Booksbooksbooks 03/2023
In which i read a lot.
For reasons, i didn’t read as much as i wanted in the past few months, but i still managed to finish my Goodreads Challange early this year, having read 50 books as of yet. Since the last post in mid August, i only read 8 books in three months, but here they are nevertheless, in chronological order of my reading.
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Andreas Eschbach - Der schlauste Mann der Welt (eng. The smartest man in the world) ★☆☆☆☆
Never read a book with such a whiny, stupid, entitled prick as protagonist. The guy actually believes traveling around the world accounts to doing nothing and claims to be so proud of his lazyness, all while he's doing something all the time. I mean i get it, the books wants to be provocative and sell you some shallow buddhist meditative philosophical insights while describing a life lived in luxury hotels and exotic islands, while also oh so ironically dunking on the decadent lifestyle of the rich and the famous, because, after all, the guy scammed his money by accident and sheer luck so he's entitled to be not one of them. A whiny little bitch, that's what this guy is. His philosophical fluff is nothing but a cheap excuse for never having any idea about how to actually enjoy things and, central to buddhism, actually erase his ego and live in the present.
You could take such a story featuring such a shallow, whiny main character from a better writer who's not afraid to deconstruct his protagonist and shred him to pieces, showing you the flesh and bones of what such a clown is really made of. But instead, Eschbach smears pretentious prose all over the place, trying to make his hollow worldview sound elaborate, better than the rest, all while painting him as nothing more than a whimsy it is what it is, shruggie type of guy and it just makes the author himself sound arrogant.
It doesn't help, then, that the book promises over two hundred pages to make the main character kill himself -- and then he doesn't do it, smiling all the way to the bank. Fuck this book.
C.C.W. Taylor - Socrates: A Very Short Introduction ★★★★☆
Good short introduction to the "ideal philosopher", as Plato put it. Taylor analyzes the dialogues written by Socrates' disciples on the search for the "historical Socrates" and later describes how medieval and modern philosophy interpreted him, focussing on Kierkegaard and Nietzsche.
Arkadi and Boris Strugatzki - Stalker ★★★★☆
My first Strugatzky and surely not the last one. 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. Still, the scifi elements are very outdated today, but their mechanist aesthetics fit the overall gritty tone. Pretty good, absolutely deserves to be ranked as a classic of scifi literature.
Andrea Wulf - Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self (dt. Fabelhafte Rebellen: Die frühen Romantiker und die Erfindung des Ich) ★★★★★
A beautifully written history of the early romantics, most importantly Goethe, Schiller, Fichte, Schelling, the Schlegels, the Humboldts, Novalis and Hegel, in their formative years from the late 18th to early 19th century.
Wulf greatly intertwines historical facts with personal stories and gossip and the emerging philosophical thinking that emerged from this small circle of friends who all lived together for ten years or so in the small city of Jena, where they drank, sang, made love, and developed new ideas about the self and the role of humans in nature. 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.
I also very much liked that this was clearly structured, telling the story of these friends in chronological chapters revolving around the events of world history. While the french revolution and Napoleons wars stay on the margin, they are always present, giving the book a clear narrative. It's a detailed retelling of the foundational years of modern western philosophy sourced from hundreds and hundreds of letters, painstakingly woven into a rich, colorful story which makes these first free spirits come to live.
In short: I had a blast reading this, and if this stuff is up your alley, so will you.
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.
It shines when it manages to marry the titular seriousness and lightheartedness, when he tells the story of cabaret artist Werner Finck, who was incarnated by the Nazis and subjected them to his charming and biting political humor anyways. But towards the end of the book, Hackes tone often takes that of a self help guy, showering you with thoughts on how to lead the good life. But he also tells the story of John Cleeses eulogy at Graham Chapmans funeral, which you can find on the Youtubes, and that's always a plus.
It's a nice book, but it could've been better, if he'd taken his subject a bit more, yes: seriously.
Adrian Tchaikovsky - Shards of Earth (dt. Die Scherben der Erde) ★★★★☆
My second Tchaikovsky after Children of Time. This on being more of a full fledged space adventure with a giant interdimensional species of architects attacking planets of human colonies and a rogue gang of space pirates hunting artifacts to fight them. Along the way, dozens of fractions and aliens.
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. Therefore, we get space amazons, swarming insect in robot scaffolding, weird crab pilots with advertising displays on their limbs, crystaline moon-sized artists destroying planets, subspace-traveling and mind-jumping into alien consciousnesses, all in a great, colorful space opera. What's not to like.
Anthony McCarten - Going Zero (dt. Going Zero) ★★★☆☆
In the near future, a big tech company together with the CIA launches a secret game in which ten participants have to go off the grid and not being captured by their spooks and hackers, for the price of three million bucks.
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. Unfortunately so i have to say, because the story is fast paced and gripping, the main character is interesting and the book has a pretty good twist after the second act which actually did impress me for the surprise.
But also, the main villain stays a pretty shallow caricature, being an amalgan of Zuckerberg and Musk, this guy so openly devotes himself to surveillance fascist beliefs with zero doubts that it's simply not very believable, which makes this book and entertaining, but ultimately shallow read.
Peter Schäfer - Kurze Geschichte des Antisemitismus (eng. A short history of Antisemitism) ★★★★★
For obvious reasons, i bought books about the history of antisemitism, the history of Israel and the history of Palestine, because while i'm not entirely clueless about the conflict in Gaza, i never got into the topic and i finally wanted to get at least some real sense of what's going on.
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.
In the first half he takes his time to show in detail, how inter- and intrareligious theological conflicts got mixed up with racist ressentiment and the power of roman laws to form a deadly amalgam for jews, making the point that the roots of antisemitism lie in pre-christian history and antijudean christian foundations. He goes on to explain how this deadly meme spread throughout the middle ages in various forms with the support of the church and how institutions of power used antisemitism for their own gain, for example, when laws forbid jews to participate in the economy leaving them only financial services to make a living, while the ruling class profited from those services all the while those laws furthered the spread of prejudice, conspirational thinking and racism, which then was used as a weapon to get rid of their debt.
The book really made me understand more clearly the historically rooted spiral of exploitation and violence jews are caught in and why antisemitism is its own form of discrimination with elements of racism, economic exploitation and religiously motivated exclusion which throughout thousands of years of history, again and again, aggravated into violent pogroms and the cruel murder of thousands of people, culminating in the Shoa, the ultimate industrialzed genocide of millions.
A good, maybe very good book on a timely topic that, unfortunately and for reasons it describes in detail, never ceases to be relevant.
btw. i'm reading Octavia Buttler - Lilith's Brood it has a very novel description of organic (tech) and sexuality for the most alien aliens presented.
Isn't the Stalker book actually "Picknick am Wegesrand"?
also, love the crystaline moon-sized artists destroying planets description, so much artistic potential:)