User Profile

Moritz

Moritz@bookrastinating.com

Joined 1 year, 9 months ago

I read a wide variety books. Favorite fiction is magical realism and weird stuff. I do read bad bestsellers just to see what is popular. In non-fiction I read books on management and economics for work, and on history, different countries, and religion for leisure. My ratings tend to be on the critical side.

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Moritz's books

Currently Reading (View all 15)

The Life of Sigmar (Hardcover, 2005, Games Workshop)

This is great as an in-game prop for Warhammer Fantasy Role-Play, but not really interesting as prose. The booklet is a faux retelling of the myths around a major historical figure in the game, and on the mid level of gaming fiction, but with the faux leather binding and illustrations that look like woodcuts it's a cool prop.

Peter Scholl-Latour: Der Fluch der bösen Tat: Das Scheitern des Westens im Orient (German language, 2014)

Horribly racist and uninformed book. Whenever the author jumps around time and places and makes reference to stuff that happened 2000 year ago to comment on current events it becomes really clear why he calls some cultures "inscrutable" - sure because he doesn't know the language, only talks to Westernized elites, and he himself mixes up time and space. I am baffled that this wasn't edited. I understand why it was published, he was a well known journalist and any book by him was a guaranteed bestseller, but it's really negligence. As a simple example, there are lots of spelling mistakes of Turkish place names, a language that uses the Latin alphabet (so no transcription issues, unlike with his very idiosyncratic spelling of Arabic terms), and Turks are the largest minority in Germany, so somebody really should have checked. But mainly it's wrong and racist.

Horrible book.

Ernest Cline: Ready Player One (Ready Player One, #1) (Paperback, 2011, Crown Publishers)

Ready Player One is a 2011 science fiction novel, and the debut novel of American …

I would have loved this at age 25 but I guess I am older now and the book also hasn't aged well, with those ableist and homophobic slurs, besides the 1980s have more to offer than only the mainstream part of nerd culture.

Margaret Killjoy, Inmn Neruin, Robin Savage: Penumbra City

Decent RPG, but partly more a manifesto than a game

Some people read TTRPGs to play them, some read them as a piece of literature, some read them for both. This is a complete TTRPG with an interesting setting heavily inspired by the anarchist views of the authors, but it sometimes feels more like a manifesto than a game book. There is a GM guidebook that comes with it, but in itself it seems a bit bare bones. I guess it's fine but not for me?