Read: "Lebek: A City of Northern Europe Through the Ages" by Xavier Hernandez and Jordi Ballonga; illustrated by Francesco Corni (1991)

Why: Wanted to buy something from used bookstore in Italian Market

A large black-and-white illustrated book in the style of Macauley's "Cathedral," it shows how a seaside port city develops from 1000 BC to the present.

Takeaway: Every time I open this book I get lost in it and get a crick in my neck. Fourteen enormous bird's-eye-view illustrations, in pen and ink, follow the city from the Bronze Age to the late 20th century. The city of Lebek starts as a farmers' campsite, builds a stockade, fights the Vikings, then builds a Gothic cathedral that rises in the middle of the little townhouses like a giant turbine. The whole city is like a machine that's being built from the inside -- it's neat to watch the city grow bit by bit and make itself into something that looks familiar. I got so invested in the growth of Lebek that when it got pounded in World War II, I was sad.