I noticed that in the Recent Reading list over left Geert Mak's In Europe: Travels Through the Twentieth Century is about to slip off. That's a shame for two reasons. One is that I haven't finished the book yet. I got up to page 732, a little more than 100 shy of the end, before I had to put it down to deal with some books that I had picked up on 14-day loan from the library. I'm still in that pile, dealing with them as briskly as I can, and I've just picked up Ahmed Rashid's Descent Into Chaos: The US and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia, which seems likely to be one of the more important books of the year. Also have some things that I bought that I'm itching to get into, like James K Galbraith: The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too, and Thomas Frank: The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule. (Also on order are: Arno J Mayer: Ploughshares Into Swords: From Zionism to Israel, and Andrew J Bacevich: The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism. So I have plenty on my plate.

The other reason it's a shame is that I've simply gotten more pure pleasure out of Mak's book than any other book I've read this year. It's a travel book across Europe during the fin de siècle year of 1999 to a series of spots selected for what they reveal of the serial history of Europe from 1900 on. Part of the book consists of interviews with witnesses and actors, as interesting as Studs Terkel. Part is a survey of what survived and what did not. Most is relevant history. It's not purely sequential, especially in the thickly eventful interwar years. And it doesn't get to everywhere -- I would have expected a bit on the pre-1914 Balkan Wars. (Post-Tito Yugoslavia might still be in the last 100 pages.) But it's a magnificent book, revelatory, a real delight. I can hardly wait to get back to it.