Books · always reading
The reading list
What's on my shelf and nightstand, sorted by mood: easy company, love and life, the intellectual heavyweights, and the ones that make me laugh and think.
01
Light reads
Crime series I come back to for the characters as much as the cases. Brunetti, Bruno and Brenner, drawn over so many pages they feel like old friends. With all three, you dive straight into another life.
Commissario Brunetti: Dressed for Death
Book 3, and for me the finest of the series: Venice you can taste, and a case that lingers.
Bruno, Chief of Police: The Crowded Grave
Book 4: a mystery in the Dordogne, and a French countryside you can almost smell.
Simon Brenner: Müll
Book 8: Brenner at a Viennese recycling yard, in Haas's unmistakable voice. The character is the whole pleasure.
02
Life & love
Stories about living and dying and the things we love.
The Forty Rules of Love
Two love stories seven centuries apart: Rumi and the dervish Shams, and a woman who finds herself through their tale.
Alle Toten fliegen hoch: Amerika
An exchange year in America, wide-eyed and very funny. The first of his honest autobiographical novels.
Memories of Heidelberg
Strunk's tragicomic register: small lives and big longing, told with a painfully funny tenderness.
03
Intellectual & classics
The heavyweights and the timeless. Slower reads, longer echo.
1984
The dystopia every later dystopia answers to: surveillance, doublethink, and a warning that never dates.
The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas
The Holocaust seen through the uncomprehending eyes of a child.
The Lord of the Rings
The mountain every fantasy since has been climbing. A world so complete it has its own languages.
04
Laugh & think
Satire that makes you laugh out loud, then keeps you thinking long after.
QualityLand
A near-future where the algorithm always knows best. Sharp, silly, and uncomfortably plausible.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
The funniest book about the meaning of everything. The answer is 42.