Home Life and The Language of Things

I like the premise, the title, and the look of Deyan Sudjic's The Language of Things: Understanding the World of Desirable Objects, and so began to read:

Never have more of us had more possessions than we do now, even as we make less and less use of them. The homes in which we spend too little time are filled with things. We have a plasma screen in every room, displacing state-of-the-art cathode-ray-tube-based television sets just five years old. We have cupboards full of sheets; we have recen