A year in books - 2023

2023 wasn't the best year when it came to my reading habits. I only started taking notes in February, and I'm certain that I forgot to mention or write down a handful of books. Still, I probably have read less than 40 books throughout the year. And very few of the ones I did read where exceptional. Here's to 2024 going better.

August

• “Visual Threat Intelligence - An Illustrated Guide for Threat Researchers” by Thomas Roccia; I read this on recommendation by a few acquaintances, and it lived up to my expectations.
  
  I’m not really the target audience anymore, with the book covering the absolute basics of cyber threat intelligence, or analysis work in general. But I still enjoyed the read, it’s something I will probably recommend for coworkers starting out in their career, or getting interested in threat intelligence for the first time.
• “Operationalizing Threat Intelligence” by Kyle Wilhoit and Joseph Opacki - similarly, this was a book recommended, and because I was already in the mood to read on the subject, I got this as well.
  
  I’m a bit torn about my conclusion. On one hand I don’t want to be harsh, because I’m suspecting that parts of my criticism are based on personal preferences that the book is not meeting, which would be subjective criticism and thus at least a bit unfair.
  
  But on the other hand, it does suffer from the same issue a lot of titles from Packt Publishing suffer (in my experience, your mileage may definitely vary). It gives a high level summary of relevant topics, then throws in some step-by-step manual on to set up certain tools, and how to use them (in the sense of being able to navigate through interfaces or read the output), and that’s it.
  
  It feels like the book is giving you some things, some information that could be used as a building block for further learning, work, or research. But it doesn’t really give you any hints on where to go next. Or even recommendations on what to do about deepening the knowledge and understanding you acquired from the book.
  
  I could work around this, because I both knew most of the stuff the book contained, and because I’ve read my fair share of books by Packt Publishing by now. But I feel like that’s not the experience I should get from a book.
• “Rote Kapelle - Spionage und Widerstand” by W.F. Flicke is an old book I got at a flea market shortly before the pandemic started. Home-grown espionage networks in Germany during WW2 are a topic that has been fascinating me since I was a kid, and since I haven’t really read all that much about the Rote Kapelle, I was looking forward to this one.
  
  Well, this book was very much not what I expected. This wasn’t a factual, historically correct book on the subject. It was fiction, in the style of a novel. Pretty much telling the story of how the group was eventually broken up, peppered in with a lot of parts that were borderline revisionist.
  
  This book contained the most generous, whitewash-y description of the Gestapo I have ever seen. The only reason I finished it was because it was morbidly fascinating. Avoid, avoid .. avoid, avoid. Seriously.
• “The Dark Heart of Italy” by Tobias Jones; a few years back I was intensely interested in the Italian subculture of “Ultrà”, of fanatical football support.
  
  This subculture has spread throughout Europe in above since it becoming a thing in the 1960ies, and its expression varied from country to country, but the “motherland” was always especially fascinating to me.
  
  Tobias Jones was a journalist that often came up in English-language documentaries at the time, because he was one of the few British journalists permanently living and working in Italy at the time.
  
  So his name was not entirely unknown to me when I stumbled upon this book at an .. alternative source for literary publications on the Internet a while ago.
  
  This book isn’t about football per se, it’s about Italy, in general. Modern history, politics, food, society. It’s a fascinating read, even for someone literally living next door to the country in question. It’s a window into a culture that’s seemingly vastly different to mine.
  
  It’s probably a bit dated by now, given that it was released in 2005, but a quick look at news about Italy suggests that things migt not have changed all that much.
• There’s a concept called “Bücherfahrrad” where I live. It’s a place (sometimes a literal bicycle, sometimes an old phone booth, sometimes a modified bench, ..) where people can place books that they don’t need anymore, so that other people might pick them up for their enjoyment.
  
  Obviously, the mixture of books you can find in them varies wildly. Often it’s books that are outdated and old, but not yet ripe for selling them to an antiquarian. Sometimes it’s books that were given out by employers or political parties decades ago.
  
  But sometimes you find really cool stuff in there. That’s what happened when my partner and I hit the local Bücherfahrrad during one of our evening walks. Apparently, someone had decided to get rid of parts of their collection of WW2-books. I was glad to finally find a replacement for my British biography of Rommel I got gifted as a kid, which was already falling apart when I got it, and hasn’t improved since.
  
  But the most interesting (in a slightly hilarious way) book was “The Secret Life of Adolf Hitler” by a guy called David Lewis. When I saw it I both knew that it was a horrible, sensationalist, most likely almost entirely fictional, and that I had to take and read it.
  
  And my, oh my .. it was even worse than I thought. Given that it was a book about the sexuality of Hitler that was published in the Seventies, at the height of the “sexploitation”-wave of both books and movies, I was expecting quite a bit. But the author managed to somehow make Hitler out to be sexually deviant, homosexual, celibate and a womanizer at the same time. Also somehow he magically grew a testicle during the course of the book, only for it to vanish again when the Soviets looked at his alleged body.
  
  That book was a wild ride, and I definitely do not recommend it for anyone seriously interested in sexuality during the Nazi dictatorship. For that I’d recommend “Sexuality and German Fascism” and “Sex after Fascism”, both by Dagmar Herzog. But if you’re looking for a light, hilarious and absolutely bonkers read - sure, give it a go.

July

• “One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps” by Andrea Pitzer; on a technical level, the way it was written, this was an engaging, enjoyable read. If we’re talking about the content, this was (as I expected when I bought it a few months ago) depressing. Humans are good at a lot of things, but especially at two - one being mean to each other, the other being “really not learning from history”.
• “Salvation’s Reach”, “The Warmaster”, “The Anarch” by Dan Abnett - “Gaunt’s Ghosts” have been a staple in my life since I was a kid, comfort literature I came back to every few months. But for whatever reason I had never read the last three parts, a fact I decided to change in July.The books were as you’d expect them to be, as something written by Dan Abnett, excellent. The only criticism I could lever is that the end of “The Anarch” felt a bit rushed, and one particular plot point was a bit much, even though this “tad bit much” was well executed.Because I am too lazy to add a few snippets of CSS to enable <spoiler>-tags, I’ll not go into details about the plot. All I’m going to say here is: Jesus christ, fuck you Dan. That hurt.

June

• “The Good Shepherd” by C.S. Forester; I enjoy the film “Greyhound” with Tom Hanks quite a lot - but please, don’t ask me why, because I can’t explain it objectively. When I realised that it was, more or less loosely, based on a novel I decided to get it - this was, if I remember correctly, in March. I finally got around to reading it now, and while, similar to the film, I enjoyed it, it’s objectively a pretty bland book. To sum up its contents, it’s roughly 200 pages of the protagonist missing his ex and trying not to let his crew know that he has human needs, like eating, drinking and sleeping.
• “Tales of the Old World” by Marc Gascoigne - which was, as it’s usually with these books, an entertaining, light read. I really do miss the “Old World” of Warhammer Fantasy Battle, and I doubt that what Games Workshop is coming up with as part of their “Warhammer: The Old World”-revival is going to be as good, lore-wise, what the first iteration was. I’m just nostalgic, not a grumpy neckbeard, I swear.

May

• “Russlands neuer Spionagekrieg” by Mark Urban (which translates to “Russia’s new war of espionage”); I remember buying this when it originally came out, but for whatever reason I ended up leaving it unread until now. In the grand scheme of things it didn’t really provide any new information about the poisoning of Sergei and Julia Skripal in 2018. But on a more personal level it was a really informative read.
  
  Before the poisoning happened, the author interviewed Skripal for another book project, that ultimately never manifested, which allowed him to learn a great deal about the life of Sergei Skripal, his work for Soviet and later Russian intelligence and all the events up to and after the assassination attempt on his life. I’d not necessarily recommend it as a primer on the poisoning incident, but it’s a great book for getting “a feel” for the whole affair, and about how working for an Eastern intelligence agency was, and to some extent, is.
• “Russia: Myths and Realities” by Rodric Braithwaite; The author is a former ambassador to Moscow (both when it was the capital of the Soviet Union and when it was the first city of the Russian Federation), which usually isn’t a good sign. But I was pleasantly surprised to learn that Braithwaite is also a historian and an experienced diplomat (rather than what I like to call a “one-off-ambassador”), and those qualifications definitely show in the writing.
  
  As much time and effort I have dedicated to understanding modern Russian society and politics, I have to admit that I am still lacking on historical knowledge of the country that would eventually become the Russian Federation. I subconsciously avoided the topic because I was afraid of being bored to death by typical stories about this prince murdering that nephew, this king marrying that daughter of his sister and all these shenanigans. In hindsight I’m very glad that I picked this book as a first step into Russian history. Engaging read, plenty of recommended reading in the appendix .. also Russian history is fucked up.
• “Der alte weiße Mann” by Norbert Bolz (roughly translated to “The old white man”, which lacks the underlying tone it has in German) is a bit of an outlier for my usual reading choices. I tend to avoid topics surrounding gender and diversity, both talking about them and reading books on them.
  
  The reason for that being that I feel like I need a university education in social sciences in order to be able to understand the current literature, that I don’t care about the topic any further than “just stop being assholes to people who are different than you ffs” and that I really don’t want to discuss since it inevitably turns into a shitshow since a lot of people tend to deliberately misunderstand things - and no, this is not an attempt at dog whistle politics, fascists and other bigots can go fuck themselves.
  
  Despite all of this, the title of this book was particularly provocative and somewhat intriguing, so I bought it. It turned out to be a thought-provoking, but at times difficult book. On one hand the author clearly had some interesting ideas and theories about identity politics and society in general, but then - on the other hand - he throws out a not-even-borderline-but-straight-up hateful comment every few pages. Which was especially weird given the political stances the author took in the past, which were everything but right-wing.
• “The Russian Understanding of War: Blurring the Lines between War and Peace” by Oscar Jonsson was first and foremost quite expensive, roughly 40 bucks for less than 200 pages. On top of that it was a hard read for me. I think I have not had to focus that hard on reading and understanding what was written in a book and what the author was trying to convey in a long while.
  
  Nonetheless it was, at the same time, an amazing and excellent resource. It’s the only (mostly) complete overview of Russian military thinking outside of academic literature, and if it were up to me, I’d throw it at most people doing threat intelligence with a focus on Russia, right at the beginning of their career. That way I could probably avoid hearing “tHe GeRaSiMoV dOcTrInE” all the time.
• “The Book of Kubernetes” by Alan Hohn was a book that I had to convince myself of. I don’t hide my distaste for the enthusiasm with which people throw containers and especially the related orchestration frameworks at problems without sparing a thought if said throwing makes actual sense.
  
  But that opinion of mine is based on a general understanding of the technologies that are the foundation for containers and some practical experience with containers in Kubernetes, not an in-depth knowledge. Which is exactly what led me to buying this book. I wanted my opinion on the subject to be a more educated one while, at the same time, trying to find out if there was some amazing thing that I was missing out on or a core concept I was misunderstanding.
  
  Without turning this into an essay on modern operations: No, I wasn’t and no, I haven’t. I’m now convinced more than ever that for most scenarios (yes, even the obvious exception that you are thinking about now), Kubernetes is a bad idea. It’s a convoluted mess whose downsides are outweighed by the upsides only in a handful of carefully selected scenarios.
  
  Oh, and on the book: It’s as good as you’d come to expect from anything that’s released by No Starch Press. It’s well written, explanations strike the balance between readability and deep-dive, and it encourages you to experiment and tinker on your own.
• “Radical Candor” by Kim Scott, in hindsight, was a funny experience. The first half of the book, which goes into detail of what she understands as “Radical Candor” and how it works both in theory and in practice, was an interesting read - in the sense that I was able to acknowledge how much effort she put into putting together a system for having meaningful relationships at work, and how it had helped her throughout her career.
  
  However it didn’t really do anything for me. A lot of the time, at the end of a chapter, my reaction was “I mean, yeah, that’s cool and all that, but it’s kind of weird that it seems to be necessary to tell people to not be assholes” (not to give any false impressions, this is entirely on me). The second half of the book was the exact opposite, containing a ton of concrete recommendations and ideas for improving workplaces, both from the perspective of a leadership role, but also from the perspective of interacting with your colleagues.
  
  And despite not aiming to be that, at times it felt like “The Little Red Book” for aspiring or newly minted teamleads (.. well, without all the parts about murdering the bourgeoisie) that want to be good at their jobs and make their workplace a space where people want to work and are able to thrive. Which is an “aura” a lot of companies are, unfortunately, sorely missing.

April

• “The Second World War” by Antony Beevor, which I randomly picked one day while laying on my couch, trying to find something to do that was reasonably entertaining while not being hindered by annoying headaches. Despite the book having around 1000 pages I ended up reading it in less than three days. The aptly titled book Antony Beevor wrote on Stalingrad (“Stalingrad”), which was released in 1998, was one of the earliest books I read on the Second World War. Six year old me read it over and over. Judging by the time it took me to finish re-reading this one, chances are I might like his style of writing.
• “Putin’s People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and then Took on the West” from Catherine Belton; I’m a bit torn on that one. The book contains a vast amount of well-sourced information - I am somewhat (and I am giving me a lot of potentially undeserved credit here) knowledgeable on what happened after the fall of the Soviet Union and how the rise of “Putinism” came to be, yet there was still a ton of new things I learned, or new connections between actors and events I came to know, which I haven’t known before. Yet, at the same time, this is the biggest issue I have with the book. There are so many persons, companies and places that you have to keep track of in order to fully understand what’s going on that the book is, at times, cumbersome to read. The author is trying her best, I really can’t blame her for that, and I don’t have any idea on how to do it better. But it’s definitely not a light read that I would recommend for someone dipping their toes into the topic for the first time.
• “ZOV - Der verbotene Bericht: Ein russischer Fallschirmjäger packt aus”, by Pawel Filatjev - the book is only available in German, in English the title would be “ZOV = The forbidden report: A Russian paratrooper speaks his mind”. This book has been reasonably popular in German-speaking countries ever since it’s been released in December of 2022. When it came out it was advertised as the first honest, in-depth look at what is happening inside the Russian army currently invading Ukraine.
  
  From the beginning I was suspicious, it had all the hallmarks of someone trying to become rich and famous by painting a portrait of himself that’s only vaguely, if at all, realistic. Think of all the books by alleged former criminals who pretended to be top members of organized crime groups or former politicians trying to stay relevant - looking at you here, Sarrazin. So for the longest time I ignored the book, until last week when I saw it in a bookstore while I was in need of a light read.
  
  Man, I should not have bought that one. For the type of book that it is, it’s expensive, costing 25 bucks for around 150 pages. And it’s just, .. bad. It’s written like the diary of an angry teenager who thinks that everything bad that happens to them is the fault of literally everyone and everything else. All the while he is the only one who seems to understand what is going on.
  
  Plus: There’s a distinct lack of any mention of war crimes, like looting and unlawful executions of prisoners of war and civilians, which have been committed by troops in the areas that he describes serving in. I’m not saying that he himself has been involved, but his account of looting being rare and necessary, because they didn’t have food, doesn’t hold up to the reality.
  
  Similarly, the story of how his unit caught Ukrainian civilians who they suspected to be spying for the Ukrainian army, letting them go after just some short questioning .. yeah, no pal. Not believing this. This goes contrary to literally everything we have heard, and demonstrably seen, so far of Russian behavior, and contrary to the sad tradition of the way civilians are treated.
  
  His cause isn’t helped by the fact that the author is now suing the people who had helped him, claiming that his promise to donate the proceeds of the book were “coerced” out of him. Fuck that guy, and fuck his book. 10/10 would go into the oven first whenever I need to heat my flat with actual fire.

March

• The “Eisenhorn”-trilogy. I read through Xenos, Malleus, Hereticus in a couple of evenings. Is it the most elaborate Science Fiction-trilogy, with the most intriguing plot and unexpected twists? Probably not, there are other series for that. But Dan Abnett is still one of the best authors when it comes to turn the setting of Warhammer 40.000 into an entertaining read.
• “Bloodlines” by Chris Wraight. This book was the first one released under the overarching series of “Warhammer Crime”, which is a challenging scope. It needs enough crime to be able to distinguish itself from your average novel set in the grim darkness of the far future, while at the same time maintaining a right amount of “warhammer-ish” character to not just be yet another crime novel set in a Sci-Fi environment. And while it wasn’t an outright amazing book, it was a well enough start. I think this crossover of genres is promising.
• “Broken Cities” by Chris Wraight, an omnibus of short stories of “Warhammer Crime”. I enjoyed most of the stories, even though some were very, very clearly copies of well-known Science Fiction books or movies. And it was sad that some were that short, because they would definitely have had the potential for being longer.
• “Russia’s War on Everybody” from Keir Giles - I don’t know exactly how many books I have read on Tsarist Russia, the Soviet Union, the Russian Federation throughout the years since I started to take an interest to the topic a decade ago. A quick look at my bookshelves suggest that it’s more than 20, which doesn’t include books I have stored elsewhere, borrowed or read digitally. What I’m trying to say is that I’ve read what I would argue is a lot of books on these topics. And this one, without hyperbole, is one of the best books I have ever encountered in this area of interest. Together with the lecture of Martti J Kari it’s probably the most concise introduction into how Russia, both on a state and on a societal level, approaches statehood, geopolitics and war.

February

• “This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race” by Nicole Perlroth; I’m am unable to decide if I liked it or not. The content was written in an engaging manner, and the author went to great lengths to make the connections between different actors, events and technical details understandable. But the book claims to tell the story of the cyberweapons market, yet only dedicated 20% of the actual pages to that. The rest of the time it’s about Russian computer network operations, the dragnet surveillance uncovered by Edward Snowden and the business side of commercial spyware developers.
• “Cybersecurity for Small Networks: A Guide for the Reasonably Paranoid” by Seth Enoka; I read this one more out of curiosity about what the author is going to talk about rather than with the intention of learning something. And as with most books from Nostarch, it’s a good book. But: 40$ is a lot of money for something that’s pretty much nothing more than a couple of not-all-that-much-effort blog posts. And as much as the content of the book that is actually there is good, it’s just not enough for me to justify the price tag.
• Putin’s Wars: From Chechnya to Ukraine” by Mark Galeotti; Galeotti is one of the few authors where announcements about new books from them get me at least a bit excited. His book about the vory v zakone, the group that is most often referred to as “the Russian mafia” is one of the few books on the subject that does not engage in sensationalism, instead doing a deep-dive on underlying issues and looking at angles that are otherwise often overlooked. The same goes for this book, I’d highly recommend it to anyone interested in getting an excellent overview on Russian military history as well as plenty of starting points for more in-depth research.