{"id":1463,"date":"2020-12-30T10:12:28","date_gmt":"2020-12-30T18:12:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/globalmelange.com\/?p=1463"},"modified":"2020-12-30T10:32:36","modified_gmt":"2020-12-30T18:32:36","slug":"2020-my-year-of-books","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/globalmelange.com\/en\/2020\/12\/30\/2020-my-year-of-books\/","title":{"rendered":"2020: My Year of Books"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Books are an important part of my being, I would even say I define myself through them. Not only have I enjoyed reading since my early youth, but I’ve also been writing books for almost two decades, on average one a year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For the past two years, I’ve been keeping my own list (as a Google Sheet and now also on Librarything<\/a>) of what books and magazines I’ve read. In 2019, I came up with 216 books, comics, and magazines, organized by category: 117 comics (mostly French) and 56 nonfiction, a few biographies, picture books, and even children’s books. I read most of them on my travels, and there were quite a few in 2019. I’ve been to Europe a total of 10 times, and on each trip I managed to read two to four nonfiction books. And yes, I really do lug the books around with me in print form, not digital. And they grace my apartment. I probably have close to 3,000 volumes spread over seven shelves in two rooms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a writer, books are also working materials and inspiration. Just as a filmmaker watches films, and artists themselves visit galleries and performances, so too must an author read. I myself read between two and four hours a day, and i spend the same number of hours writing every day. Under normal circumstances, I would be a coffeehouse literate, reading and writing books in the coffeehouse. This year, that was only possible from home, but I still maintain the coffeehouse vibe with proper preparation of my coffee, Viennese style.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Caf\u00e9 & Literature (Instagram<\/a>)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

I have one rule: every second book I read must have nothing to do with my actual topic. So if I’m working on a book about artificial intelligence, I’ll read a biography of Leonardo da Vinci, the fall of Rome, or Bauhaus architecture in between. If I’m finishing my book on Future Angst<\/a>, as I’m doing right now, then I read something in between about the architectural movement Brutalism, a Japanese novella from the 10th century (Tales of Genji), primate research or ethics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My brain doesn’t really switch off during this, and unconsciously in the background the work keeps running on the back burner, and often the most interesting inspirations for my current or a future work topic come from these ‘off-topic’ books. For example, a detail in the Leonardo biography – The Woodpecker’s Tongue<\/a> – gave me the inspiration for the book Future Angst.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I manage to keep the overview by meticulously marking passages with small post-it notes and then transferring them to a document, which then serves me for faster searching. I enrich my own texts with such cross-references, stories and thoughts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
The books I read and the post-it notes I put on them.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The year 2020 in books<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

This year was a little different, though, and it showed in the amount of material I read. Although I only got to 196 books, comics and magazines because I had trouble getting French comics due to the lockdown, I got through 86 non-fiction books and 6 biographies in three languages (English, French and German). Among them were such tomes as the 700-page first volume of Barack Obama ‘A Promised Land’, the 600-page biography of Edison, more than 500 pages of ‘Surveillance Capitalism’ or the mathematical book about quantum computers ‘Dancing with Qbits’.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even though many of the books were interesting and I only didn’t finish reading two or three in total (that happens too), I have a small list of my highly recommended favorites, organized by nonfiction and the rest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My favorite nonfiction books 2020<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n