Why did I pick these books (1 of 10)?

Being a German, I have also picked one book by a German, Daniel Kehlmann. I will read this book in German of course (Die Vermessung der Welt), however, it is also available in English: Measuring the World. What may make this book interesting for non-German readers is that it was picked by TIME Magazine to be included in its annual Books of the Year list for 2006, though - strangely enough - only in its European issue, dated Dec. 25, and not in its U.S. issue. Here are the lists of both issues:

U.S. edition:
Alison Bechdel: Fun Home
Lawrence Wright: The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11
Cormac McCarthy: The Road
Bill Bruford: Heat
Thomas E. Ricks: Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq
Richard Ford: The Lay of the Land
Gary Shteyngart: Absurdistan
Hampton Sides: Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West
David Mitchell: Black Swan Green
Dave Eggers: What is the What

European edition:
Jan Morris: Hav
Carmen Callil: Bad Faith: A Forgotten History of Family and Fatherland
Ngugi wa Thiong‘o: Wizard of the Crow
Seamus Heaney: District and Circle
Tahir Shah: The Caliph‘s House
Tove Jansson: Moomin: The Complete Tove Jansson Comic Strip
Ian Buruma: Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance
Peter Watson and Cecilia Todeschini: The Medici Conspiracy
Daniel Kehlmann: Measuring the World
Goerg Gerster: The Past from Above

The two lists are completely different. Here in Europe we are subscribing TIME Magazine to get the American point of view, but what we really get is that we have to satisfy ourselves with what we can also read in our own magazines. I have followed the TIME end-of-the-year lists since the late 1970s, but this is the first time I come across a specific European book list.

I have to admit that in the book store I already read a few pages. The book is so funny and such an easy read that I can imagine that I will finish this book first. A novel to be funny and easy to read is quite a feat for a German book because German authors have a big problem: they write in a grave style as this is the easiest way to hide that they have nothing to tell. However, once in a while a gem comes up, and then it is always a bestseller which stays on top of the bestseller list for months. Other examples are Patrick Suesskind's Perfume or Sten Nadolny's Discovery of Slowness. All these books are historical books. You get the point: if they write about things other than themselves, they create good literature (one exception I would like to highlight: Thomas Bernhard).

Here is TIME‘s portrait of Measuring the World:

The year is 1828, and mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss has just met explorer and natural scientist Alexander von Humboldt in Berlin. This is where Kehlmann begins the life stories of the two eminent German scientists, but what happens after that is as much comedy as biography. Kehlmann writes the men as comically eccentric, sometimes tyrannical and, yet, not wholly unlikable. While Humboldt travels the world, Gauss prefers to journey into the depths of mathematics. Gauss loves women and Humboldt is curiously asexual. But the two contemporaries are united by their fanatical quest to explore the secrets of the universe. Gauss even abandons his new bride at a climactic moment on their wedding night when he has a sudden idea. Kehlmann has an overabundant imagination, but he's also a thorough researcher, which makes this an engrossing, enjoyable mix of fact and fiction. Sometimes hilarious, sometimes heartbreaking, Measuring the World manages to be both clever and entertaining, which is a science unto itself.