This is a collection of book summaries for the books I read during April-December 2025.

Politics #

📚 Baustellen der Nation #

Philip Banse & Ulf Buermeyer — Goodreads • Notes

This book is about construction sites (German: “Baustellen”) of the nation in Germany. It covers different aspects of what works well in Germany and what doesn’t. Among the construction sites you’ll find different chapters on:

As a long-time listener to the podcast, I was already familiar with most topics and arguments. But having read the book and collecting all the important aspects for each topic, now I always have a quick reference for each “construction site” problem.

Philosophy #

📚 Brief Answers to the Big Questions #

Stephen Hawking — Goodreads • Notes

I had this book on my TODO list since 2022 already. I don’t remember exactly why I finally decided to read it.

This book contains several chapters which will answer one BIG question such as

Overall, Hawking tries to answer these questions from a quite scientific point of view. One thing that stuck with me was his explanation of time: He wrote that the concept of time only exists since the Big Bang. We simply can’t know what was before, because the concept of time didn’t exist before. It’s like asking what’s south of the South Pole - the question itself doesn’t make sense.

📚 The Little Book of Stoicism #

Jonas Salzgeber — Goodreads • Notes

This was the first book of some initiative I started in order to read more about Stoicism.

The author lists his core principles of Stoicism around what he calls the “Stoic Happiness Triangle”, with eudaimonia (living a supremely happy and smoothly flowing life) at the center as the ultimate goal:

  1. Live with arete (express your highest self in every moment)

    This includes the four cardinal virtues: Wisdom, Justice, Courage, and Self-Discipline

  2. Focus on what you control (accept whatever happens and make the best of it)

    Only focus on your voluntary judgments and actions, everything else is “indifferent”

  3. Take responsibility (get good from yourself)

    Good and bad come solely from yourself, not external events but your interpretation of them

💡 What was even more interesting were the stoic practices which I’ve used to create Daily Stoic Practice.

📚 The Stoic Mindset: Living the Ten Principles of Stoicism #

Mark Tuitert — Goodreads

I quite randomly picked this book since I wanted to get really fast into the principles of Stoicism. This is the place where I first got in touch with the stoic thinking that there are some things you CAN control and some you can NOT. It’s also the first time I read about the key Stoic figures - Epictetus, Zeno, Chrysippus, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius - and how they influenced each other (see the section about Marcus Aurelius).

What I found fascinating was Tuitert’s story: He’s a Dutch Olympic speed skater who discovered Stoicism just weeks before the 2010 Vancouver Olympics when he was dealing with massive pressure and self-doubt. After missing two previous Olympics (2002, 2006), he was 29 and facing what might be his last shot at Olympic glory. All these questions were running through his head: “What if I fail miserably? What if I’ve been training for nothing?”

That’s when he picked up Stoic philosophy, and whether it helped him win gold or not, it completely transformed how he approached both sports and life afterwards.

💡 The book breaks down Stoicism into ten practical principles:

  1. Turn obstacles into opportunities (Marcus Aurelius: “What stands in the way becomes the way”)
  2. Your judgments create emotions, not events themselves
  3. Focus only on what you can control
  4. Accept what you cannot change
  5. Practice negative visualization to prepare for setbacks
  6. Live according to your values, not external outcomes
  7. Stay present-focused rather than anxious about future/past
  8. View yourself as part of something larger
  9. Practice gratitude for what you have
  10. Remember that virtue is the only true good

Each comes with exercises that Tuitert developed with a sport psychologist. I really liked the hands-on approach: Instead of just theory, you get things like the “setbacks practice” where you visualize worst-case scenarios to mentally prepare #+sidenote This is the Stoic practice of negative visualization that William B. Irvine also teaches in his meditations - it’s a core technique for building mental resilience. #+sidenote or the ABC model that shows how your emotions come from your judgments about events, not the events themselves.

What makes this different from other philosophy books is that Tuitert shows how these ancient ideas actually work in high-pressure situations. He’s not just some academic, he’s someone who used these principles to perform under Olympic pressure, then later as an entrepreneur and father. The Stoics he draws from (especially Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, and Epictetus) weren’t idle philosophers either - they were leaders dealing with real-world challenges, which is probably why their ideas still work today.

This was definitely the right book for getting into Stoicism quickly. It’s practical, personal, and shows how these principles can help you stay calm while still being driven to achieve your goals.

📚 How to think like a Roman Emperor #

Donald J. Robertson — Goodreads

I got this book inspiration from Ryan Holiday who has its own recommendations on Stoicism.

I particularly liked the style of this book as it’s a narrated version of “Marcus Aurelius - Meditations” (which i still want to read) but way more context / background information in order to get the bigger picture. It definitely helps to put the actions of Marcus Aurelius in the right historical context in order to understand why several things were done that way.

As a short historical overview:

Stoicism wasn’t the only game in town during Marcus’s era. The philosophical landscape was quite diverse. The major schools included Epicureanism (which emphasized pleasure and withdrawal; Robertson explains how Marcus was trained in multiple traditions but chose Stoicism because it offered practical wisdom for someone who had to actually rule an empire while dealing with personal tragedies. The Stoics believed the goal was “living in agreement with Nature”, using reason to live virtuously regardless of external circumstances.

What really impressed me about Robertson’s book is how he extracts concrete practices from the Meditations. Marcus didn’t just philosophize, he had specific daily techniques/routines:

Marcus saw philosophy as some sort of psychological training, like mental weightlifting to build character strength. Robertson shows how these weren’t abstract concepts but daily practices Marcus used to handle enormous pressure (plague, wars, political conspiracies, family deaths) while staying true to his principles. I highly recommend this book if you want to get serious about Stoicism.

History and Information Networks #

📚 Nexus #

Yuval Noah Harari — Goodreads • Notes

Some years ago I became a big fan of Harari’s books after reading 21 Lessons for the 21st Century and then Sapiens. His newest one, Nexus, is about information networks and the role they’ve played throughout human history - from ancient myths and bureaucracies to modern AI.

The book’s main argument is that humanity gains power by building large networks of cooperation, but the way these networks are built could lead to power abuse. According to Harari it’s an “information problem” that for thousands of years, humans have built and maintained large networks by spreading fictions, fantasies, and mass delusions about gods, ideologies, and now AI.

Harari introduces two competing views of information:

He argues there’s a middle ground between these extremes that could help us handle the AI revolution more wisely.

What really struck me was Harari’s point about self-correcting mechanisms, things like independent courts, free press, peer-reviewed journals. These are what keep democracies healthy by catching and fixing errors. But here’s the thing: the Catholic Church became incredibly powerful precisely because it had weak self-correction - it didn’t allow challenges to its authority (with everyone else claiming the opposite being punished).

This connects directly to what we’re seeing with populists today. They’re systematically attacking the very institutions that make democracies self-correct: calling courts ‘corrupt,’ the press ‘fake news,’ universities ’elite propaganda.’ It’s like they’ve learned from history that if you want unchallenged power, you need to kill off the error-correction systems first.

The AI-democracy stuff is genuinely scary. Harari asks: how can human politicians make financial decisions when AI increasingly controls the financial system and even the meaning of money depends on algorithms nobody understands? And how do you have democratic debate when you can’t tell if you’re talking to a human or a chatbot?

It’s not just about AI taking over, it’s about AI making democracy impossible to operate. Democratic discourse requires knowing who you’re actually talking to and having some shared basis for understanding reality. AI could undermine both of those foundations.

Health and Spirituality #

📚 Becoming Supernatural #

Joe Dispenza — Goodreads • Notes

I got into Joe Dispenza after watching some interview he had with Steven Bartlett on “The Diary of a CEO” podcast. It totally resonated with me, that’s why I really wanted to read more about his work and techniques.

If you’re already familiar with breathing exercises (like Pranayama or Wim Hof techniques) as well as with some basic spiritual practices, I don’t really recommend this book to you. What I didn’t like at all about this book was the fact that Dispenza came up with new names for some breathing exercises (like calling his spinal breathing technique the “prana tube” method, or referring to chakras as “energy centers”) although these have been around for thousands of years already. In general I didn’t like the overall tone as if he actually discovered most of the meditation/breathing techniques.

Dispenza also constantly keeps referring to some of his workshops - his “Advanced Workshops,” “Week Long Advanced Retreats,” and “Progressive Workshop Series” as if he was trying to sell me something. I don’t really like this because I didn’t buy the book to let him convince me that I HAD to book one of his events in order to get healed.

However, I found some of his explanations interesting (cerebrospinal fluid which will cause an electromagnetic field around your body when pumped up to the brain) but I found out that Dispenza is indeed a very controversial person. Critics point out that he’s actually a chiropractor, not a neuroscientist as often portrayed, and has published very few peer-reviewed studies. Medical professionals warn against his pseudoscientific claims and the way he markets meditations as cures for serious diseases without proper evidence. So each statement has to be digested with some grain of salt.

Psychology #

📚 The Anxious Generation #

Jonathan Haidt — Goodreads • Notes

Having started with Digital Minimalism I slowly began to understand how our attention is stolen from us and how much time I actually spent doom-scrolling without any purpose. Well, at least I became aware of this misfortune and drastically changed my relation to smartphones and social media. The same I cannot speak for the teenagers (and even kids) I sometimes see in the city, where (although gathered as a group) everyone is staring at their phone, checking something, without noticing what’s going around them.

Jonathan Haidt explores in a more scientific and empirical way why so many teenagers nowadays (and not only) suffer from anxiety, depression and social isolation. This also seems to happen on a more global scale, which according to Haidt cannot be explained by cultural differences, geography, economic or political events, or even the global financial crisis. The unprecedented rise between 2010 and 2015 is a sudden, synchronized, international increase in adolescent mental illness that hit multiple developed nations simultaneously.

What he calls “The Great Rewiring” refers to the period between 2010-2015 when the social lives of American teens moved largely onto smartphones with continuous access to social media, video games, and internet-based activities. This Great Rewiring of Childhood is what Haidt considers the single largest reason for the wave of adolescent mental illness that began in the early 2010s.

I had already read Haidt’s The Righteous Mind before (covered later in this post), so I was familiar with his analytical approach to psychological and social phenomena. But this book really hit different because it’s about something we’re all witnessing in real time.

💡 Haidt proposes what he calls the “four foundational reforms” to protect kids from this mess:

  1. No smartphones before high school: Give kids only basic phones (calls, texts, maps, music) until around age 14
  2. No social media before 16: Let their brains develop first before exposing them to the comparison and validation-seeking that social media creates
  3. Phone-free schools: Schools should have phone lockers or pouches so kids can actually focus and interact with each other
  4. More independence and free play: Let kids go outside, explore, take risks, and figure things out without constant adult supervision

What really stuck with me was his “Mars experiment” comparison. He calls giving smartphones to Gen Z “the largest uncontrolled experiment humanity has ever performed on its own children.” It’s like we sent them to grow up on Mars - the smartphone/social media environment is fundamentally unsuited to human child development. Tech companies basically conducted this experiment without research, safety protocols, parental consent, prioritizing market dominance over child safety (just like tobacco and oil companies did with leaded gasoline).

📚 The Righteous Mind #

Jonathan Haidt — Goodreads

This book completely changed how I think about politics and moral disagreements. Haidt’s main argument is pretty radical: we don’t think our way to moral conclusions - we feel our way there first, and then our rational mind tries to justify what we already “know” is right. He calls this the “elephant and the rider”: Your emotions are the elephant (massive and in control), while your rational mind is just the tiny rider on top, desperately trying to steer.

Here’s how each part works:

The elephant (your emotional system):

The rider (your reasoning mind):

Why this matters for moral disagreements:

The most eye-opening part was Haidt’s “Moral Foundations Theory.” He argues that while liberals mainly care about harm/care and fairness/justice, conservatives have a broader moral palette that includes loyalty/betrayal, authority/respect, and sanctity/degradation. This explains why conservatives often seem to be speaking a completely different moral language. When progressives focus solely on harm and fairness, they’re only hitting 2 out of 5 moral “taste buds” that many people have.

What really got me was his research on “WEIRD” people (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic). Most moral psychology research has been done on college students, but when you study people from different cultures, you discover that our liberal, individualistic moral framework is actually the weird one globally. Most humans care deeply about group loyalty, respecting authority, and protecting sacred values - not just individual rights and harm prevention.

The book’s structure follows three main parts:

Overall a quite complex book, which took me a while to read. In order to understand Haidt’s positions better I might just watch some Youtube videos.

Lifestyle and Gardening #

📚 Kleine Freiheit Garten #

Janine Sommer — Goodreads• Notes

This German gardening book turned out to be exactly what I needed: A practical, month-by-month guide that treats gardening as both sustainable practice and personal freedom.

What I loved most was the realistic, relaxed approach: “Du musst generell nichts im Garten anbauen, was du nicht gerne isst” (You don’t have to grow anything you don’t like to eat). For example the author admits that mangold doesn’t grow well for them and they’ve never successfully harvested red beets.

The book is structured around a practical garden calendar from March (starting seeds on the windowsill) through the winter months (minimal care and planning for next year). Each month has specific tasks, checklists, and seasonal wisdom. March is about anticipation and planning, April is the first “real” garden month, May focuses on weed management, summer months emphasize watering and harvesting, and autumn prepares for winter dormancy.

For someone who absolutely had no clue about gardening, this was a quite good start.

Le Fin #

This completes my reading journey for April through December 2025 where I focus on my own read books spanning politics, philosophy, psychology, history, and spirituality.

You can check out all the books I’ve rated on my Goodreads profile. I also maintain a to-read list with books that I plan to read in the future.