"Though hast it now, King, Glamis, Cawdor…"

This is, if I am not completely wrong, a rather famous quote from Shakespear's Macbeth, it is included here basically to impress girls - actually, coming to think about it, does it make you sexy if you quote such boring old stuff??? I do not know, suggestions are extremely welcome...

Now to be a bit more serious about me redaing habits, I enjoy lots of type of books, some are concerned with computer science and/or matematics, but have no fear, I will not lead you into such directions on this page. This is more about reading for recreational purposes, to actually get your mind off of those study-related things, books to enjoy the well-crafted language of or the story narrated in them or both of, it is much a matter of personal taste. And so we use a phrase which was coined by our old friends, the ancient Romans, de gustibus non disputandum, which we throw in at this point to merely show off our knowledge of languages long forgotten and spoken no more…

I don't really know what else to say, so I simply write down a list of books I had the pleasure of reading, maybe some might be tempted to retrace my steps in one direction or the other…

• The Dune series by Frank Herbert has of late fascinated me quite extraordinarily, each book sheds more light on the complex universe Herbert had created.
• Similarly, Tolkien's Lord of the Rings (and related books like the Silmarillion) gave me much joy over the level of detail spent on creating a "true" world.
• Now I have to add Stephen King's Dark Tower series, so far people might think I only read sci-fi and fantasy…
• To remedy this immediately, I mention a couple of books by Milan Kundera, for instance The Unbearable Lightness of Being among others; Kundera is an author who has the very rare gift of writing about serious matters in such, how to say it, perhaps light way (suggested by the book of his I mentioned) which has a slight resemblance to the tone of many French films I have seen, no matter how dramatic things get, always a little bit of humor, or rather incomplete seriousness remains. I find it hard to describe but Kundera can make me laugh and cry within the same sentence.
• I've enjoyed reading Camus' The first man which is some kind of autobiographical narration of his own childhood in Algier, probably the most sensual and sensitive book I have ever read, the way he describes the sun in the sky, the sea, all nature around him you can actually feel, see, smell it.
• Another fascinating book was One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The entangled story of this family and the place they lived in I found very nicle told, occasionally confused by the fact that all male people mentioned had only (approx.) two different names…
• This list would not be complete unless I mention The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams which has found me rolling on the floor and laughing like mad because it simply ridicules everything about sci-fi you ever come up with.

There are certainly other books I've read and I have found remarkable, but any such list is by design incomplete… Anyone interested in buying books, I would recommend one of the various Amazon sites on the internet, the German one is particularly nice for residents of Germany, Austria, and Switzerland because no postage needs no to be paid. In case the book you are looking for is out of print, check out this site for Used Books, maybe you can find it there, good luck!