My Reading List 2017

In 2017, I have bought a lot of books. This is only an excerpt from the complete list:

1. Turings Kathedrale (George Dyson, 2012). Original title: Turing's Cathedral. A book about computers, especially about the early days when people such as Alan Turing and John Von Neumann were still alive. Status: not finished reading yet. I have started reading it again and again several times because I wanted to memorize more details. I have not got close to even 50% of the text yet.

2. Outliers (Malcolm Gladwell, 2008). A very good book. Status: not finished reading yet. I have read only the first couple of chapters. I wrote about them in my blog a couple of weeks ago. I have not arrived closer to the end of the text yet.

3. Der soziale Schwan (Florian Willet, 2013). A German book that tries to make a synthesis of Darwinism, Economics, Social Sciences, etc. Very original ideas. Too bad the style is quite amateurish. Status: not finished reading yet. So far, I have read about 20% of the text.

4. Ultimate Explanations of the Universe (Michael Heller, 2009). Although I have only finished the first part, I already feel confident enough to say that this is the best book I have ever read. It discusses hypotheses about the origin of the universe and life. Excellent material. Highly recommended for people similar to myself.

5. Supermacht Wissenschaft (Lars Jaeger, 2017). Quite a nice summary of some of the key technologies that are going to shape the future of man. A bit too pessimistic and skeptical for my taste. Status: not finished reading yet, finished reading only the first chapter.

6. Homo Deus (Yuval Noah, 2015). Unfortunately, this "Spiegel Bestseller" is the worst book I've bought this year. Far too trivial and uninteresting. Status: abandoned after reading the first chapter and skimming through the rest of the book.

7. Die Pharma-Falle (Fahmy Aboulenein, 2016). This book was written by an Austrian doctor who happens to be friends with me on Facebook. He criticizes his colleagues who accept special offers from pharmaceutical companies with the intention to manipulate their opinion about prescribing certain drugs to their patients. For this book, the author was heavily bullied by some of his colleagues and in the end lost his seat in the Austrian Medical Chamber. It is certainly debatable whether it was a smart move to risk losing popularity among his colleagues, but at least it is a courageous, honest and sincere book. Status: finished reading.

8. Was ist Leben? (Erwin Schrödinger, 1944). Original title: "What is life?". I already read this book back in 2001 when preparing for my A-level exams in English. Yes, I read the English edition. Now I have purchased the German one, for no real reason. It is easy to understand and of course a bit trivial from today's point of view, but still interesting. Status: finished reading more than 15 years ago, not finished re-reading yet.

9. Epigenetik (Bernhard Kegel, 2009). A book on a topic that is not uninteresting, yet it seems to be written in a very dry style. Status: only started reading.

10. Bold (Peter Diamandis, 2015). A book about changing economies and how to adapt to the new challenges. I am not an entrepreneur, yet I do think this is relevant for my life. Status: only started reading.

11. Idea Makers (Stephen Wolfram, 2016). A collection of short biographies and essays about people Wolfram considers important. Mostly scientists. Neither really bad nor really good. Status: skimmed through it, will read more chapters in detail later.

12. Das Buch der Unendlichkeit (Antonio Lamua, 2012). Original title: Los secretos del infinito. This is more of an art book with a lot of pictures in it and not so much text. But it is about a topic I deem highly interesting. Status: skimmed through it, will read it more thoroughly later.

13. Geschichten vom Ursprung des Lebens (Richard Dawkins, 2004). Original title: The Ancestor's Tale. A book about the origins of life, as the title says. It starts with homo sapiens and then transverses time backwards to the absolute beginning. I have not read enough to be really able to judge the quality of this book. Status: only started reading.

14. Life at the Speed of Light (Craig Venter, 2013). A book about the history of molecular biology from early experiments to determine the genetic substance up to synthetic biology and artificial life. Very good for people new to the matter, such as first-year university students. Status: more or less finished reading, but I only skimmed through the last few chapters and will have to read them again more thoroughly.

15. Introduction to Artificial Life (Christoph Adami, 1998). A coursebook for Caltech students of physics or biology, focusing on the "avida" platform, but also including a couple of more theoretical chapters. Not quite bad, but not the best book on the matter, in my humble opinion. Status: not finished reading yet, but quite advanced.

16. Artificial Life (Christopher Langton, 1995). A collection of early papers about the newly founded research subject (the term "artificial life" was originally coined in 1987). Very interesting and well written. A lot of good stuff in here. Status: only started reading.

17. Artificial Life (Steven Levy, 1992). Despite the cover that makes this book appear somewhat unserious, it is a very good book, very in-depth, with a lot of useful information. In contrast to Langton's book, this is not just a collection of papers but a coherent text. Probably the best coherent text on the matter there is. If you are interested in the subject, go and get this book! Status: not finished reading yet, only about 30% so far.

18. The Singularity Is Near (Ray Kurzweil, 2005). Probably the most important book from this list. If you have not read it, you have no clue what is going to happen in the next decade. The world is going to undergo drastic transformations. The time between two consecutive milestones in the development of life and technology is shrinking by factor ten every time a milestone occurs. Soon there will only be a couple of months between two consecutive milestones, then it will only be a matter of days. Who knows what the world will be like in ten years from now? Read this or remain clueless! Status: only started reading.

19. A Crack in Creation (Jennifer Doudna, 2017). A book about CRISPR, written by one of the ladies who discovered it. Very easy to read and interesting. A good book. Status: not finished reading yet, about 30% so far.

20. Schaum's Outlines: Partial Differential Equations (Paul DuChateau, 2011). This should help me make better computer models. Status: not just reading, but studying it. Still a long way to go until I master it in detail.

As already said at the beginning, this list is far from complete. I also bought a lot of second-hand books. These twenty books, however, are not second-hand. I bought them at full price.

As my winter vacation is now about to (really) start - as I have finally finished the "2017 Annual Review" for "21st Century Headlines" -, I will probably spend more time reading these books in the next couple of weeks. Perhaps I will even get to finish some of them.

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