Here are four recommended books, mostly influential for my writing/travelling.

The Road to Oxiana by Robert Byron (London: MacMillan & Co. Ltd, 1937)

A bible for my generation of travel writers. The account of a journey taken through Persia and Afghanistan in 1933-4. Structured as a random diary, this a brilliant mix of personal vignette, scholarship and descriptive writing.

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I’ve got some interesting books to share with you this month, as always.

We’ll also talk about what’s coming up.

And that’s about it. What can I say? I’m steaming ahead on all fronts, and I hope you’ll find something here that interests you.

(One correction from the video: I mentioned a writer c…

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Colin Thubron’s keenly observed travel writing has made him one of our greatest writers on place.

He drove through the western Soviet Union by car during the Brezhnev era, and ventured into the heart of Siberia after the collapse of Communism.

He explored China in the wake of its devastating Cultural Revolution, and the newly independent countries of Central Asia immediately after the fall of the USSR.

His most recent travel book took him down the river that divides Russia and China, a strange buffer zone on the distant fringes of troubled empires. It’s a territory haunted by land grabs and unequal treaties, and it might just form the next conflict zone of collapsing empire.

The scale of Thubron’s journeys is immense, but his lyrical books focus on the small and immediate. He writes about ordinary people whose lives were shaped by forces beyond their control.

He also shares stories of individuals on the fringes: radical Christian sects and animist shaman, Siberian poachers, gulag survivors, and cross-border traders.

I have an abiding fascination with empty landscapes and cultural borders, and I’ve long wanted to talk to Colin about his remote Asian travels.

Colin Thubron is the author of The Amur River, In Siberia, The Lost Heart of Asia, and many other travel books and novels. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages, and his list of awards is nearly as long as his bibliography.

We spoke about how Russia’s vast landscape shaped its psyche, Asia’s suspicious borderlands, and getting interrogated by the KGB.

These are the books we mentioned in the podcast:

• Among The Russians

• In Siberia

• The Lost Heart of Asia

• Behind the Wall: A Journey Through China

• The Amur River

Edo-era (1600’s) woodblock prints depict a Venetian world where goods were transported through the city by boat. Even the Yoshiwara ‘pleasure district’ was called the Floating World.

Apart from the stately Sumida flowing past Asakusa and into Tokyo Bay, where are all those little rivers today?

Many were diverted or channelled underground. The rest were controlled, clad in concrete to prevent the sort of floods that once plagued low lying areas. Most look more like drainage culverts than the rivers they actually are.

I’d been wondering for years about two particular rivers, the Kanda River that flows through canyons of buildings past Ochanomizu, and the Nihombashi River that I’d walked along so many times this year.

I finally had a chance to float down both of them last weekend. I put together a few photos and a couple videos to give you a sense of what they look like. It’s a hidden side of Tokyo that few visitors or residents ever see.

The journey began at a lovely riverside spot on the Sumida right next to Hamarikyu Gardens, previously the Tokugawa shogun’s private retreat.

We left the sheltered harbour at Takeshiba Waters and entered the Sumida River where it opens into Tokyo Bay.

I’d passed down a long stretch of the Sumida by ferry years ago, from Asakusa to a dock near the base of the Rainbow Bridge to the artificial island of Odaiba. The waterside view is fascinating, but it was of course the minor rivers that interested me.

When we first returned to Japan in February, my wife and I stayed in a short let apartment (a monthly mansion, in Japanese) near Kayabacho. I crossed a bridge over the Nihonbashi River, where it enters the Sumida, every time I went out. Sometimes I’d see a little working riverboat putting up it. I always wondered where that river led.

I sat up straighter when we turned to enter it, cruising under that same bridge and down the stretch of water I’d walked along so many times this year.

Beyond a second bridge, we encountered the elevated Metropolitan Expressway that we would travel beneath for most of the journey. In a city as congested as Tokyo, there wasn’t enough free space to build highways in 1962 and so they raised them up and followed the rivers.

I’d seen the massive pillars of the Inner Circular Route CI beneath one of the Shuto Expressway’s junctions near the Kayabacho neighbourhood where we stayed, and now we were drifting among them.

This special cruise was part of the Tokyo Architecture Festival, so naturally an architect was with us to explain each the dozens of bridges we passed under. Many were named for an industry that flourished in the neighbourhood we were passing through. These iron, steel, stone and concrete structures are themselves keys to history.

We carried reprints of an old map that showed Edo-era Tokyo — long before all those artificial islands were built with reclaimed land in the Bay — scattered with dense patterns of family crests, noting the main businesses associated with each clan.

The area inside what was then the outer defences of Edo Castle were packed dense with the crests of the daimyo who maintained households around the castle of the Tokugawa Shogun, spent every other year there, and left family members as hostages when they went back to their distant fiefs.

The area previously occupied by those daimyo is now the vicinity of Tokyo Station and Nihombashi, and the land where Edo Castle once stood is the Imperial Palace and gardens, a vast green space that is the world’s most valuable piece of real estate, worth more than the entire state of California during Japan’s economic bubble years of the 1980s.

After winding around the palace precincts, we made a sharp turn north to meet the Kanda River where it flows through a canyon of buildings towards the Sumida River and the sea.

Our route took us past the Tokyo Dome (the city’s baseball stadium), where cheerful fans fuelled by beer had just left after a game.

We also passed Ochanomizu railway station, a junction where three lines cross, prompting train spotters to line nearby bridges hoping to capture a shot of three trains passing simultaneously.

Here are a few more river views.

It all went by so quickly, and it left me curious to explore canals and rivers on the other side of the Sumida.

I hope these images give you a sense of a hidden side of this city.

I’ve got a stack of books to share with you this month. I’m finally back in full swing now that I have a proper workspace again.

I also ran into what looks like a major problem with the podcast. I’m worried it might pull the rug out from under the work I’ve done since we moved to Substack a y…

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When Tom Feiling lived in Tokyo in the early 1990s, Japan was a vision of the future: prosperous, peaceful, and incredibly high tech. A place where science fiction existed next to centuries old Shinto shrines.

He returned to the country nearly twenty-five years later to find some of the shine had worn off. Japan still looks like the future, but it is a troubling future, and a warning.

Its population is aging and shrinking. Inflation is finally setting in after decades of economic stagnation. People are choosing solitude over companionship. And countryside villages are being abandoned as their last residents die off.

Why are couples ceasing to pair up and have children? How will Japan pay for the needs of its rapidly aging population, and who will look after them? Will robots save the day? Feiling asked these questions in villages and farms, city coffee shops and seedy bars, and he interviewed people affected by this crisis and those who are trying to fix it.

Some similar version of demographic decline is only a couple decades away for Western Europe and North America. What’s happening in Japan will affect us all.

Tom Feiling is the author of Alone in Japan, Short Walks From Bogota, and The Candy Machine: How Cocaine Took Over the World. You can read more about him on his website.

We spoke about Japan’s culture of overwork, extreme forms of solitude, sex doll showrooms, and attempts to save village life and big city prosperity.

These are the books we mentioned in the podcast:

• Alone in Japan: A Journey to the Future

The little town of Weimar was the crucible of German high culture, democracy, and dictatorship.

It was home to Goethe and Schiller, Nietzsche and Liszt. It gave its name to the Weimar Republic, a troubled period of democratic hope and cultural innovation wracked by hyperinflation and political instability. And it was an early stronghold of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party.

It’s easy to look back at this period and diagnose how it all went wrong. Surely catastrophe could have been avoided if only a few more people stood up to tyranny? Why did so many sleepwalk into disaster?

Hindsight is always deceptively clear. But life looks very different when you’re living it.

Historian Katja Hoyer tells the story of Weimar — and by extension, Germany’s descent into chaos — through the lives of ordinary people, giving us a vivid sense of what it must have been like, year by year, as they tried to put food on the table, build businesses, and feed their families.

Katja is the author of Weimar: Life on the Edge of Catastrophe, Beyond the Wall, and Blood and Iron. She’s a columnist for the Berliner Zeitung, a regular contributor to The Spectator, The Daily Telegraph and UnHerd, and co-host of Reichs & Republics: The German History Podcast.

You can read more about her on her website, listen to Reichs & Republics, and follow her on Substack and X.

We spoke about Weimar as the centre of German culture, how Elizabeth Nietzsche tarnished her brother’s legacy, and how democratic hope turned to Nazi terror.

These are the books we mentioned in the podcast:

• Weimar: Life on the Edge of Catastrophe

We also mentioned:

• Reichs & Republics: The German History Podcast

• Our earlier Personal Landscapes conversation about East German

Life in Tokyo has finally settled in to long desk-bound days of writing followed by long sofa-bound evenings of reading, capped with a late night film. I’m trying to get out of my neighbourhood at least once every weekend, but sometimes it only ends up being a long walk to a nearby…

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Landscapes contain hidden histories that shaped the development of the world we live in.

How we moved through those landscapes also tells us something about ourselves.

The book we’re talking about today explores the web that has stretched across Britain for over 11,000 years, as prehistoric routeways evolved to Roman roads and pilgrim paths.

We’ll also learn how land-grabbing Norman barons began the enclosure of the countryside, and how national parks and long-distance trails emerged from the ashes of two world wars.

A story like this wouldn’t be complete without firsthand accounts of hikes into the icy Cairngorms and along the remains of Hadrian’s Wall.

After all, our guide to this hidden history once spent a year and a half walking the chain of mountains that wind across Europe, from Cap Finisterre in Spain to Istanbul. We’ll talk about that remarkable journey, too.

Nicholas Crane is the author of ten books, including The Path More Travelled, The Making of the British Landscape, Latitude, and one of my favourite travel classics, Clear Waters Rising. He’s also known for his television work as lead presenter on the series Coast. And he was was president of the Royal Geographical Society between 2015 and 2018.

We spoke about navigating Mesolithic routeways, the legacy of Britain’s Roman roads, and how 7th century pilgrimage reshaped the urban landscape.

These are the books we mentioned in the podcast:

• The Path More Travelled: The Secret History of Britain’s Footpaths

• Clear Waters Rising

We also mentioned:

• The Travels of Celia Fiennes

• Nick’s BBC television show on Celia Fiennes

I posted a couple short videos in February but this is the first official WAIR from Tokyo. I’m finally in a long-term rental house, with just enough stuff to make it liveable. And best of all: I have a workspace again.

Check out the video for updates on life in …

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Life is slowly returning to normal here in Tokyo’s western suburbs. We’ve moved into our rental house and bought the minimum furniture and appliances to make it liveable. I’ve even started recording new podcast episodes (more on that soon).

I’m happy to have a proper workspace again. It’ll look much nicer when my books finally arrive from Berlin.

The first thing I did when we finally officially changed our address was to register for a public library card at my local ward branch.

No matter where I am in the world, I feel immediately at home in a library: oriented in space by the catalog system and by the temple-like, almost ritual regularity of checkout desk, reference section, fiction and nonfiction.

I also feel oriented in Time—through the mathematical chronology of the history section, and in terms of the linear development of human thought through the eras of literature and poetry contained in the vast, sprawling fiction section, ordered only by the author’s last name and the alphabet.

But more than that, the library also orients me immediately in the timeline of my own life. I remember when I first read a book—what age I was, what I thought, how I saw the world, and how I felt. The history of old discoveries, of my development, is contained in its walls, but only I hold the key. The map, the thread of this path through the words contained in those books, exists only in my memory and is entirely personal. It is the chronicle of my growth into the person I have become.

Each reader is their own patchwork quilt of memories and stories, and each accumulation is unique. So much depends upon the age at which we encounter a particular book, and what came before it—in terms of books, but also in terms of the experiences of our lives. Our memories are also changed by the books and experiences that came after. Nothing is fixed in Time. The future can and does alter the past.

Our personal pasts can be chopped into distinct phases of chronology, just as an archaeologist sections a slope of soil. They can also be chronicled developmentally. The developmental chronicle is never complete, because each moment—each new experience or book—changes it. Each impact ripples out to earlier and earlier stages, changing things to a depth dependent only upon its weight, its specific density in terms of personal importance.

The fundamental question is whether or not we can ever accurately picture the chronological past. Can we truly separate out what we know now, and remember what we thought and how we saw the world at a given moment?

One way in to these slices of a life is through someone’s writing. The writing of a particular time period provides a glimpse into that person’s past—a version of that person from a distinct slice of time—a character-ological cross section that is gone forever with every passing moment.

In that sense, we are each our own repositories of knowledge. A ‘self’ is nothing more than a collection of memories—a living library.

I thought I’d film a little video tour of the place we rented in Tokyo. You might find the cultural differences interesting. (Please excuse the panting, I’m a little stuffed up.)

We just got the keys today, so th…

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The foreign affairs and travel writer Robert Kaplan sees today’s world as a larger version of Germany’s Weimar Republic, “connected enough for one part to mortally influence the other parts, yet not connected enough to be politically coherent.”

National disasters like pandemics and recessions spread across a digitally interconnected world beset by urbanization, mass migration and great-power conflict, causing a crisis in one part of the planet to instantaneously become a crisis in all.

In his latest book, Waste Land, he uses history, literature, politics and philosophy to draw parallels between today’s challenges and those of Germany’s interwar period to give us a bracing glimpse of a dangerous world that we’ve already entered into.

How did we get here and where are we going? That’s what we’re talking about today.

Robert D. Kaplan is the author of twenty-four books on foreign affairs and travel, including The Loom of Time, The Tragic Mind, The Revenge of Geography, Asia’s Cauldron, The Coming Anarchy, and Balkan Ghosts. He reported on foreign affairs for The Atlantic for three decades, and he was a member of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board and the U. S. Navy’s Executive Panel. Foreign Policy magazine twice named him one of the world’s “Top 100 Global Thinkers.”

You can read more about him on his website.

We spoke about the immediacy of every crisis, how faltering institutions enable fanatics and ideologues, and why the roots of our permanent twenty-first century crisis continues to lie in what went wrong in the twentieth.

These are the books we mentioned in the podcast:

• The Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis

We also mentioned:

• Ibn Khaldun

• War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

• The Last Train to Zona Verde by Paul Theroux

• Amitav Ghosh

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It’s difficult to believe that my time in Berlin has come to an end.

Germany is a surprisingly difficult place to get out of, and not just because I still like Berlin so much.

We had to give three months notice on our flat, and there were varying periods of advance notice to get out of just about everything else. Even so, some of those bureaucrats just didn’t want to let me go. The all-powerful deregistration certificate (Abmeldung) is the only thing that’ll get the health insurance, German pension, mobile phone, tax office (Finanzamt) and bloody TV Tax bureaucrats off my back and out of my bank account, and I could only apply for that seven days before vacating our flat.

I started the process of thinning out my library late last year. I managed to let go of nearly 400 books, but we still shipped 69 boxes total, of which 36 were books and assorted notebooks, papers and drafts. I don’t know what the other stuff was. All my clothes seemed to fit in two suitcases.

Emptying our flat was another challenge. What’s the last possible day you can do without a piece of furniture, a kitchen item or a bed? I chipped away at it for two months, selling things on Kleinenzeigen — including all our appliances — and giving away a lot for free. That and filling screw holes in the walls and touching them up with a little paint. My desk was the last to go; I wanted to work right until the end. We were down to a mattress topper on the floor for the last three nights.

Somehow we got it all cleared out two days early, while working throughout. And then we moved to an Air BnB flat a few U-bahn stops away and handed over our keys a day early.

We took one last look through the flat, and one last walk around our neighbourhood — including Jungfernheide Park, where my wife did so much marathon training and where I trained for my Pyrenees traverse.

And then we trudged down the steps of the U7, knowing we would probably never see those streets again.

We found ourselves in a weird in between space. We were staying in an Air BnB apartment, so inside that flat it felt like we were traveling, with all the usual ‘living out of a suitcase’ routines. But step outside the door and we were in Berlin, a city I know so well.

We spent those last few days revisiting favourite places.

So many of my favourites are summer places, so we couldn’t go there: biking up and down the runways at Tempelhofer Feld followed by the biergarten, the Prater Garten in Prenzlauer Berg, reading on the grass of the Tiergarten, or sipping beers under the elevated line at Gleisdreieck, and picnics there with friends. There was nothing better on a summer day than biking around this city that is so big but so flat and bike-able.

Other Berlin memories are seasonal, like screenings and red carpet premiers at the Berlinale, and those are gone forever.

Others are still accessible, even in the depths of winter.

We walked through Gendarmenmarkt, surely Berlin’s most beautiful square, and continued on to Bebelplatz, the big square next to Humboldt University library where the Nazis burned books in 1933. I always stop to pay my respects at the empty library monument when I’m in the area. It’s one of my favourite places in Berlin.

We also went to Zwiebelfisch, our favourite bar, for one last beer, and talked about all the friends and visitors we took there over the years.

Chinese food at Aroma was also on the list. We’ve been going there since our first visit to Berlin in 2013.

A walk down Auguststrasse remembering all those years of galleries, openings and Berlin Art Week.

KaDeWe for champagne and oysters.

And a walk through our old neighbourhood of Bergmannkiez, where we spent our first four Berlin years. We were over there this summer with Paul and Sheila Theroux, but when you’ve got a couple days left, it’s those old places you always want to see.

The highlight for me was catching one last midnight screening of Casablanca at the little 32-seat Lichtblick Kino. They’ve been showing it every Saturday night at midnight for years.

And now I have to cut this short, just like my nine years in Berlin. It’s time to go to the airport. There’s only a couple hours left.

It’s strange to think we’ll probably never see these places again.

It’s difficult to believe that this is my last update from Berlin. My Europe years will come to an end in just two weeks.

I’ve got several updates for you this month. I’ll tell you what I’ve been reading in the new year, give you an update on my latest boo…

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From Goddess to Mortal: The True Life Story of Kumari by Rashmila Shakya (Vajra Bookshop, 2007). The autobiography of the first ex-living goddess of Kathmandu that I interviewed and described in our chat. An extraordinary insight into life inside the Kumari House, and a living goddess’s challenging return to the outside world.

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Curious to know what a living goddess looks like? Then scroll down.

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In a small medieval palace on Kathmandu’s Durbar Square, a young girl chosen from a caste of Buddhist goldsmiths watches over this broad valley and protects the country and its people.

She’s the embodiment of Devi, the universal goddess, and Hindu kings have sought her blessings for centuries to legitimate their rule.

The living goddess is the stuff of legend, and the stuff of rumour. Did she really walk barefoot through bloody courtyards scattered with the severed heads of buffalo while demons leaped and howled in the shadows? How was she chosen? And what happens to her after the goddess inside her disappears?

Isabella Tree uncovered the secrets of this strange tradition over many years and many visits to Nepal. She peeled away the layers of myth, religious belief and modern history, and she slowly overcame the reluctance of priests and caretakers to meet Kathmandu’s living goddess herself.

Isabella Tree is the author of The Living Goddess, Islands in the Clouds, The Book of Wilding, and other books. Her work has appeared in Granta, National Geographic, The Sunday Times and other publications. She’s an award winning conservationist, and lives West Sussex, in the middle of the Knepp Wildland, the first large-scale rewilding project in lowland England.

You can read more about her on her website, and follow her on Instagram.

We spoke about the powers of the living goddess, how she is chosen, the connection to tantric ritual, and how the goddess foreshadowed the massacre of Nepal’s royal family.

These are the books we mentioned in the podcast:

• The Living Goddess

We also mentioned:

• The Knepp Wildland project

Christmas markets helps those of us who live in Berlin endure the first half of winter.

In the middle of summer it’s easy to forget that Berlin is on the same latitude as James Bay. It’s impossible to forget it when November sinks in, with dark mornings and even darker afternoons, and cruel gusting winds that whip across vast flats of Russia and Poland to infiltrate my jacket and flat on Germany’s easternmost fringe.

November in Berlin is a time of denial, followed by long underwear and even longer faces, but we barely have time for our scowls to settle into permanent facial crags of gloom because the beginning of December coincides with this most cheerful of traditions.

Christmas markets date back to the Late Middle Ages in the German-speaking areas of Europe. They’re normally held during the four weeks of Advent leading up to December 25th, but I’ve noticed those dates creeping out by stealth, into grey November and even infant January.

You’ll find them in just about every town square. The better ones spill into neighbouring streets. Stalls sell traditional German Christmas ornaments, furry hats, and wooden toys. You’ll even find rock music posters, the kind that plastered the walls of 1980’s teenage bedrooms. Many markets have singing and dancing entertainers, too.

There’s a chill in the air, a scent of woodsmoke hovering around the edges, and enough food and drink to stuff even the hungriest turkey. The highlight is, of course, glühwein — hot wine spiced with cinnamon, aniseed, cloves, citrus, sugar, and sometimes a shot of brandy for extra warmth.

Hungry? Queue up for a hot grilled bratwurst covered in mustard and dripping warm grease. Follow it up with Flammkuchen — fresh stone oven flatbread, topped with creamy white cheese, green onion and chunks of meat. Then stuff in a few roasted chestnuts, a dozen bite-sized donuts, and at least one pretzel filled with cream cheese and chives.

At this point, you might think you’re full. But trust me, you’ll want a little something for the subway ride home. Got a serious sweet tooth? You’ll find strips of liquorice in a rainbow of colours, warm candied nuts, candied apples and candied grapes, sticky nougat, and that most traditional standard, old-fashioned marzipan.

Forget about fitness resolutions, they can wait until January 1st. Right now, you’re getting fit for a good long hibernation.

I’m not much of a Christmas person. We usually travel outside Europe at this time of year. But I do like the markets in Berlin.

Gendarmenmarkt is one of my favourites. Sure, it’s touristy, but the 18th century architecture around the square — the old Konzerthaus, the Französischer Dom, the Deutsher Dom, and the statue of poet Friedrich Schiller — gives it such a magical atmosphere at night.

You’ll also want to check out those little markets that only last a few days, like the one at Richardplatz, site of the old Bohemian village of Alt-Rixdorfer, founded in 1737 in what is now the district of Neukölln. The stalls are run by charitable associations and cultural groups, and you’ll find everything from Swedish glögg to vegan food, and even South American peanut soup, gently lit by hundreds of kerosene lamps.

The market in Spandau’s old town is also good, as is the big market in Potsdam, near Frederick the Great’s palaces.

I think the most romantic place in Berlin to jingle your bells is the Christmas market in front of Charlottenburg Palace, the rococo summer residence of a Prussian queen. It’s the closest one to our flat, and the market we visit most often.

I don’t know if it’s the outdoor drinking — a winter version of the biergarten Germans are so fond of — but Christmas markets will even put a smile on the typical Berliner’s face.

I’m looking at them a little more closely this year in the knowledge that I’ll probably never see them again. After nine years in this city (and fifteen years in Europe) we’re getting ready to leave the continent next month.

So cheers from Berlin, and Merry Christmas. I hope you have a wonderful day wherever you spend it.