Books · always reading
The reading list
What's on my shelf and nightstand — sorted by mood: easy company, love and life, the intellectual heavyweights worth the climb, 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, told 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 gloriously 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 a child's uncomprehending eyes — a fable that lands like a blow.
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 — the best kind of clever.
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, and the joy is the detour.