My reading highlights 2019

For those who need some inspiration for Christmas gifts or for what to read next, here are my reading highlights of 2019. I chose 14 books that have influenced my thinking this year. They come in the sequence of my reading, not as a ranking.

Susan Schaller. A man without words.

What if you are deaf and you have never been taught the most basic ideas of language? If you lived in total isolation, disconnected from the world of conversation? If you would not even comprehend sign language since you have no understanding of symbols, concepts, numbers and patterns? How would you learn to express yourself when you meet a teacher who introduces you to sign language? Susan Schaller describes, how she met this man who had no words and how it struck him like thunder when this idea of concepts and symbols entered his mind. Maybe there is a lesson to learn about how homo sapiens developed language by just observing this story of an interaction between a teacher of sign language and an isolated human being. As Schallers shows, there is something like thoughts in our minds even when there are no words available to organize those thoughts.

Ronald Syme. The Roman Revolution

When Julius Caesar was killed and Augustus became the first Roman emperor, the long history of the Roman Republic ended. How was it possible that a society with a rather advanced institutional division of power collapsed in a dictatorship? Ronald Syme’s book has become a classic contribution to the analysis of the (long and violent) transition from the Republic to the Empire. Most importantly, Syme wrote this book in the 1930s under the impression of rising Fascism (published in 1939). Reading his careful analysis makes us see three different historic moments in one: The collapse of the Roman Republic, the rise of Fascism and our own time which shares a lot of similarities with the crisis of the Roman Republic and the European crisis of democracy in the 1930.

Peter Wohlleben. The hidden life of trees.

Trees communicate. They are social beings and they are connected to each other and their environment in complicated networks underground (the wood wide web). They help each other, protect their children, call insects for help, warn each other in moments of danger and even learn. By contrast, plantation trees do not communicate. Those trees stand in silence. There is so much to learn about our understanding of nature and of society and how we got it wrong. Forest and trees might deliver the key for a future narrative we hold in our hands. Wohlleben’s book, which is based on the most recent findings in biology, has opened a new way of seeing the world and it comes in the right moment.

Richard Powers. The overstory.

Inspired by Wohlleben, Powers wrote a novel in which trees are in the center, a novel that narrates the story of humans around those trees partly over centuries. He describes the awakening of a new understanding of nature by showing how the human protagonists of his story connect to particular trees and forests in general. If I am right that forests and trees are at the core of a future narrative for escaping our current crisis, Powers shows how we have to tell the stories that might weave into a broader narrative one day.

Andrea Wulf. The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt's New World

Alexander von Humboldt once was a superstar, there is no other human being whose name was used to name so many rivers, cities, mountains, institutions. He was the friend of kings and presidents who listened to him. Wherever he went, huge crowds gathered to see him and listen to him. He was a scientist and adventurer who went beyond the traditional way of looking at nature – classifying plants from a human perspective in harming and healing ones for instance. He is the first Western scientist who sees a web of interconnected natural actors –from trees to mountains and rivers and the first who warns that our interference with this web at one point creates harm at another point. When Darwin was travelling to the Galapagos, he had two of Humboldt’s books with him, reading in them every day. What course history might have taken if he had better understood Humboldt’s key message that cooperation is the major activity in nature and not competition? Andrea Wulf brings Humboldt back to life in exactly the historic moment where his long forgotten understanding of nature is needed.

Stephen Greenblatt. The swerve

This is the fascinating story about how early humanists made highly dangerous journeys through Europe in order to find long forgotten transcription of Roman and Greek authors. They were called the “book hunters”. Greenblatt tells the story of one of those book hunters, Poggio Bracciolini, a former secretary of the pope who discovers a copy of Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura in a remote monastery in Southern Germany in the winter of 1417. This discovery of a book, written around 50 BC would change the world and guide thinkers like Francis Bacon on the path towards enlightenment. Greenblatt’s reconstruction of the middle ages at beginning of modernity (with Gutenberg and Luther as later protagonists) is written like a novel and would be a wonderful script for a Hollywood movie.

Lucrezius. De rerum natura.

Of course, I had to read Lucrezius directly after finishing “The swerve”. It is mindblowing to see how more than 2000 years ago, some major facts on nature have been developed by a poet who uses nothing but pure imagination. Just by listing some of the claims he makes, the importance of that book for the invention of the modern world becomes obvious: Everything is made of invisible atoms. Those atoms are eternal and like the letters of the alphabet they can be combined in infinite ways. Atoms are in motion in an infinite void. Space and time have no beginning and no end. The universe has no creator or designer. Everything comes into being as a result of a swerve (declinatio or inclinatio), which is the minimal motion (nec plus quam minimum) that triggers a constant process of collisions. Nature continuously experiments and there is no single moment of origin or mythic scene of creation. Everything evolves through a long process of trial and error. Lucrezius also shows us something lost long ago: The fusion of science and poetry, a scientist writing like a poet. We might learn a lot on how modern scientists failed to transmit their knowledge on global warming, because of that lost link to poetry.

Aleida Assmann. Cultural memory and western civilization.

Aleida Assmann is one of those increasingly rare scientists who has deep knowledge in many different scientific domains and who reads in many living and ancient languages. In this fascinating book she investigates, how in ancient societies memory and forgetting were organized. What sounds very banal as an activity is at the core of why civilizations live or die. Her narrative points directly at one of the key challenges of our own society, in which it seems paradoxically so difficult to collectively remember and at the same time to collectively forget.

Hannah Arendt. Between Past and Future.

Hannah Arendt is one of my favorite philosophers. Her ability to vivisect society and to put the contemporary problems into a historical context that reaches back to ancient Greece is amazing. And in contrast to many other philosophers, she writes in plain and clear language. In this collection of essays, she examines the crisis of her society – the postwar society between the Fascist past and the Capitalist future and as a reader you realize quickly that her analysis is timely in this very moment of our own crisis, where we risk to move back from Capitalism to Fascism. Arendt was a visionary, always a step ahead of her compatriots and still a step ahead of us, five decades later.

John Lanchester. The Wall

Definitely my dystopia of the year. The story takes place in the UK, a few decades from now. Civilizations have collapsed and people try to get into the remaining functional territories – like the UK. However, since this is not in the interest of people living in the UK, they have built a wall around the island and all young people have to serve for two years on that wall, basically killing all those who arrive in boats on the shore. It is a dangerous job since those who want to come into the country are desperate enough to try it by all means. The teams who fail are punished in the cruellest way: They are put in a boat themselves and have to leave the UK. In this post-collapse society, communication between generations has basically stopped. The young people hate their parents for the climate collapse and obviously are not interested in learning lessons from them anymore. Why would you listen to those people who messed it up? A frightening realistic narrative. Just to avoid a disappointment. I figured out at the end of the book that it is meant to be a series of books with volume 2 not written yet. A bit frustrating, because you finish the book and you want to urgently know how the story of the protagonists continues.

Bruno Latour. Finding Gaia.

Latour has been attacked as a constructivist who is responsible for the fake news world we are in. Now he strikes back and shows us a potential way out of the current crisis. Going back to the work of Lovelock in the 1970s on Gaia, he argues that we need to change our understanding of agency. For the whole human history, it was humans who acted and “the environment” build the background for our actions. Now, as it seems, the environment acts and we become spectators. Agency shifts. In order to get out of the crisis, we need a new vision of society by analyzing networks of agency in which humans become just one actor among many and in which the deep understanding of the networks themselves become important: How do the actions of different actors – from humans to rivers and trees – interconnect and what are the consequences of interfering in such connections? Not always easy to read (after all, this is a French author…), but worth the reading-work.

Hugo Mercier & Dan Sperber. The enigma of reason.

What if philosophers and psychologists got it all wrong and reason is not a feature of an individual mind but an intersubjective capacity? Mercier and Sperber summarize the most recent research in making exactly that point. The focus on the individual, which we owe to Descartes and friends is according to them a distorted way of understanding homo sapiens. This shift in perspective has significant consequences. For instance, where Kahneman sees dysfunctional heuristics, they see socially functional ones. This intersubjective perspective (by the way nothing new for philosophers who studied Habermas), promises to reorient research in psychology and could be a starting point for understanding society very differently (and here I would link back to the forest and trees from my above summaries).

Anatole France. The Gods Will Have Blood

I read this book for the first in school in the 1980s and it deeply impressed me. This year I read it for a third time more than 15 years after my last lecture of it and in the current societal context, I read it very differently. France tells the story of a painter who in the turmoil of the French revolution becomes a judge in his quarter, ruthlessly sending people to the guillotine. The book shows how an ordinary citizen turns into a blood-thirsty monster until he ends up under the guillotine himself (not really a spoiler since this happened to most of them). France, a quite forgotten French noble laureate for literature shows how strong contexts can transform individuals and move them to the dark side of the force. Impossible to read this book without constantly comparing it to what is going on around us right now. Fake news, ingroup/outgroup thinking and mass hysteria are recurrent patterns in human history.

Madeline Miller. Circe.

My overall book of the year as I already wrote in a recent post. The story of Odysseus from a female perspective. Circe, the daughter of the sun god Helios and a witch tells her version of some of the key stories in Greek mythology. Not only can you read this book as a metaphor for the modern dominance of the male perspective and male power, you can also enjoy reading an author who shows some kind of linguistic witchcraft herself –  this is a book written in an enchanted language with a powerful and painful analysis of what is wrong in society.

Enjoy!