…but Hans Diller is alive

A complete list of all the books I've read in my reading club

The purpose of this page is mostly personal, but may also act as inspiration for anyone looking for a good (or bad) book to read :)

Roughly every second month, I meet with my friends Morten, Mikkel, Klaus, and Jeff to discuss a book we've read. And maybe have a beer. We have a reading club called "…men Hans Diller lever".

The name comes from a piece of graffiti at the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Copenhagen, where all students and teachers have a collective crush on Michel Foucault. Possibly in a somewhat odd attempt to mock the humanists, someone wrote, with huge letters in front of the entrance, "FOUCAULT IS GAY". Later, "IS" was edited to "WAS" to clarify that he had died, and even later someone added "MEN HANS DILLER LEVER", which is both a dull joke (meaning "but his willie is alive" in Danish) and a reference to the little-known German classical scholar and historian Hans Diller. That's meta-humanity-humour for ya.

Photo credit: daamcrew 4.

These are the books we've read.

For sorting reasons, dates are written as yyyy/mm/dd. Country codes follow FIFA's country codes.

We also rated them on a scale from 0 to 5. The ratings shows the mean and spread (standard deviation, i.e. how much we agreed/disagreed on the rating). Because I like statistics, below the table you'll find a summary of how our readings are distributed according to various parameters.

Date	Author	Country	Title	Year	Pages	Stars	Spread
2023.02.10	Helle Helle	DEN	Hafni fortæller	2023	180	(currently reading)
2023.12.16	Mary Shelly	ENG	Frankenstein	1818	240	3.5	±0.9
2023.11.03	Virginie Despentes	FRA	Vernon Subutex	2019	327	4.2	±0.4
2023.08.11	Tove Ditlevsen	DEN	A Child was hurt	1941	168	4.1	±0.2
2023.06.17	John Fante	USA	Ask the Dust	1939	202	3.6	±0.2
2023.04.06	Göran Tunström	SWE	The Christmas Oratorio	1983	326	3.6	±0.6
2023.10.02	Édouard Louis	FRA	The End of Eddy	2014	220	4.2	±0.2
2023.14.01	Gustave Flaubert	FRA	Madame Bovary	1857	432	1.9	±0.7
2022.11.04	Luke Rhinehart	USA	The Dice Man	1971	477	1.2	±0.8
2022.08.26	Margaret Atwood	CAN	The Handmaid's Tale	1985	311	3.1	±0.4
2022.06.02	Jennifer Egan	USA	A Visit from the Goon Squad	2010	293	4.0	±0.0
2022.03.09	Hans Kirk	DEN	De ny tider	1939	211	3.2	±0.5
2022.01.08	Lone Frank	DEN	Størst af alt	2020	292	3.3	±0.7
2021.10.29	Jack Kerouac	USA	On the Road	1957	285	2.9	±1.1
2021.08.14	Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa	ITA	The Leopard	1958	247	2.7	±0.8
2021.06.12	William Golding	ENG	Lord of the Flies	1954	196	3.1	±0.9
2021.04.03	Ray Bradbury	USA	The Martian Chronicles	1950	192	3.2	±0.8
2021.04.03	Alistair MacLean	SCO	Where Eagles Dare	1967	166	2.9	±0.7
2021.01.30	Vladimir Nabokov	USA	Lolita	1955	307	4.1	±0.4
2020.11.21	Halldór Laxness	ISL	Salka Valka	1931	373	3.0	±0.6
2020.09.18	Laurence Sterne	ENG	The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman	1759	588	2.7	±0.6
2020.05.30	José Saramago	POR	Blindness	1995	284	4.1	±0.4
2020.04.04	Iain M. Banks	SCO	The Wasp Factory	1984	232	4.0	±0.0
2020.02.11	Arto Paasilinna	FIN	The Year of the Hare	1975	183	3.5	±0.8
2019.12.27	Siri Hustvedt	USA	The Blazing World	2014	434	3.8	±0.5
2019.10.26	Isaac Asimov	USA	Caves of Steel	1953	214	1.7	±0.2
2019.08.09	Sophus Helle og Morten Søndergaard (overs.)	SUM	Gilgamesh	-2100	140	3.8	±0.8
2019.05.11	Brett Easton Ellis	USA	Less than zero	1985	163	2.8	±0.7
2019.02.08	F. Scott Fitzgerald	USA	The Great Gatsby	1925	171	2.6	±1.0
2018.11.24	Günther Grass	GER	The Tin Drum	1959	555	1.5	±0.9
2018.08.24	Peter Adolphsen	DEN	Rynkekneppesygen	2017	245	3.6	±0.2
2018.06.02	Ourselves	DEN	We wrote our own short stories	2018	018	5.0	±0.0
2018.04.07	Svend Aage Madsen	DEN	Between Heaven and Earth	1990	208	4.1	±0.2
2018.02.17	Louis-Ferdinand Céline	FRA	Death on Credit	1936	508	4.9	±0.2
2017.12.15	Karen Blixen	DEN	Seven Gothic Tales	1934	500	2.3	±0.8
2017.10.06	Erich Maria Remarque	GER	All Quiet on the Western Front	1929	202	4.3	±0.2
2017.07.18	Jens Blendstrup	DEN	Slagterkoner og Bagerenker	2016	418	4.2	±0.2
2017.04.08	Jan Sonnergaard	DEN	Radiator and other short stories	1997	221	3.8	±0.7
2017.02.10	H. P. Lovecraft	USA	The Call of Cthulhu and other short stories	1928	117	4.0	±1.0
2016.11.19	John le Carré	ENG	The Spy Who Came in from the Cold	1963	225	2.2	±0.2
2016.08.26	Peter Madsen	DEN	The Book of Job (comic book version)	-450	104	1.0	±0.4
2016.08.26	Virginia Woolf	ENG	To the Lighthouse	1927	210	2.5	±0.4
2016.07.10	Aksel Sandemose	DEN	A Fugitive Crosses his Tracks	1933	425	4.0	±1.0
2016.05.14	Morten Pape	DEN	Planen	2015	557	4.3	±0.4
2016.02.19	Orhan Pamuk	TUR	The White Castle	1985	160	3.6	±0.2
2015.12.05	Thomas Pynchon	USA	Bleeding Edge	2013	519	0.4	±0.2
2015.10.10	Dan Turèll	DEN	Vangede Billeder	1975	193	3.6	±0.4
2015.08.28	Harper Lee	USA	To Kill a Mocking Bird	1960	307	3.2	±0.2
2015.05.14	Michel Houellebecq	FRA	The Map and the Territory	2010	312	4.5	±0.3
2015.03.13	Joseph Conrad	POL	Heart of Darkness	1899	128	2.9	±0.5
2015.01.30	Fjodor Dostojevskij	RUS	Notes from Underground	1864	166	4.3	±0.4
2014.12.06	Charles Dickens	ENG	A Tale of Two Cities	1859	440	2.9	±0.4
2014.09.27	Gabriel García Marquéz	COL	One Hundred Years of Solitude	1967	308	2.5	±0.6
2014.06.21	Knut Hamsun	NOR	Hunger	1890	108	4.5	±0.3
2014.06.21	Lewis Carroll	ENG	Alice In Wonderland	1865	140	3.4	±0.5
2014.04.17	John Steinbeck	USA	East Of Eden	1952	579	4.0	±0.0
2014.03.22	Ernest Hemingway	USA	The Old Man and the Sea	1952	112	3.0	±0.0

Diller statistics

The following sections show some statistics of the books we've read, our ratings, etc.

The figures and the underlying analysis are coded in Python, and will be updated after each meeting.

Our general enthusiasm of the the books we've read are distributed as shown above. Median values are shown in the box, along with uncertainties given by the 16th and 84th percentiles. Although we typically rate around the 4 stars, the distributions are asymmetrically skewed toward lower ratings, pulling down the average (and to a lesser degree the median).

Considering the average and 1σ standard deviations as a function of time, the picture emerges that, over time, we've been more in disagreement (that is, the error bars increase with time), although perhaps we've been better at avoiding books that we all dislike (except for a dip with The Dice Man and Madame Bovary, which were rather horrible).

On average, the books we read had 282±141 pages. This average is, however, pulled somewhat up by a few (much too) long books, although our own novels pull it down again.

The median and 16/84 percentiles of the number of pages is \(232_{-71}^{+206}\), and the full distribution is seen on the histogram above, where I've binned the number of pages in intervals of 50 pages.

This plot shows a histogram of the year of publication of the books we've read. Note the discontinuous x axis, so designed in order to show Gilgamesh (earliest inscriptions date back to at least 2100 f.Kr.), The Book of Job (most estimates are "between the 7th and the 3rd century B.C."; although we read the graphic novel version from 1999), and Tristram Shandy (1759–1767).

This pie chart of the distribution of the nationalities of the authors shows (not surprisingly) an overabundance of Danish authors, and perhaps also not so surprisingly multiple American and British authors. These are the nationalities that we're mostly exposed to, but we do try to diversify our choice og books somewhat, and roughly 1/3 is spanning multiple nationalities.

Country codes follow FIFA's country codes.

The distribution of the author's gender is not entirely up to scratch…

The little blue segment is due to my lack of knowledge regarding the authors of Gilgamesh and the Book of Job.

The last figure shows a correlation plot of the number of characters i the Danish and English titles, respectively. The dashed line shows the \(n_\mathrm{Dan} = n_\mathrm{Eng}\) line. The fact that most points lie above this line implies that Danes are better at being brief and concise.