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other travel books, which tend to rely too heavily on photographs, they allow a relatively large amount of space for description, prose essays, historical background, literary quotations or reproductions of artworks, that kind of thing. In spite of the practical information which they also contained, the Baedekers provided more pleasure and fulfillment than many other books, the kind that are light on intelligence and stuffed full with hyperbole. But unfortunately Joachim’s Baedekers were all ones I also owned, or else had previously read somewhere. I wanted to read something properly, not just in order to pass the time at the café, so I relaxed my budget and went to a bookshop in the city center. There, I chose three books. The first was Kafka’s The Castle ; I’ve no idea why I chose it. Not only had I already read it a long time ago, but I hadn’t even found it all that interesting when I did. Perhaps I bought it because when I discovered it in the bookshop it made me remember theMax Anderson comics I’d read the last time I was in Berlin. I hadn’t been studying German for very long when I read them; there was a scene where the heroine, Akina, gets a call in the middle of the night demanding that she reads The Castle . She has to stay up all night to finish it, and after that she’s told she has to read Crime and Punishment. But for some reason or other I couldn’t concentrate on The Castle. I think at first I’d been a bit daunted, but contrary to my preconceptions it wasn’t particularly difficult, in fact I was quite surprised by how simple some of the sentences seemed. But that didn’t help me focus on it. I was determined to read it the whole way through, but in the end I found I couldn’t manage it so I left it at Joachim’s house, along with a brief note saying that I hoped he would read it; he didn’t, of course. The two other books I bought were People Who Read Books and Forms of Human Coexistence. I read them when I’d begun to tire of my usual routine of eating breakfast at the café, taking the tram to the park, being unable to sleep at night, watching television, listening to music etc. Of course, I wasn’t reading them very carefully, and I set them aside whenever turning the pages became too much of an effort. Later, I occasionally bumped into people who had read People Who Read Books ; naturally, when I said I liked reading, they were quick to recommend it to me. Some of them were able to appreciate good writing, but not the majority, and in fact many of them had a taste in books that I would have scorned. I guessed that the reason they liked it was because of the closing section, which became sentimental as it aspired to tragedy. It had been a bestseller here, in the positive sense of the word. The writing certainly had a way of pulling you in. One day, when I’d just recently started the book, I took the tram late at night. I’d gone out late in the afternoon with no particular destination in mind, eaten Thai soup at a standing bar, listened to music at a late-opening vinyl record storeon Friederichstrasse, chosen a book at the bookshop, and was on my way home. I found an unoccupied seat on the tram, sat down, and opened People Who Read Books . It was very dark outside the window, so there was nothing to distract my concentration. I read on. Beautiful, arrestingly unfamiliar sentences appeared in front of me, vanishing into the darkness outside the window. Beautiful and complex, they frequently included words that were relatively new to me. I concentrated on each sentence one by one, and had to read them several times in order to understand how the many sub-clauses related to each other, using the context to try and work out the meaning of certain words. The further I pushed my way through the thorny thicket of the sentences, the more I faltered, and even found that I’d unwittingly been sounding out the words as I read