Reading is part of my everyday life. Over the years, a few books have left a particular mark and got to me for different reasons. This is where I collect them, along with the question of why I buy them somewhere other than Amazon.
DJ memoirs
Mark Ronson’s Night People caught me off guard. Not just because his music had never done much for me, but because his writing is genuinely good and the scenes he describes reflect a time I lived through as a DJ myself, just not in New York. Anyone interested in the music industry from a different angle will find an equally sharp and entertaining stocktake in Wir hatten Sex in den Trümmern und träumten by Tim Renner and Sarah Wächter (German only).
The internet has to go
Far from fiction and good cheer, Schlecky Silberstein wrote a book that holds up a mirror. What the internet does to us, how it changes us, and why that’s not always a good thing. Not light reading, but necessary (German only).
Art that leads to a book
Sometimes it’s not the book that leads to art, but the other way round. A sculpture by Henry Moore at the Tate Modern held me captive for so long that I eventually had to order Herbert Read’s book about him. No idea where this leads, but it remains fascinating.
From Instagram feed to bookshelf
Lucas Levitan’s Photo Invasion is one of those cases where an Instagram account turned into a book. He draws little figures into other people’s photos and often gives them the twist they were missing. When he crowdfunded the whole thing as a book on Kickstarter, I backed it straight away.
Buying books fairly
Where I buy my books and why it’s no longer Amazon is something I describe in my post about fairbuch.de. Two percent of every purchase goes to Kindernothilfe. Transparent, traceable, and thanks to Libri the selection is the same.
This page will be updated as new reading material comes along.