An Uneventful Weekend

We didn't do too much this past weekend: I guess that after a week and a half of doing something every single day from morning to night, we were ready to sit around.

Still, we got around: I investigated the English-language book market, we celebrated the enlargement of the European Union, and we each finished a book about ancient conspiracies.

On Saturday, I decided to cross off an item that'd been on my to-do list for a while and check out The English Bookshop, a store near the Holstenstraße S-Bahn stop that supposedly offered a good selection of used English-language books. It appears in just about every guidebook I've seen; after just a few minutes, I had to wonder if any of those guidebook authors had actually been there. The store occupies three adjacent storefronts on the same street; each individual shop was dirty and dishevelled in that seedy-used-bookstore way. I didn't linger too long; not only could I not find a book under five Euro (even among a stack of battered and sun-faded Penguin Classic paperbacks), the store was testing my fear of death -- either I'd pull the wrong book out of a stack and bury myself, or would perish in a fire started by rogue sparks from the eight or nine plugs protruding from every electrical outlet. For extra wierdness, an English food store co-existed with the bookshop, so you had a box full of marmelade jars sitting on the floor in front of the true-crime paperbacks, and bottles of shandy sharing a shelf with a stack of National Geographics.

I made up for the disappointment of The English Bookshop by checking out another bookstore, this one selling new English-language books, and was pleasantly surprised -- not only did they have a good selection, but they also don't try to nail you on the Pound-Euro or Dollar-Euro exchange rate. A mystery: this shop (and others we've visited) was selling new paperback copies of The DaVinci Code, with a cover price in dollars and the imprint of an American publisher -- but you can't find the paperback for sale in the USA! Are they dumping these overseas while they milk the American hardcover market for as long as they can? (Similarly, you can buy trade-paperback copies of Neal Stephenson's latest two books, Quicksilver and The Confusion, over here, even though the second book has just been released! They're no bargain, however -- the paperback copies cost 23 Euro a piece because they weigh fifteen pounds each. Other people seem to like them, but I worry that this is the series where Neal Becomes Too Famous For An Editor Who Says No.)

On Saturday night, we went to a food-drink-and-culture fair held in the plaza in front of the Rathaus. The European Union will be getting larger soon, and this was a state-sponsored chance for us to celebrate our EU bretheren and soon-to-be-bretheren. Booths sold food, drink, and handicrafts from the various countries, bureaucrats tried to hand out pamphlets nobody was interested in, and a couple of stages provided music. Shelby and I chose to celebrate by drinking German beer and eating Italian pizza and garlic bread. Scout came along, too; for the number of potentially stimulating things going on around her, she was a very good dog -- just sat next to our table and waited patiently as we finished our food.

On Sunday, we just lazed around and read -- Shelby finished The DaVinci Code (not one of those paperbacks, but a hardcover that had come over as her dad's on-the-plane reading material), while I finished Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum, a book that came to my attention after several DaVinci Code reviews referred to Eco's book as "the thinking man's DaVinci Code". Both books involve the Knights Templar, conspiracies, and Deep Secrets kept across the centuries. I can't speak to Shelby's reading experience, but I found Foucault's Pendulum to be suitably gripping, despite being incredibly dense throughout (with a near-constant flow of historical references, both conventional and esoteric, it was able to make me feel significantly undereducated much of the time; however, I suspect part of the flood is meant to create the mood that the conspiracy theorist feels when he is Decoding the Plan -- that everyone has gotten into the act).