I’m an avid reader, and always have been. But as an expat in Germany, it wasn’t always easy to feed my fervent need for reading material. When I was a kid, I sat between my brother and sister in the back of the car for every vacation with a pile of books at my feet. Or, this being the seventies, I sat on the floor of the car with the books on the seat. My brother, who was dyslexic, couldn’t be bothered with much more than Tintin, but I went to the library and grabbed a stack of books that were beyond my age and reading level, but kept me happy.

When I first moved to Freiburg in the early 90s, I quickly noticed the gaping hole that came from having no access to the library, and no money to buy books myself. Sure, there were English books in the German bookstores, but you really had to depend on someone else’s taste and hope that one of the ten books available appealed to your taste. The UB had books too, but these also tended towards the classics, and there is only so much of that sort of the thing that a person can consume without being hungry for something lighter. Magazines at the train station were 10 – 12 DM a hit, and when you read as fast as I do, it quickly becomes a very bad Preisleistungsverhältnis (price-performance ratio).

I remember the sheer desperation of the situation hitting me when I had to plunder a shopping cart of castoff books that someone left in the hall of the dorm, reading anything I could find that was in English, even dark mysteries and very bad true crime stories, which normally aren’t my thing. This approach did open new literary doors, as it were. At that point in my German career, I could read German, but not well. I managed to drag myself through Rosamund Pilcher, but couldn’t be bothered with much else. Nowadays, I can read German almost as well as I can English. But with the stress of my life, job and everything else, I still prefer English. READ MORE »