Books You Can't Miss (001)

A new series on Every Dawn

Welcome Back to Every Dawn

Hello and welcome back to Every Dawn. I want to start a new series of videos that will be longer than what we had until now. You know, originally I was making these longer, 8 to 10-minute ones, and then I changed them to 3 minutes because YouTube has these three-minute shorts. And so these videos are supposed to be distributed to more viewers, and I thought this would be a good idea to promote our channel by having more people see these videos as shorts. But now I feel that the short videos are perhaps a little too short. I mean, it's good for a daily inspiration, but in the long run, if you want to have some understanding of philosophy, if you want to have some real inspiration that goes beyond the sound bite, then it is better to have a slightly longer form in which to do this.

The Importance of Books in My Life

Another thing is that something I never talk about in these videos is that my life has always been full of books. When I moved to Hong Kong, where I live now, from Germany, I had with me around 3,000 books that I shipped here. And then, of course, I kept buying books, so now I must have around 4,000. You see some of them behind me, but this is already a place that we cleaned up specifically so that I can make these videos because everywhere else there's no space. So what this means is that a big part of my life are books, and I want to talk about books because this is one of my favorite topics. This is what my life is about and has been about for 30 years, 40 years, since I was 16, 20. This is where I started reading books regularly, living with them, and living through them also because I identified with these characters in the novels I read, and I wanted to be like them. And these books had a huge influence on my own life.

Sharing My Love for Books

Now that I'm getting older, I feel that I have all these worlds inside me—all these different books that live in me—and I want to share this. I want to share this with you, but I also want to share this with my children who perhaps will not have the time in our modern world like I had it. You know, when I was young, we didn't have smartphones; I didn't have a TV. I still don't have a TV, but now we have YouTube. So my life was much more quiet then my children's lives are now. I went out to play on the street, football with my cousins perhaps twice or three times a week, and the rest of the time I was in my room having nothing to do. I was reading books and also as a student, you know, when I was studying in the mid-80s, we still did not have mobile phones. If you wanted to talk to your friends, you had to essentially visit them because also nobody as a student had their own phone—you know, landline. So we would just walk around and go visit people and then talk to them. And if the weather was bad or if you didn't want to walk around too much, then you just stayed home and you were alone and you did your thing. And since I didn't have a TV, you know, the thing to do was to read a book. So these books were hugely influential to me.

Books in the Modern World

But I see that for my children, this is not the same because they grow up in a world that has YouTube, and we are even promoting YouTube to them because we think that it is better. You know, if we guide them in the use of media so that they see something valuable on YouTube like a documentary or something they can learn from—all these educational channels about science. So these are the kinds of things we like to show them, and in this way, we hope to steer them a little bit in the direction of having some discerning ability of choosing, you know, good content rather than some stupid gameplay videos. So I mean, it works with varying degrees of success obviously as every parent would know, but this is still the plan.

Introducing Books to My Children and You

And so now I feel that these books that were so important to me, I often don't have an opportunity to give them to my children with the expectation that they will read them because it is just too difficult for a child today. I see they don't have any time. When they come from school, you know, they're almost always at school all day. When they come from school, it's you know, afternoon, it's perhaps 4, 5, 6:00 in the afternoon. Sometimes other activities go until 8 or 9. Then essentially, they can just eat and go to bed again. And even if they finish school early, they still have to do a lot of homework. So there is really not much time to read long books in the way that I used to read them when I was at school or later when I was a student at University.

Sharing Inspirational Books

And so what I want to do with these videos—these longer videos—is also to perhaps give them some ideas for books that are worth reading, that are fun to read, that are educational, that are instructional, that are just, you know, enriching one's life. I don't want to make it educational in the sense of, you know, you suffer through your education—what is often what school is—but I want to show them and I want to share with you books that are really great, that are really fun, that really give you a totally different image of what it means to be a human being, to live a human life, to think the thoughts that humans can have that perhaps some of us have, some of us don't have because we have different lives and experiences.

My Life Through Books

Many of my experiences are experiences that are made through books because my own life has not been adventurous. You know, I'm a philosopher. I went to school, I went to University, I traveled a little bit as a young person around Europe like everybody does, taking a few trains here and there to see different cities. But you know, I never went to India to live in an Indian village. I never went to Africa. I never even visited you know the Americas or the United States. I went twice to Japan as a grownup now, you know, in the past 5 years. So I didn't do anything exotic in my life, and I just studied and then, you know, more or less I became a programmer for many many years, 20 years, and then after that, I became a philosopher. And so now, here I am, being a YouTuber. So there was some excitement in my life of course, but it is not like I lived through, you know, revolutions, catastrophic events, whatever. And I'm happy that I did not because these are not always the most pleasant things to happen to someone.

Introducing Important Books

Back to the books, what I wanted to say is that in this series, I will give you one book every time of the books that were really important to me. So these are books that I think no one should miss reading because these are books that will enhance your life, that will make your life richer and more beautiful and deeper and will give you a much better understanding of what it means to be human. And perhaps you know some of these books, I'm confident that you will not know all of them or you will not even perhaps know many of them because I am originally a German living in Germany. So many of these books are German books. Now here we are in an English language YouTube channel with most viewers being in the UK and in the US, so I guess that perhaps most of you will not know German authors that were very important to me and that I think are really worth reading.

Beyond the Usual Suspects

So we will talk less about the people you have already talked about in your secondary school, let's say in your English studies. You probably had to read, you know, Hemingway and Kerouac and all these people. And although these are also important to me and I do have all their books somewhere here—Fitzgerald of course, I mean these are beautiful books—but often for me, there have been German books that were more important than those English language books. And so yeah, I will present some of these books to you, and I hope that you will find this interesting. I cannot do this every day, of course, so I will still do the short videos every day, and then this kind of thing with books, we will do perhaps once a week. It might also be a little more infrequent if it so happens that, you know, something else is happening in my life, but more or less, you know, weekly I hope that I can manage this.

The Spirit of Every Dawn

And the videos will be in the same spirit like this year, so we are not going to become a book channel. The videos will be in the same spirit of Every Dawn—inspiration, books that are inspirational, that are motivating, uplifting, sometimes tragic but always worth reading. And I hope that you will stick with me and perhaps even you know, share these videos with others and that we will have fun together. So thank you, I will stop here now. I will not immediately put the first book after that because I also don't want these videos to become too long. You should not be sitting here three hours listening to me droning on about a book.

I will give you the next book in the next video, and I hope that you will enjoy it and I hope that you will come back. Thank you, and see you next time.