IT books
Martin Kleppmann “Designing Data-Intensive Applications: The Big Ideas Behind Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Systems”
The book on persisting data in a distributed world, a tour de force that explains the ideas and tradeoffs behing the concepts involved.
Verdict: must read
Jiawei Han, Micheline Kamber, Jian Pei “Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques”
An excellent data science / data mining book that covers the essential concepts and approaches to discover patterns in data. There’s a new edition and the book ages well, because it focues on concepts.
Verdict: must read
Jason McDonald “Dead Simple Python”
A sneaky understatement: this goes from zero to very advanced and is an excellent book for the seasoned Python developer as well. This book was published in late 2022, but it is written in a way that it’ll age really well. Get it!
Verdict: must read
English-language books
Karin Smirnoff “The Girl in the Eagle’s Talons”
Another instalment in the late Stieg Larsson’s series about Lisbeth Salander, an enigmatic Swedish woman which I would losely describe as a grown-up goth version of Pippi Longstocking who has turned all grumpy and is surrounded by social justice warriors who fight for the right cause and solve a crime while doing so. This time they are fighting environmental destruction and domestic violence. The story is meandering and full of clearly delineated good and bad guys with hard-to-believe traits. It’s still a page turner if you liked any other book of the series.
Verdict: may read
Michael Reid “Spain: The Trials and Triumphs of a Modern European Country”
Hands down the best book on contemporary Spain, its society and politics.
Verdict: must read
Antony Beevor “The Spanish Civil War”
There are many books on the Spanish Civil War, only a tiny amount is impartial though. Beevor recounts the trajectory of the war neutrally, explains the lead-up to the war, tactics and politics of the different phases of the war, and its aftermath. A timeless classic.
Verdict: must read
Patricia Highsmith “Strangers on a Train”
A thriller from 1950 that hasn’t lost punch: two young men meet on a train and discuss the perfect murder and the ensuing avalanche slowly takes off…
Verdict: must read
Michael Palin “North Korea Journal”
This is the companion book to Palin’s travel documentary from 2018: the book is short, every day is given its own chapter of a few pages each. Despite this and the obvious difficulties to travel to and in North Korea, Palin manages to convey a lot of empathy towards his “travel guides” and the country.
Verdict: interesting read
Ken Follett “Eye of the needle”
I recently found this book in an old crate: it’s a spy/crime novel set before D-Day and a Germany uberspy threatens to inform the German secret service that the First United States Army Group is merely a sham. He needs to leave Great Britain in the north-east with a submarine, kills a lot of people, and ultimately fails. Full of suspense and interesting characters.
Verdict: interesting read
Daniel Knowles “Carmageddon - How Cars Make Life Worse and What to Do About It”
I share the author’s opinion on cars and I thoroughly enjoyed the 200-page anti-car sermon. Knowles correctly points that apart from combustion engines cooking the planet, cars waste space, accidents impair or kill people and they cause noise. Walking and cycling are healthy and shorter commutes gift you more time every day. Yet, I think he vastly underestimates how many people really want to live the suburban lifestyle, my impression - unlike the author’s - is that the “lust for cars” is only getting bigger.
Verdict: must read
Katja Hoyer “Beyond the Wall”
Hoyer is an East-German historian who has been living in the UK for a couple of years and wrote this book about her native country geared towards the English-speaking world - where it received more positive reviews than in Germany. The author interweaves anecdotes and historical events and makes the world’s grayest country look a bit more colourful - nothing beats the drab Mutti Merkel’s craving for blue jeans - and achieves one of her stated goals (“a place far more dynamic than the Cold War caricature often painted in the West”). I don’t buy into the tacit suggestion that East German culture has been actively ignored - e. g. have a look at “their TV station” which is uninteresting to anyone not East German - but this book may be pave the way to more books on the GDR that is neither dismissive nor overly nostalgic.
Verdict: must read
Fabrizio Fenghi “It Will Be Fun and Terrifying”
The book is subtitled “Nationalism and Protest in Post-Soviet Russia” and its two main protagonists are Eduard Limonov and Aleksandr Dugin, two of the co-founders of the National Bolshevik Party. Fenghi shows how these two fringe people managed to blend socialism and fascism into their own ideology, achieve considerable success in the post-Soviet political space and then how Dugin managed to move into the Russian political mainstream with the Eurasia Movement and supposedly wield a lot of influence over Putin. This is an intellectual book and not easy to read, it is essential to understand this fascinating and unreal topic.
Verdict: must read
Serhii Plokhy “The Russo-Ukrainian War”
This book was released in May 2023 with the war raging at full scale. It consists of two parts: the lead-up the war which is very well-explained, the invasion of the [Little green men](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_green_men_(Russo-Ukrainian_War) which has been widely ignored in the West. Plokhy also explains how fundamental the Ukrainian SSR was in the Soviet Union and the role of 1991 Ukrainian independence referendum in its break-up. The second part is about the actual war itself and it feels a bit cobbled together, not surprising because we don’t really know yet how things will end. I’m sure there will a compelling second edition, hopefully soon.
Verdict: must read
Juliane Fürst “Flowers through concrete”
The author is a historian and recounts the history of Soviet hippies with tangible empathy. She dug through personal and official archives - the Russian official ones are not accessible for obvious reasons - for more than a decade and almost brings to life her subjects and the Soviet society and its morale as a backdrop. Subculture research in the Soviet Union - except for some tidbits of punk - is almost inaccessible for me because I don’t speak any Russian, but the book seems very well-researched and the writing good which papers over the editing which feels a bit sloppy: an academic book which you must read if you are interested in subculture or Soviet history.
Verdict: must read
Serhii Plokhy “The Last Empire”
Plokhy recounts the last months of the Soviet Union starting with the August coup via the dissolution on the 8th December 1991, when the leaders of the Slavic republics decided to leave the union, to the 25th of December 1991 when Gorbachev resigned with a a televised speech. The author sheds light on the struggle between Gorbachev and Yeltsin and then-regional leaders like Leonid Kravchuk or Nursultan Nazarbayev, how the USA led president George Bush tried to stay on top of things, and how the world’s then largest empire would disappear more or less peacefully. This book also helps to understand the ethnic conflicts and wars that have flared up since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Verdict: must read
Doug Johnstone “Black hearts”
I read most of Johnstone’s books and the Skelf family series are unfortunately not among my favorites: The Skelfs are a family of grandmother, mother, and daughter who run a funeral business and moonlight as sleuths. This crime novel has too many plots and characters to keep track of - so despite Johnstone’s excellent writing it was a bit of a dull read.
Verdict: may read
Arthur Chichester “The burning edge - Travels through an irradiated Belarus”
Arthur Chichester - his more famous name is Bald and Bankrupt - visited Belarus, especially the nowadays deserted area that was heavily irradiated after the Chernobyl disaster. The book is very much like Bald’s videos: he knows Russian and he adds some background information about the country. I guess he would word his assessment of “Batska” a bit differently today. If you enjoy Bald and have two spare hours - read this book!
Verdict: interesting read
Adam Hochschild “American Midnight”
A left-wing historian writes about the First Red Scare and covers the years from 1917 to 1921. The author shows how enthusiasm for war and nationalism led to a wide-spread fear of left-wing movements and at the end he also draws some parallels to the Trump presidency. It’s not a dry history book rattling down the facts, it rather tries to recount the fates of “normal people”. Personally I know too little about that period in the USA, so I would have done better with an introduction.
Verdict: interesting read
Jarvis Cocker “Good Pop, Bad Pop”
Jarvis Cocker cleans up his attic and needs to decide whether to keep or bin things he hasn’t seen in years. Things turn into memories of adolescence, setting up a pop band, school, moving out and a lot more. Must read if you are even only remotely into Pulp or britpop.
Verdict: must read
Ira levin “The Boys from Brazil”
Josef Mengele tries to take over the world in 70ies, but Yakov Liebermann (very reminiscent) of Simon Wiesenthal prevents that. The book is off to a thrilling start, but fizzles out towards the end, especially because it is somewhat amusing to see how they imagined the future would be. I found this book in my parents’ attic and I bet it must have been an exciting read back then. The plot is great and it’s still a quick read…
Verdict: interesting read
Chris Miller “Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology”
The history of the semiconductor industry in one book, readable and understandable, yet not too superficial. It points out how chip technology was essential in winning the cold war and retain American/Western supremacy. It also explains how complex chip production is, what Moore’s law’s exponential growth means in real life, and the many choke points that exist. It provides for a solid understanding of what US industrial policy has looked liked since Trump and what it quite likely will look like in the years to come.
Verdict: must read
Ada Ferrer “Cuba: An American History”
The author itself says it: a book on the history of Cuba from a Howard Zinn perspective. The author, a professor of history, was born in Cuba, emigrated to the USA as a toddler, and returned to Cuba many times. She recounts Cuban history from a people’s perspective and intertwines it in a revealing manner with US-American history, she also treads a fine line between Cuban, American, Cuban-American and (US) Democratic perspective and manages to be sensible there. A thoroughly enjoyable and enlightening read.
Verdict: must read
M. Mitchell Waldrop “The Dream Machine”
A fantastic book on the history of computing intertwined with the biography of J. C. R. Licklider, one of its early visionaries who was seminal for how we interact with computers, software, networking, and thus today’s internet. This is quite a tome, but an excellent and compelling read.
Verdict: must read
Serhii Plokhy “The Man with the Poison Gun: A Cold War Spy Story”
Plokhy, a professor of Ukrainian history at Harvard university, chronicles the life of Bogdan Stashinsky, a Soviet spy of Ukrainian descent. In the 51950s0ies he killed two leaders of the Ukrainian nationalist movement, one of which was Stepan Bandera, with an umbrella that was squirting cyanide. He later married an East-German woman who convinced him to defect to West-Berlin, on the night before the Wall was built, was put to trial and sentenced to jail in West-Germany. He disappears after having been released from prison. Plokhy’s writing is captivating, the story itself is so good it makes a James Bond movie look mundane.
Verdict: must read
Victoria Smolkin “A Sacred Space is never empty”
One of the Soviet Union’s goals on the path to reach communism was to do away with religion through the scientific foundations of their new belief. This book chronicles the different approaches that were taken over the roughly 70 years of Soviet rule: suppression by militant atheists, tacit acceptance, collaboration against an external enemy to ersatz rites. 1000 years of the Christianization of Kievan Rusʹ Gorbachev officially met the then head of the Orthodox church, much to almost everyone’s surprise. An excellent read and I would much appreciate a follow-up on the Yeltsin and Putin years.
Verdict: must read
Tim Marshall “The Power of Geography”
9 countries and how their history was shaped by their geography, entertaining reads of half an hour each. The book ends with how the upcoming space race may end up and how geography may shape that. Read it soon (till June 2023), this book won’t age well.
Verdict: worth a read
Zakhar Prilepin “Sankya”
Sasha is a young member of the “SS Party”, cheeky acronym for Sojus Sosidajuschtschich, who fight against Westernization, globalization, and the powers that be. The author romps through various graphical acts of violence in Moscow, Riga and Sasha’s native Nizhni Novgorod. Their economic ideas are left-leaning, their social ideas right-leaning, e. g. Women play second fiddle both in the party and in Sasha’s life. Sounds familiar? Everything seems to be modeled after the National Bolshevik Party and it turns out that the author was a long-time of said party, so the novel might be quite autobiographic, although all involved parties deny that. Today’s Prilepin thinks that Putin is a wuss.
The book was published in 2006 and translated to German in 2012 and to English in 2014. Its German publisher is left-leaning and intellectual and it received raving reviews back then, which is next-to impossible to understand with today’s moral compass.
Verdict: skip
German-language books
Friedrich Ani “Bullauge”
Ein Polizist, der auf einem Auge blind geworden ist, und eine Frau, die das mutmaßlich auf einer Demonstration verursacht hat, treffen sich und “verwickeln” sich. Die Frau stirbt, das Ende des Krimis ist überraschend. Das Buch ist sehr atmosphärisch, mehr Roman als Krimi.
Urteil: lesenswert
Wolfgang Schorlau “Falsche Freunde”
Kommissar Morello ist immer noch unglücklich in Venedig und ermittelt, weil ein allgemein unbeliebter Steuerberater erschlagen wurde. Morello gerät gegen seinen Willen in den venezianischen Sumpf, wo er doch viel lieber im sizilianischen Sumpf ermitteln würde. Wie üblich gewinnt bei Schorlau aber das Gute.
Urteil: sehr lesenswert
Wolfgang Schorlau “Der Tintenfischer”
Ein Flüchtling wirft sich von einer Venediger Brücke und wird gerade so von Kommissar Morello und seiner Mitarbeiterin Klotze gerettet. Sie geraten in einen Studel von sizilianischer und nigeranischer Mafia, am Ende gewinnt das moralisch Gute. Mir gefällt der Stuttgarter Ermittler Dengler besser, Stuttgart wird einfach seltener als Handlungsort verwendet.
Urteil: sehr lesenswert
Jörg Thadeusz “Steinhammer”
Thadeusz lässt das Ruhrgebiet der 50er Jahre wiederauferstehen: drei Jugendliche, die Armut und Kriegsfolgen hinter sich lassen wollen, der talentierteste von ihnen wird Künstler in Düsseldorf. Ich habe mich quasi in schwarz-weiß durch das NRW dieser Zeit gehen sehen.
Urteil: sehr lesenswert
Moritz Hürtgen “Der Boulevard des Schreckens”
Ein satirischer Roman über Journalismus in 2022, in dem Volontäre sich über Jahre beweisen müssen und hier erst zweitklassige Künstler interviewen sollen, die in einem piefigen Vorort sterben, bevor das sowieso gefälschte Interview veröffentlicht werden konnte. Gut zu lesen und ganz witzig.
Urteil: lesenswert
Volker Kutscher “Transatlantik. Gereon Raths neunter Fall.”
Das neunte Buch der Gereon-Rath-Serie - verfilmt in Babylon Berlin - spielt im Berlin und New York von 1937 und verwebt die bereits bekannten Charaktere weiter. Ich habe natürlich längst den Überblick verloren, aber der Autor frischt die Erinnerung an Personen und Ereignisse gut wieder auf. Das Buch ist spannend und ich habe die knapp 600 Seiten an einem Wochenende “lesen müssen”.
Urteil: sehr lesenswert
Herfried Münkler “Marx, Wagner, Nietzsche. Welt im Umbruch.”
Der Doyen der deutschen Historiker setzt drei prägende Figuren der deutschen (Geistes-)Geschichte in Beziehung zueinander: Das Buch ist exzellent geschrieben, regelrecht “spannend”, und beschreibt auf circa 700 Seiten Leben und Wirken von Karl Marx, Richard Wagner und Friedrich Nietzsche.
Urteil: sehr lesenswert
Jens Bisky “Berlin - Biographie einer großen Stadt”
Knapp 800 Jahre Geschichte in etwa ähnlich vielen Seiten unterbringen ist eine große Herausforderung. Ich habe mich zum guten Teil durch das Buch gequält: es ist zu oft entweder aus Fanboy- oder Bildungsbürger-Perspektive geschrieben und damit wirkt es weder wissenschaftlich noch unterhaltend.
Urteil: querlesen
Spanish-language books
Fernando Castiñeiras “El plan es no tener plan. Viaje sin rumbo por Sudamérica.”
A diary of a backpacker’s 6-month long trip through South America, a very entertaining book which has whetted my appetite to visit the countries I have not yet been to.
Verdict: worth reading
Fernando García De Cortázar & José Manuel González Vesga “Breve historia de España”
Little surprise that this is the best-selling book on Spanish history. The book is anything but brief, I was looking at a tome of 700 densely-printed pages, but well-written, well-researched, and well-structured. It’s not only linear history, it’s not only chaps and maps, it tries to explain the trajectory of Spanish history. This is why I find the later chapters more interesting, so it’s a bit of a let-down that this book ends in 2017 (as stated on the cover) with the Catalan independence movement on the rise and having eclipsed the Basque independence movement. I will get the next edition to understand the last couple of years.
Verdict: must read.
Leonardo Padura “Personas decentes”
A Mario Conde crime novel set in 2016 that intertwines a murder of a government official, Obama and the Rolling Stones in Cuba, and a historic murder case. The elderly Conde, an ex police-man, has gotten wise and reflexive and helps the police that is apparently stretched thin. The Cuban society as a backdrop for this story with its limitations and deprivations comes to life and I wish I knew a bit more about Cuban history. A good, albeit long book.
Verdict: worth reading
Arturo Pérez-Reverte “Sidi”
A “rewrite” of sorts of the Spanish national epic, brought much closer to reality and a new life by Pérez-Reverte’s skillful writing. I enjoyed reading the booking even though I am neither a fan of historical novels nor of medieval novels.
Verdict: worth reading
Aroa Moreno Duran “La hija del comunista”
A girl grows up in the sixties in East Berlin, she’s the daughter of Spanish communists who ended up exiled in the GDR - something which actually really happened to a couple of hundred people. She’s torn between communism, her Spanish heritage, and puberty and flees to West Germany at some point. I like the setup of the story a lot and I found the first two thirds of the book very convincing, the last third in West Germany and the inevitable fall of the Wall felt a bit underwhelming.
Verdict: worth reading
Luis Landero “Lluvia fina”
An excellent novel that recounts the horrors of a broken family from the point of view of the brother’s married woman. With every chapter you learn more ugly details about the characters involved - until the unhappy end.
Verdict: must read