Hannover

Today we went to a bigass bookstore in Hannover; it was something like four or five floors, plus a café. I did a damn near forensic analysis of the place; although the selection was excellent (they had multiple copies of the Cryptonomicon!), I couldn't find anything by Ayn Rand. (That goes for amazon.de as well - if gold rust, what then will iron do?) No wonder there's so much socialism here.

I got two books, myself. I didn't want to spend too much money (I'm saving it for a Prague bookstore, my money will go further anyway) and I only wanted to buy things in the original German. I got a book called Der Dativ ist dem Genitiv sein Tod. It's essentially the German counterpart of Eats Shoots and Leaves; that is, it talks about the quirks of the "labyrinth of the German language." Der, die, das - warum, wieso, weshalb? The other book is by Andreas von Bülow, the former German defense minister; it's about the CIA's role in the September 11th attacks. Mr. Bülow has been interviewed twice now on the Alex Jones show, and I couldn't pass up the opportunity to buy this book.

There was a lot of interesting stuff there; they had a seventeen volume history of Germany, for instance. I looked in their Travel section ("Reise"); a Lonely Planet guidebook to Prague (in English!) listed a bunch of bookstores, two of which are (a) absolutely gigantic, (b) located in Wenceslas Square, and (c) replete with Czech-language books. I'll probably walk into the first one I can find and spend about ten thousand dollars.