January in Books

On December 31st, I posted a wrap-up of all the books I have read in 2021 copied from my GoodReads dashboard. I always had a couple of friends asking for book recommendations (which is why I posted the wrap-up), but I never imagined that 50+ people would get interested, asking to post these more frequently. I thought that titles alone are not too useful, so I decided that every month I will post books from this month along with a couple of sentences. The order is chronological (time when I finished the book). Enjoy :)

PS: It may seem I read a lot, but in fact I mostly listen to audiobooks. I run ca. 2hrs a a day, which makes me a true power-user of Audible. In January I listened for more than 80 hours. Thus the number of books.

PPS: I am Polish and some books are in Polish, not translated. I include them all for the benefit of people who can read in Polish. Possibly, most people who ever read this post will be Polish, but English is just easier for me. Licentia poetica ;)

1. Heike Geissler, Seasonal Associate

4/5

Heike is a seasoned German journalist, who takes on a temporary position in Amazon. It might semm like a topic that you have already heard everything about and do not need anymore, but Heike is a great storyteller-journalist and her observations about people at Amazon apply to the world and life more broadly than the company itself. Read it if you are into fly-on-the-wall kind of non-fiction, Kapuściński style.

2. Ewa Kempisty-Jeznach, Chorzy ze stresu. Problemy psychosomatyczne

3/5

Ewa is a Polish doctor who set up a practice in Germany and she is masterful in explaining how the body and mind (and the soul) are connected, using the lens of her various patients with various conditions. The books gets too medical-technical at certain points, but that’s probably appreciated by the more “sciencey” readers. Read it if you are into holistic medicine.

3. Christopher Wylie, Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America

5/5

OMG I loved it, though now I am truly scared of how nothing on the Internet is real, really. A Cambridge Analytica insider tells the story of how the company came to be, why he left, how Trump and Boris…