The most important ingredient for a journey such as this is a good selection of books. Instead of carefully choosing, I picked three out of five of my books more or less at random in a Hamburg bookstore five minutes before closing time. Seemed to have worked. I enjoyed all of them. Here's the list, in order of reading:

• I know You Got Soul, Jeremy Clarkson. Penguin Books (2006), ISBN 0-141-02292-2.

• Easier Fatherland. Germany and the twenty-first century, Steve Crawshaw. Continuum International (2005), ISBN 0-8264-7617-1.

• Pattern Recognition, William Gibson. Berkley (2005), ISBN 0-425-19868-5.

• Raus aus der Provinz, Daniel Oliver Bachmann. Ullstein (2006), ISBN 3-548-26494-8.

• A History of Venice, John Julius Norwich. Vintage (1989), ISBN 0-679-72197-8.