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Browsing my children’s shelves, I understand how the books we read make us who we are It’s why we keep books, isn’t it, for the little ghosts of our past selves contained within? We’re having a book clear-out, partly triggered by the youngest, who has been home over Easter and decided to finally rid his room of all the books I have forced on him since childhood. At least, that’s probably how he views it. He was never an avid reader, despite having loved bedtime stories when he was small. As he grew, he drifted away from books, finding that they couldn’t quite hold his attention. Too many other things were more immediate, more distracting.
Durs Grünbein’s The Bars of Atlantis
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010
Despite its brief history, East Germany held potent sway over the Western imagination
Despite its brief history, East Germany held potent sway over the Western imagination; “athletes, spies and writers were three things they seemed worryingly good at producing” as Michael Hofmann put it. Escape artists also belong on that list. Thanks to the steady stream of emigration, the GDR had lost over three million citizens by 1991. In retaliation, the Eastern authorities radically altered their half of Berlin until it was virtually unrecognisable. Aside from the fortifications around the Wall, streets on the red side of the Spree were widened into colossal thoroughfares, or “pure marching zones for the military or the police” as Grünbein writes in “Breaking The Body,” one of the essays in