As a young writer, Pamuk considered the idea of writing a novel in the form of a museum catalog and began collecting stuff--the detritus of 20th century Istanbul haute-bourgeoisie life for his fictional characters. When he did write the book, it was in the form of a novel dictated by the fictional friend Kemal, but the impulse to collect, which features so much in that story, never left him, and was exacerbated by his exile and need to come to terms with his own family and the modern Turkish state. So, he bought an 1897 Ottoman house in Galata and installed exquisite shadow box pieces. The contents are evocative and banal, culled from personal scrapbooks and junk stores, photos of strangers he adopted as characters in the novel, reprinted tram tickets, single ear rings, porcelain figures of dogs. Istanbul is one of my favorite cities, but I have not been back since this opened, and this lavishly executed book can't include the audio and video pieces as well. Overall, the two books pose intriguing questions about modern Turkey, about the scale of museums (is history big and grand, or the course of a single life?) and about the meaning of place and home.