Ready to read?

Are you looking for a new book to read? The amount of books in a store is overwhelming and every week new ones are coming in. Imagine a Saturday morning, where you are standing with felt other hundreds of people in front of endless rows of books - crimes, fantasy stories, love stories, biographies... If you have a very specific author you love, great. Congratulation. This shopping stop probably costs you 15min, for example Murakami was my one and only for a long time. Otherwise you start a discovery tour that could cost your afternoon.

When I search for my next exciting read I have two criteria: First, I look at the title and the cover. When it is catchy and slightly different than the average book, it passed the first hurdle. Second, I read the last page of the story. After that, if I still have no idea how the story went, it's mine. The idea behind: if the last page allows me insights into the whole book, the story is probably rather simple and could easily be boring.

The following three books made it in my shopping bag and didn't last longer than a month unread. Enjoy!

"Technology vs. Humanity", Gerd Leonhard

Digitization, Virtual Reality, Deep Learning, Automation and Big Data. Those and more are currently hype topics owning the business life of so many companies. Everybody wants to be the best, most innovative and afraid of missing an opportunity, but what does it mean for our society? Gerd Leonhard is a so called futurist, a future consultant. This means he tries to look at current trends, how they develop and affect us back. The key aspect that interested me most was ethics. Technology is developing exponential and soon humanity will have challenges to understand it and keep pace. Society needs to find a way to have regulations, do's and don'ts, to handle the rapid change without slowing innovations down. We can not just ignore the social problems coming with the digital movement. We have to start discussions now, find solutions and be prepared. Gerd Leonhard provides details about the different trends, their possible consequences and the requirements our society needs to work on. It's a very good book about catching up on our social responsibility instead of just following a hype.

"The Bikini Body - 28 Days Healthy Eating and Lifestyle Guide", Kayla Itsines

First things first: no you won't have a bikini body within 28 days. I tried it. I tried many books that promised the ultimate sporty figure within a month. They all talked about the best method to get the biggest impact by not doing anything. None of them survived very long in my shelf. This one is different. It provides a holistic view on the topic living healthy. It seems like the title has to be like that to make it catchy, but the content of the book is much more rational. It includes a four week food plan to learn a balanced nutrition. It's not the idea to avoid sweets or carbs, but to eat the right amount of it. You get a template telling how much of what category to eat when. Everything else you are free to combine as you like. Additionally, it combines an exercise plan which you can easily do at home without equipment in just a few minutes each day. It is a great start to get moving and set realistic targets to achieve. After a month you can try more difficult ones to develop.

"Ich bleibe eine Tochter des Lichts", Shirin (German only so far)

Shirin is a Yazidi, a daughter of light and part of a happy family. She is a teenager and just about to finish her school. Life is simple, but good till the day the IS comes to her village, arrests her and uses her as a slave. She describes her journey from one prison to another. From one forced marriage into another. From one rape to the next and next... Till she finally meets men who help her flee and she finds safety in Germany. We all are aware of the cruelties done by the IS, especially to women. But reading a true story in every detail, let's me cringe. I think it is important for us from time to time to face those stories to realize how good our own life is and that there is still a fight going on for which we have to raise continuous awareness. The day we don't talk about the horror anymore, that day we give up. Reading those real life stories is a great way to stay educated. I appreciate women like Shirin who take the courage and tell their story to help us understand the details of what is going on.