This was an unexpected delight of a book! I picked it up as part of the “30 Books to Celebrate 30 Years of @cbcbooks Writers and Company”, with it representing the 2011 entry (for a full list, you can find the challenge on @thestorygraph). 

The book tells the story of the very affluent jewish banking family the Ephrussis, who lived in Paris and Vienna in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, but through the lens of a collection of 264 tiny Japanese sculptures called Netsuke. The writer, a famous ceramicist, was the fifth generation to inherit the collection, and in this book, he traces how a great uncle came to collect them in Paris, gifted them to his grandparents in Vienna when they married, and how they survived World War II to return once again to his family (a delightful, emotional surprise I will not give away).

One thing that leapt out to me immediately is that this book is *so* tactile, probably because it was written by a ceramicist. I’ve just never noticed so many descriptions of how things feel in other books. For one example, describing the matchbox-sized netsuke (which occurs several times through the book), there are just gorgeous, engrossing details of the heft, the feel of individual components, and how they roll in your palm. It was so detailed I feel like I have handled them myself. And these were not the only tactile descriptions. It was lovely to listen to. 

I think what I also loved was the overarching theme of our relationship with things. It interwove itself beautifully with similar themes in The Book of Form and Emptiness, both contrasting it and complementing it.