Category: Books I read

Books I’ve recently read and/or liked. I only link to a book or author if they have their own webpage and never link to Amazon or Goodreads. Buy your books directly from the author or from independent bookstores if you can.

There’s also a more complete OPML file that is both human and machine readable, that you can check out: my booklists

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Madeline Ashby is the author of Company Town, a fun near future SF novel I read in 2016.
In Glass Houses, published 2024, an AI company’s team crashes on a deserted island while on a trip celebrating having been acquired. Its CEO has Mars colonisation dreams, but not everyone of the team is on board with that fantasy. His PA has an agenda of her own, and a deeper understanding than she lets on. As things on the island turn bloody, flashbacks fill in the back story. Enjoyed it, and it was a quick read, but I remember having enjoyed Company Town more.

Finished this on new year’s day (having started it the day before).
(e-book, bought from Kobo platform)

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A few weeks ago Y and I visited the printing art fair in town. The local second hand book shop had, as curiosa, put up a number of frames containing things they found inside books they received. Paper money, shares and other official documents, paper cigar bands, post cards, all things used as bookmark or perhaps hidden between the pages. It was fun to look at, and with Y wonder why some of those things had ended up between the pages.

A book I ordered, Information Anxiety by Richard Saul Wurman, at Kennys Bookshop and Art Galleries in Galway, Ireland, arrived today in the mail.

Leaving through it, I noticed towards the end something between the pages.
A rail road ticket from 28 January 1991, one way from Chiasso (on the Italian border) to Biasca, in the Swiss canton Ticino. The book itself is a September 1990 paperback print (from a 1989 publication).
So whoever made that train trip, may well have been the books first owner, and have browsed through it on the train, with the ticket ending up between the pages.

While the book is in excellent condition, not at all ‘well traveled’, it does make me wonder about its path through the world. From that 1991 train trip up the valley towards the St. Gotthard massif, to a bookshop in Galway, Ireland. And now to my bookshelves.

I’ll keep the train ticket, with the punched hole, and use it as bookmark in this work myself.

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Debut by Natasha Brown. Short, read it in one sitting over and hour or so en route to Berlin last week. A Black woman in the UK has done and still does all the so-called right things, but it is never enough to belong. Her boyfriend has all the advantages of intergenerational wealth. Why not create your own intergenerational wealth if you can, why not force the issue? For your sister if not for yourself.

E picked this book up during our August 2021 visit to Paris, browsing the shelves at Shakespeare & Company. These past few weeks I’ve been making a list of all the physical books we have at home, and that’s how I came across this one.

Brown has published a new novel, Universality, this spring, which has been longlisted for the Booker Prize. Added that one to my to read stack.

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Life is the stories we carry and tell.
This one builds an arc from oral cultures to statistically probably AI output, from old friendships you still miss and turns not taken to restoring our earth and oceans that technology has consumed.

Beautifully woven and told.

I read Playground because I previously enjoyed The Overstory also by Richard Powers that I read in March 2022. Bought Playground as ebook earlier this year (via Kobo, not Amazon as I stopped spending money with them at the start of this year).

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A great little book, published last May, that I came across in the Godert Walter bookstore in Groningen: Libraries of the Mind.

My mind was primed by E for this to stand out. Early August she pointed me to a posting about a man who had read 3600 books in 60 years, and had a list of them all which after his death was published online. Book lists online aren’t rare, and Swiss professor Beat Döbeli’s list of 8000 books and 30k texts is sort of the pinnacle of lists I know about. But the article E pointed me to got me thinking about lists. We have about 1.000 physical books in our house, I have a list of about 1.300 books I have notes about, and an e-book library of some 1.200 titles.

The physical books and e-books form an actual library, but my list of books I have notes about contains books I do not own, and books I have not read. They’re books I have notes about why I might read them sometime in the future. In Umberto Eco’s ‘anti-library’ fashion, they’re a reservoir of curated titles I can choose from in future.
All of those books together do comprise my mental image of ‘my library’.

Another 2.500 books or so, that I used to own, but did away with in 2012 and 2016, and of which there must be a list somewhere on one of my old laptops though I can’t find it, also make up part of that mental image of ‘my library’. So my mental library is perhaps over 4000 books?

Such mental libraries, is what the book ‘Libraries of the Mind’ is about, and when I came across it a few weeks after reading that link E shared with me, and having mused about the number of books that passed through this household over the years, I was primed to notice it.

A fun read. Libraries of the mind, our collection of impressions of books, are always bigger than the physical book collections themselves they are connected to. The book also goes into the dark matter of literature, all those books that were lost, written but never published, or tales told but never written down in the first place. The many works we can’t ever access due to language differences, and where translation itself moves the untranslated from view even more. I think from now on I need to start looking at other language online book stores to see what might be there. E.g. what has recently been published in e.g. Polish non-fiction that is of interest, and can I add an impression of that book to the library of my mind, even if I never will learn to read Polish?

But above all the book is about the joy of reading, the worlds and thoughts it provides access to.

Loved it.

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Wandelend met E en Y, vorige week in Vorarlberg

Bergen hebben altijd een kalmerend effect op me, al sinds ik voor het eerst in de Alpen was toen ik negen was. En ondanks mijn veel sterker geworden en daardoor me flink beperkende hoogtevrees, hebben bergen hun aantrekkingskracht behouden. Afgelopen mei ervoer ik dat nog weer sterk toen ik met twee vrienden een weekend doorbracht met uitzicht op Eiger, Jungfrau en Mönch. Twee dagen tussen de rotsen deed me goed in de recente zeer stressvolle tijd.

Vers terug van tien dagen wandelen in het Montafon liep ik afgelopen vrijdag door Utrecht en bezocht de boekhandel Steven Sterk. Daar kwam ik deze net verschenen titel tegen, Berghonger, van de filosoof Fleur Jongepier. Waarin ze reflecteert op het verlangen naar de bergen, het contrast met het Utrechtse stadsleven, existentieel in het leven staan of juist niet, en het maken van keuzes in je leven.

Onmogelijk om te laten liggen natuurlijk. In de trein terug meteen in begonnen. Lekker lezen, en vooruit denken naar een volgende mogelijkheid de bergen te bezoeken.


Het boek Berghonger lezend in de tuin