Not often moved to recommend books, but for a fairly dense historical travelogue of the Habsburg Empire pre-1918, this book has kept me hooked, not for the historical narrative (I actually almost gave up on it as it was too detailed and I quickly lost the thread) but for the continued little picture postcard anecdotes he sprinkles it with. I've laughed out loud more than Hitchhiker's Guide or Catch-22 at this rate.
I'm never sure which particular emperor I'm reading about in each chapter, but passages about each emperor's little peccadillos - such as deer hunting in Prague with imported cheetahs "ferocious if chilly African megafauna chasing down appalled Bohemian ungulates" or just snippets of his family vacations - "We would light-heartedly bring up over breakfast some sort of cultural destination (the Louvre, the Musee Carnavalet) and the children's ears would go flat to the sides of their heads, like threatened cats, clinging to their croissants but alert to danger", keep me hooked.
Is slow going though! Only bought it to tide me over while the shop ordered me in some books about the Pyrenees, which have since been delivered and are gathering dust on the bookshelf.
