Reading

I enjoy reading a lot, both fiction and non-fiction titles. Generally, I try to avoid translations, so I do a most of my reading in English. As I speak only English and German, I sometimes do have to rely on translations. In that case, I do not much care whether the text is in English or German. I will just read whichever I can get my hands on.

Out of all the books listed below, the only one that I have not, so far, read in the original is The Lord of the Rings which I certainly plan to do.

Fiction

Generally, I enjoy fantasy, science fiction, and, more generally, speculative fiction. A subset I particularly like is rational fiction, i.e. fiction where nothing happens just for the sake of the story. No rule of cool. People do things because they have good reasons to do them, or at least the genuinely believe they do.

Works I enjoyed include:

• Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings (German translation), The Hobbit: Both great examples of high fantasy.

• Terry Pratchett's Discworld series, save the last two books. Excellent fantasy series, funny throughout, sometimes very much so.

• Nearly every book written by Neal Stephenson, among others Snow Crash, The Diamond Age, Cryptonomicon, The Baroque Cycle, Anathem, REAMDE, Seveneves, The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O.

• Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a great Pythonesque science fantasy series. Lots of space travel, many unexpected turns, a lot of it follows the rule of cool. Normally, this would probably annoy me, but as it can be read as a satirical take on science fiction concepts, I'm quite OK with it.

• Connie Willis' gripping Oxford Time Travel series, a series that definitely earned each and every one of its awards: The four books all received the Hugo Award for Best Novel, the Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel, three received Nebula Award for Best Novel and the other one was nominated for it.

  Truly excellent time travel stories. I had trouble putting these books down. I literally read through an entire night to finish Blackout.

• James S. A. Corey's exceptional The Expanse series (up to and including Nemesis games). Also very gripping. Lots of politics, and no one is just evil. People do bad things because, in their mind, it is the right thing to do. The bad people are not just deranged monsters that are evil for evil's sake.

• Georg R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, a fantasy series that actually is a lot like what I just wrote about The Expanse. Lots of brutality, as is to be expected in a pseudo-medieval society, central characters, even protagonists, die.

• Greg Egan's Diaspora and The Clockwork Rocket for very different science fiction.

• Ursula K. le Guin's The Lathe of Heaven, a great science fiction story, and The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, not a story at all, just the description of a society, but no less interesting.

• Deborah Harkness' All Souls Trilogy, a suspenseful fantasy series about witches, vampires, and daemons.

• Another excellent series, Magic 2.0 by Scott Meyer, explains how magic works. It has some science fiction component to it. Quite a good example of why there is a category called "speculative fiction".

• Ringworld by Larry Niven is also a classic, and rightly so. Not every aspect is great, but certainly it plays with a number of very interesting concepts.

• Today more relevant than ever, and certainly a good book: 1984 by George Orwell.

• Another modern classic: J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series, and, to me even more enjoyable, Eliezer Yudkowsky's Harry Potter fan fiction Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, a rationalist take on the series, as well as a variety of meta-fan fiction.

• Daniel Suarez's Daemon two-part novel, a gripping techno-thriller. Well researched, lots of things that could happend today or in the very near future.

• The Martian and Artemis by Andy Weir, both great science fiction novels. The Martian is like the problem solving scene in Apollo 13, but novel length. OK, not exactly. The protagonist has to solve lots and lots of problems, not just one. It is certainly a work of hard science fiction. Yes, there is one big, and a few minor things that would not work as described but they are there to set up the story, more than anything else. No "OK, I have this really hard problem. Oh look, there's a [technobabble]! Done."

  It has a (relatively) near-future setting, none of the technologies described are inherently unrealistic, nor are they used in unrealistic ways.

  Artemis has a somewhat similar feel to it, though the setting is a very different near-future one.

• Charles Stross:

  • Accelerando
  • Ancient of Days
  • Halting State
  • The Atrocity Archives
  • The Merchant Princes series (books 1–3)

• Alexander Wales' great rationalist fan fiction:

  • A Bluer Shade of White: Frozen
  • Branches on the Tree of Time: Terminator
  • The Metropolitan Man: Superman

• Lawrence Watt-Evans: The Ethshar series, parts one through four. When reading the first book, The Misenchanted Sword, I started out a bit bored, but in the end, it was pretty great. Knowing what to expect, I devoured With a Single Spell and was not disappointed.

  It seems, generally, that Watt-Evans picks a single idea and then runs with it. In addition to these books being full of excitement, adventure, magic, etc., they ask are explorations of these ideas. For instance, With a Single Spell features a wizard who only ever learns how to perform a single spell. Then, whenever he has to solve a problem, he has to figure out a way to make do with this one spell, and whatever non-magic means available to him. In a way, it is similar to Weir's The Martian, in that it revolves around a protagonist in problem solving mode.

  Not what you might find in a typical fantasy books: a powerful wizard facing problems, for each of which a new spell might be introduced, whatever necessary to solve the problem. This is about wizard with very little at his disposal, who has to rely on his ingenuity and creative problem solving skills.

  The magic system in the Ethshar series is very much Hard Magic, i.e. it strictly follows a set of rules that limit how magic can be used. The system may be weird to us, but it is internally consistent, and it always applies.

• Sam Hughes' Ra, like Magic 2.0 a techno-fantasy tale, which also has an actual explanation for why magic exists. At times, the story can be a bit hard to follow, feeling like you just missed a page, or even a chapter.

• Robert Reed: A Billion Eves is a great novella.

• Walter Moers' Die 13½ Leben des Käpt'n Blaubär and Ensel und Krete: Ein Märchen aus Zamonien

• Frank Schätzing: Der Schwarm, a very well researched, not to mention gripping, thriller. So well researched, in fact, that Schätzing needed just one year to write the non-fiction Nachrichten aus einem Unbekannten Universum using this research.

• Eliezer Yudkowsky:

  • Dark Lord's Answer, a humorous speculative fiction tale

  • Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, great Harry Potter fan fiction. First of all, it is massive even though it is "just" fan fiction, it is certainly book sized. It is longer than The Lord of the Rings and roughly half as long as Rowling's entire Harry Potter series.

    Not only is it a new take on the Harry Potter story, mostly Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, it also goes far beyond the original in many aspects.

    Spells are cast using a weird mix of pseudo-Latin and pseudo-Greek? The protagonist asks whether these words are actually necessary, and then tries to find out by experimenting. Trying different pronunciations, telling the caster the spell does something other than what it really does, things like that.

    Why would Voldemort only make horcruxes out of easy to find and retrieve objects? Why not use the Pioneer plaque or some random object dropped into the Mariana trench?

    Are the blood purists right? Is magic in decline? Let's think of an experiment and execute it.

Non-Fiction

Besides text on informatics or mathematics, I read non-fiction titles on a wide variety of subjects. Here is a list of books I enjoyed or found enlightening.

• I found the Very Short Introduction series by Oxford University Press to provide a nice overview over each of a wide variety of subjects, Witchcraft, Linguistics, Planets, Game Theory, Astrobiology, Marx. There are also a lot of titles I have not so far, but will at some point, read.

• Cathedral, Forge, and Waterwheel by Frances and Joseph Gies provides a fascinating account of technology in the middle ages (spoiler: there's a lot more of it than one might think)

• William Rosen's The Most Powerful Idea in the World

• How to Destroy the Earth by Sam Hughes is a very interesting read. The title is quite literally what it is about: actually destroying planet Earth. He provides an overview of a wide variety of more or less realistic ways one might go about destroying a planet. Hint: It is not easy, but there are lots of ways.

• What impressed me very much was Stephen Pinker's The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence has Declined. In contrast to what you might think when watching or reading the news, we live in a remarkably peaceful time. Sure, it is far from perfect, but never in human history have less people been killed by other humans than now. Even the previous century, with both World Wars, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, just to name a few, turns out to be one of the, if not the single most peaceful century, as long as one adjusts for the increase in global population.

  Not only does Pinker show that this is the case, he also gives a variety of causes. This book has shown me, in short, that we live in better world than ever before, and it does not seem like this should change any time soon. On the contrary, current trends suggest a further decline in violence.

• Also very interesting, though maybe a bit long-winded and rarely original, is Rationality: From AI to Zombies, an edited collection of blog posts by Eliezer Yudkowsky.

• Darm mit Charme ("Gut: The Inside Story of Our Body's Most Underrated Organ") by Giulia Enders, describes, in a very approachable way, how the gastrointestinal tract works. This is where I first learned that stomach rumble ("Magenknurren") is actually produced by the small intestine close to the stomach, but not the stomach itself. It is the sound of the intestine moving fluids and gases around, when the firmer food is already further down the track.

• A long time ago, I read Frank Schätzing's Nachrichten aus einem Unbekannten Universum, a book about how life in the oceans developed, from the very beginnings to the present, as well as how it might develop in the future.

• Another book that greatly changed my view of the world, or at least a significant part of it, in this case the Americas, is Charles C. Mann's 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus in which he describes, in great detail, though in now way long-winded, what human a number of human societies in the Americas looked like just before the first Europeans arrived:

  The earliest cities in the Western Hemisphere, before the ancient Egyptians built the pyramids. Incredibly successful genetic engineering in modern-day Mexico creating Maize from a much smaller grass. Amazonian Indians using charcoal to greatly improving the soil of an estimated 6300 to 18900 square kilometers in Amazonia. North American natives creating the great plains by periodically setting spreading forests on fire. Densely populated areas along rivers in what is now the north-eastern US and eastern Canada.

  He shows that a lot of what is usually believed about the Americas before Columbus is correct. When Columbus came, the Americas had a population that easily rivalled Europe's, there were no pristine forests from coast to coast. Most of that came only after the Columbian exchange, much caused by diseases brought by the Europeans.

• An enlightening account of how automation has changed the world we live in already, in particular regarding jobs, as well as hints of how it might continue to change our world, can be found in Arbeitsfrei: Eine Entdeckungsreise zu den Maschinen, die uns ersetzen by Constanze Kurz & Frank Rieger.

• Mythos by Stephen Fry, which provides a modern retelling of Ancient Greek myths, is also a very enjoyable read, though it is not clear whether this is fiction or non-fiction talking about fiction.