Booksbooksbooks 04/2024
Tiny reviews for Three Body Problem, The Future, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Termination Shock, three Reacher-novels and many more.
Silvia Ferrara - Der Sprung: Eine Reise zu den Anfängen des Denkens in der Steinzeit (eng. The Jump: A trip to the beginnings of thinking in the stone age) ★★
Ferrara tries to answer the question, why early humans painted cave walls 50000 years ago, and she tries to do that by analyzing the paintings themselves. An art analytical take on an unanswerable question, and theories are legion, just as the likely correct answers (some where painted as ritualistic shamanic stuff, others for fun, others as an exercise, others as a hunting plan, mnemonic devices, accounting, teaching tools, etc etc, and all of those crossing over each other for thousands and thousands of years). To answer the why-question from an art analytical perspective is not an easy endeavour, and while this is an interesting book in itself (i'm a sucker for cave paintings, anthropology, and the history of writing systems), i think she largely fails due to her oftentimes confusing writing style that, in lack of a scientific proven explanation of something, falls back into an ornamental style that wants to put emphasis on the mystery of cave paintings. She's more occupied writing about her whizzy crazy associations and some random memories with cave art than writing a good, structured book on the history of the topic. This may work for some, but not for me. I still learned some nice details though, but not enough to give this more than 2 stars.
Lee Child - Im Visier (Reacher 19: Personal) ★★★ / Keine Kompromisse (Reacher 20: Make Me) ★★★ / Der Bluthund (Reacher 22: The Midgnight Line) ★★
On my quest to read all Reacher-novels, i'm now at 11 of 25, and these three are, while entertaining, not among the best in the series. All of these are recent novels, and i miss some of the qualities of the older ones -- the sparse prose, the ultra-detailed action sequences, Reachers wit and cleverness. These are still entertaining thriller novels, but they lack a bit of the punch of the first ones.
Jack Finney - Die Körperfresser kommen (eng. Invasion of the Body Snatchers) ★★★
I love all the Bodysnatchers-adaptions (except the Nicole Kidman-stinker from 2006 or so) and i rewatched all of them recently, when i figured: You know what, why not read the novel? So i did, all the elements are there, and the blankness, emptyness, bare of any identity markers of those not-dead-because-never-alive body grown out of alien seeds keep on being a nice universal meta-metaphor for any societal alienation, even in a dated scifi novel from the 50s. Bodysnatchers when it was written was a metaphor for the red scare, about "neighbors turning into communists", in the seventies, it was a metaphor for the sexual revolution, where "kids turned into weird excessive sexmaniacs", in the 90s Ferrara tried to turn it into a metaphor for american military culture, and in the 00s it was turned into a metaphor for post 9/11 paranoia. It's a universal story about paranoia in the face of rampant alienation, where our friends and neighbors suddenly turn into something else. Which beggs the question: Where is the social media-era version of the story? Where's the NPC-Bodysnatchers, or the Deepfake Bodysnatchers? Especially the NPC-meme basically is the very same story: Everybody is a non playing character, an empty hull of a human, parrotting empty phrases, except me and my peers, we are real humans. The digital age is a deeply paranoid age, and all the users might be alien plants in the heads of some conspirational 4chan anons. It's a story of our age, and a new interpretation is begging to be written.
Don Winslow - City on Fire / City of Dreams (Danny Ryan #1&2) ★★★★
I wanted to read other thrillers than Reacher and boy did Winslow get me hooked. It's the story of italian and irish mobs going to war in Providence, Rhode Island, and while the story itself is not very surprising, it's Winslows style that just sucks you in. I paced through City on Fire, which so much reminded me of Martin Scorseses Goodfellas, that i constantly read it in the narrating voice of Joe Pesci. You know you read a good thriller when you have the voice of effing Joe Pesci in your head.
Herfried Münkler - Welt in Aufruhr: Die Ordnung der Mächte im 21. Jahrhundert (eng. World in Turmoil: World Orders in the 21st Century) ★★★★
Herfried Münkler is a world reknowned political scientist at the Berlin Humboldt University, and in this book, he describes how the old dynamic of the cold war with 2 global main actors made place to a more chaotic world (in which we live now) that slowly evolves, according to Münkler, to a pentarchy of five global powers (US, EU, China, Russia and India) which in the coming decades, under certain circumstances, may lead to a new stable configuration of global powers providing a stable model for world peace. If you're, like me, not overly interested in politics, but still want to know how the larger picture is evolving internationally, this a good book to read about geopolitics in the 21st century.
Naomi Alderman - The Future ★★★
I friggin loved Aldermans The Gift, so picking this up was a nobrainer, and i was somewhat disappointed. The Future is a book about a billionaire class building bunkers while the world goes to shit, with some rebels planning to get rid of them in a pretty original way. The book itself is shattered into a million bits: climate, ai, internet outrage and socmed, pandemics, hong kong riots, preppers and survivalism, religious cults, anarcho capitalism and accelerationism, Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos, all told in nonchronological vignettes, mostly from the perspective of the protagonist. A collage of the titular future made with thousands of bits from the present. What sounds pretty cool is a bit dumbed down by the simplistic ending, which is still pretty entertaining as a microstory in the style of Lord of the Rings with mech suits on an abandoned island. An entertaining novel let down by an ending that was too simplistic and naive for my taste.
Neal Stephenson - Termination Shock ★★★
A thousand page doorstopper by Neal "Metaverse" Stephenson about the climate crisis, a slow meandering wide ranging novel showing a detailed panoramic view of a world circa 2040ish, in which heatwaves caused by climate change are rampant and a billionaire decides to just fire sulfur into the sky with a giant cannon to geoengineer our atmosphere. I loved how Stephenson incorporates as diverse topics as climate change, modern aristocracy, indian martial arts and political conflict into one coherent storyline -- but i also found it somewhat pointless. Stephenson has surprising little to say about a climate change that is largely induced by economic ideologies, and simply turns dealing with the consequences into an entertaining scifi thriller. It's a good read, and i love many of the details like the indian-chinese stick-fights at the border that clearly was inspired by this Youtube-clip, but i missed some larger message about the mallaise we're in. But maybe the point is: Billionaires gonna do whatever they want, they'll sound like Jurassic Parks John Hammond while doing it and there's not much we can do about it. Which is a bit underwhelming.
Friederike Otto - Klimaungerechtigkeit: Was die Klimakatastrophe mit Kapitalismus, Rassismus und Sexismus zu tun hat (eng. Climate Injustice: What the climate crisis has to do with capitalism, racism and sexism) ★★★★
Friederike Otto is one of Time Magazines 100 most influential people in 2021 and a leading climate researcher who contributed to attribution science, that is: The science of finding out, how much of a hurricane, flooding or heatwave can be attributed to anthropogenic climate change. I picked this up because i am one of those guys who, while seeing that climate does indeed lead to injustices, i do think that justice issues take a second row to what is largely a physics based planetary issue, which needs tons of international regulations and engineering. However, I find myself convinced by her arguments. A better title for the book would have been "Climate Adaption Injustice", because that's what it's about: How humanity adapts to climate change and the (historical) injustices leading to adaptive disadvantages in the global south. It is clear to me that dire consequences of climate change are already locked in — economic, ecological, not to speak of the disruptions caused by migration and international conflict --, and if that's clear we need a clear analysis of the status quo, to figure how to deal with those consequences in a fair way on a global level. Friederike Ottos short book provides that analysis.
Anders Levermann - Die Faltung der Welt (eng. Folding the World) ★★★
Anders Levermann is a researcher of complex systems at the Potsdam-Institute for Climate Research and his book wants to provide an alternate narrative for green growth and decoupling of emissions from economic growth. Basically it's about "horizontal growth", while classic economic development would be "vertical growth". He proposes an "inside growth", that goes into diversifying products and recycling, not the extractive "bigger, bolder, higher". I pretty much agree with him on most of his points, but all of this is not very new -- he simply uses mathematics as a metaphor for regulation and writes about how the paradigm of "endless growth" can exist in a limited system.
Max Barry - Die 22 Tode der Madison May (eng. The 22 Murders of Madison May) ★
Scifi-novel about a guy hopping parallel universes to find the perfect version of an aspiring actress, only to find subpar Madison Mays and killing them. What sounds intriguing comes around as weirdly phrased (the book is somehow full of eggs) and reads like a sitcom sometimes. It features clichéd and flat characters, boring twists, shallow dialogue without any depth, it's not thrilling enough to be a thriller, not scifi enough to be scifi, its a boring Jennifer Aniston movie with clichéd genre elements, and the more interesting parts (a mysterious organization of people traveling through parallel universes and using "anchors", objects like a lock of hair, to make sure some stuff and people exist in the target universe) stay largely unexplored. Waste of time.
Samuel W. Gailey - Die Schuld (eng. The Guilt We Carry) ★★★
A young woman who finds her dead stripclub-owner boss dead in her bed and a bag full of dollars. Ofcourse, she takes the money and runs. During her escape, she examines her past and her own guilt, and learns to deal with the consequences. A good little pulp crime novel that could've been more, but stays within the trodden path of it's story, which isn't a bad thing at all.
Liu Cixin - Die Drei Sonnen (eng. The Three-Body Problem) ★★★★
I read this three weeks before the Netflix-series came out (which i still haven't seen) because i wanted to know what the fuzz is about. It's a good book, maybe great sometimes, and i loved some of the more bonkers ideas about how life may exist on a planet in an unstable orbit in a three star system, and The parts about the cultural revolution and it's implications were daring and damn interesting, but i expected a bit more from it, given the hype. However, the second book already sits on my bookshelf, and i'll read all parts.