Reading...

The "111 places..." book is great for gee-ing up my German - I get the gist, but don't know the meaning of some the words ... these are the perils of being a "native speaker" but having your schooling in the non-native language ... your vocabulary remains under-developed.

"Stuff" by Daniel Miller is fascinating. "Things make us just as we make things" says the back cover - this is a book about material culture, written by an anthropologist. Miller talks about the "feeling" of wearing a sari - it's an asymmetical garment, needing constant adjustment (to suit physical and social situations), quite different from western garments. And he talks of how garments worn in Madrid and London define the wearer in different ways. Now I'm into the theory chapter, with Miller's renegade explanations of Bourdieu, Levi-Strauss, Hegel (ah, Hegel!), Marx, Simmel - it's definitely a roller-coaster ride.

"The Ghosts of Berlin", on a quick flip-through, looks extremely interesting. "Confronting German history in the urban landscape" is the subtitle - isn't that what we want to know about - the wider context of the history of a place - as we move from one place to another? What has disappeared, and what remains; how things have changed, and why. Lots of pictures. Looking forward to getting stuck in to this one. Fantasies of reading in cafes.....