In a year marred with a pandemic, Marc Benioff of Salesforce being chosen the CNN CEO of the year is an example.

Having finished QualityLand (the dark edition, of course) I am surprised. Positively surprised. It is easy and fun to read, I understand why everyone praises it so highly and why my dad persistently urged me to read it.

Contrary to popular opinion, I would declare QualityLand a satire and not so much a dystopic novel. Marc-Uwe Kling has a very keen sense of language and he incorporates a number of great, innovative ideas with which he transforms our present-day world into the near-future society of QualityLand, where everyone is just a notch above our current level of being technology-crazy. The story is lovely in its simplicity: the Everyman Peter Arbeitsloser (which translates to Peter Jobless, I presume?) wants to return an item he neither ordered, nor wants to have, but which the algorithms in charge (because algorithms have basically taken over) refuse to take back, since they insist that Peter really wishes to have it, even though he himself doesn’t know it. And machines don’t make mistakes, right? Speaking of Peter Arbeitsloser; the idea of giving everyone the name of his/her parents’ job as a surname – *chef’s kiss*.

The world of QualityLand is constructed slowly and carefully, meaning that there is A LOT of exposition. I would even go this far and say that the first half of the book is mainly exposition setting up everything in order for the plot to be able evolve in the second half. But I really enjoyed reading the first half, it is funny, witty and even a bit scary once you start thinking about it. And once the plot starts, boy, does it move quickly. Overall good and smart writing with a lot of enjoyable German humour (when an Austrian says „German humour“ it is usually not a compliment, but in this case most of the jokes were indeed funny).

It is a matter of taste, but I did not enjoy the ending, I think it is a little rushed (especially in comparison to the slow pace in the beginning) and overloaded, because Kling felt the need to tie everything together in the last eleven pages, including the meta-level epilogue, which in my opinion was unnecessary.

My only real point of more or less objective criticism is that some explanatory passages were done really poorly. By that I specifically mean the parts in which most theories and principles that are used / parodied in the book (like Peter‘s Principle, game theory, Turing Test etc.) were explained in monologic straight up narration. You get the fact that Kling did quite a bit of research anyway by reading QualityLand and I hate it, when authors just throw a summary of what they found out about a certain topic directly in your face.

But apart from that, QualityLand is light fiction, that greatly entertains you while dealing with some serious underlying problems of our present-day world at the same time.

Hi, everybody!

I haven't posted anything in quite some time due to being busy af. I had to meet a couple of deadlines, I was also visiting my familiy for the first time in over two months (thanks to the whole Coronoa mayhem), I had to take my cat to the vet – you know, life happed.

Anyway. I am still reading Nostromo by Conrad and I am still a little sceptical about it, although it is growing on me (more on that in another post), but I had a four-hour train ride yesterday during which it was raining most of the time and I just was in the mood for something less serious. So I started reading Qualityland by Marc-Uwe Kling (additionally, my dad is a fan of it and he has been urging me to read it for the past 1,5 years) and I do not regret it – you are in for a fun review as soon as I am finished with it.

Book source ~ Purchased

Leonard Stark hasn’t left his house in years. He’s tried. Boy, has he tried, but he just can’t do it. Christmas is nearly upon him when one morning he sees a figure on his old porch couch. Bundled up against the cold and rain he doesn’t know if the person is a man or woman, young or old. When he hears a knock at his door he panics and tells whoever it is to go away. But the voice is persistent. She (he’s pretty sure it’s a she) pleads to use his bathroom before moving along. Leonard finally gives in and it’s the biggest step he’s taken in a long time. Little does he know that it’s Eve’s biggest step, too.

This is quick read that will both wring your heart and warm it. Leonard and Eve have been through some pretty rough stuff, but their tentative friendship grows in a very short time. Maybe because they both desperately needed someone to believe in them. Sometimes, it only takes a small gesture to pull someone back from an edge you would never have known about and everyone’s story is worth hearing.

[I received a copy through NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.]

A pretty informative read on what’s going on in our brains, I found this book to be a good introduction to the topic: it doesn’t go too deep into complex science, but it also provides enough to be interesting even if, like me, you already know a little. What I already knew was there, so that’s consolidated knowledge for me, and what I didn’t, well, now I have new things to mull over.

On top of anatomy, the author also covers current (and past) research about the brain—apparently, there was a time when people found it OK to experiment on dogs’ brains without anaesthetising the poor pups—as well as brain chemistry and pharmacology. Several case studies, usually found at the beginning of each chapter, illustrate each topic, the latter ranging from language to memory, from addiction to fear, and more. The part about sleep especially interested me, due to my own difficulties with that—I knew that I shouldn’t drink coffee too late in the day (in my family, we used to say “never after 1 pm”) but now I also know that it’s because of caffeine’s long half-life, and putting numbers on this definitely helps enforce the point.

One mistake I made with this book, though, was to not always read it at the right moments. So don’t be like me, don’t read it right before bed when you’re already half-asleep. It won’t do it justice. (I basically had to read a couple of chapters again the next day to make sure I’d get everything. It’s not complicated writing or concepts, but that’s on a fully awake brain, right!)

Conclusion: A strong “introduction”, that actually also has good nuggets for people who have some knowledge on the topic.