2017-12-06
Why i never got into reading books
Since my parents native language is not German and i didn't learn to read Chinese, i never got into liking to read books for fun. I was only at school forced to consume a lot of literature, especially in the last three years at the Oberstufe from 2003 to 2006. For my Abitur at the Gesamtschule in Bad Godesberg, i had to choose "Deutsch" as advanced course, which made me enjoy "The Tin Drum" by writer Günter Grass, who i photographed many times at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2009 and 2010. Since 1998, i was already reading and writing a lot through coding on the computer, just by learning and doing it, or the other way around: I developed and run a variety of messaging and publishing platforms on the web. And since around 2005, i had with Google Reader a powerful RSS tool in my hands. At the peak, i was subscribed to over 600 blogs.
After Google discontinued it in 2013, i moved over to the RSS Reader by AOL. I removed dead sources and still had over 500 blogs filling my stream with things relating to life on Earth: It's a lot more personal than only reading posts from large magazines. With the years, i refined the incoming articles and got down to around 400 sources. In December 2017, AOL announced to shut down their Reader, which made me clean up my subscriptions once again, to a total of over 200 blogs. And even with that lower number, every couple of minutes i get a handful of new articles loading into my stream. Instead of giving you all these RSS feeds i curated, which would go beyond the scope of this post, i publish here a complete list of my over 50 podcast subscriptions in iTunes, just to give you an idea:
Accidental Tech Podcast, America's Test Kitchen Radio, Arts and Ideas, Bookworm, Call Your Girlfriend, Common Sense with Dan Carlin, Cooking Issues, Current Geek, Dan Carlin's Hardcore History, DateFails with Kate Quigley, Disruption, Freakonomics Radio, Good Food, Good Life Project, Keith and The Girl comedy talk show, Ladies Who Lunch, Lady Lovin, LadyGang, Let's Get Real, MacBreak Weekly, Material, Modern Love, No Agenda, Quit, Radiolab, Recode Decode hosted by Kara Swisher, Security Now, Story Grid Podcast, Strangers, Stuff You Missed in History Class, The Book Review, The Complete Guide to Everything, The Critical Path, The Dana Gould Hour, The Girls on Games Podcast, The IGN Movies Show, The Incomparable, The JV Club with Janet Varney, The Naked Scientists Podcast, The Nerdist, The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast, The Splendid Table, The Sporkful, The Sword and Laser, The Talk Show With John Gruber, The Writers Panel, This American Life, This Week in Google, This Week in Science, This Week in Tech, Totally Married, Triangulation, Truth & Iliza, WTF with Marc Maron Podcast, Weird Adults With Little Esther, Windows Weekly, and You Made It Weird with Pete Holmes.