 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. It’s nice but not really good, not a waste of time, but i need to find another book to read more in depth on the Monadology.

20. 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 — the story as is could play out anywhere —, but it has a nice climax and i liked the natural explanation for the hauntings.

21. 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. It’s still a Reacher, and i just like that dry and extremely detailed descriptions of action that Child is famed for. This one had not enough of that though, but it gave you some additional background to the character and a true love interest in return, so I’m fine.

22. Dietmar Dath - Stephen King (★★★★☆)
    A nice little book about Stephen King that turned out to be more of an 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, albeit it should’ve included more biographical history of King, but that’s hard with a book series restricted to one hundred pages.

23. Annaka Harris - Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind (dt. Das Bewusstsein: Annäherung an ein Mysterium) (★★★☆☆)
    An okayish introduction to consciousness-studies, made sympathetic to me by a good focus on panpsychism in the last third of the book. A nice introduction to the topic, but don’t expect any well researched in depth analysis.

24. 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. It is indeed full of great, mindblowing ideas about the mind and consciousness, and the scientific explanation for vampires feels fitting where it shouldn’t, but i think that descriptions of locations and action where subpar. A good and sometimes very good book, that could have been a masterpiece.

25. Lucien Malson - Die wilden Kinder (★★★★☆)
    Anthropological study on feral children, kids that were abandoned by their parents and either survived in isolation in the wild or were raised by wild animals. 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. This book was written at a high time of the nature vs. nurture-debate and drives home a very good point for the nurture-side of the discussion.

26. Michael Tomasello - The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition (dt. Die kulturelle Entwicklung des menschlichen Denkens) (★★★★☆)
    This is the second book from Tomasello i read, after i read his excellent A Natural History of Human Thinking some years ago. This one, his first, is full of empirical studies focussing on the cognitive revolution occuring in humans at the age of nine months, when we realize that other people are humans like us and have intentions we can imitate. For Tomasello, all human cognition follows from this, and he does provide a lot of evidence. Highly relevant especially if you are interested in artificial intelligence, and how it differentiates from human cognition.

27. 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. The book could be condensed into a cool shortstory, and wastes pretty much the whole middle section talking and talking about some esoteric form of vampirism that suck energy from people by sucking on some Lambda-field or whatever when in real life we know that energy vampires drown peoples energy by being boring. Colin Wilson also wrote a lot on mysticism and parapsychology, and this novel, unfortunately, feels like an excuse to present some of those esoteric ideas in a narrative framework. Good choice by Hopper to cut this crap and focus on the schlock-aspects of the book.

28. 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. Harari wastes 400 pages with a repetition of his Sapiens-book (which i thought was good-ish okay), only to deliver shallow takes on supercommon techcritiques as you can read them since forever. It's also a disjointed mess, for instance, he spends 15 pages on one experiment by Daniel Kahnemann just to jump to the meaning of life, because obviously those things are connected. At one point he describes the importance of sensibility through training, like developing a nuanced taste for tea, but later, this kind of sensibility isn't even mentioned when people judge AI art.
    The premise of this book, obviously, was not "a history of tomorrow" but "lets churn out a follow-up to Sapiens asap and reuse some old material to fill it fast". But i learned about the Cambridge Declaration of Consciousness and i should say that maybe i wasn’t really the targeted audience for this book, that is obviously aimed at people who are not very familiar with tech-developments.
    Not sure if this justifies for two stars, but i also like Harari as a person, so there you go.

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