Since my son may read this, I’ll just say “acute parental anxiety” ensued when, at seventeen, he decided to skip college and accept a brewing apprenticeship in Germany.  My anxiety stemmed not so much from his career choice as a beer artisan, which I see as a growth industry, but for his inability to speak fluent German.  I was pretty sure that Germany had never figured in an episode of Locked Up Abroad, but I knew it to be a country where ice cubes are extinct, no hot food is ever served before noon and t-shirts with cute sayings are universally banned. How would my son ever survive?

Then a spate of novels imported from Germany showed warm soda might be the least of his worries. These gritty page-turners reinvent the Grimm fairy tales – there’s nothing light and cheery here. Instead, Germany is depicted as a land where:

Insular little villages hide pockets of gossipy, vengeful murderers -
Snow White Must Die by Nele Neuhaus

Having a tattoo can get you burned at the stake or worse -
The Hangman’s Daughter by Oliver Potzsch

Conspiracies involving the bodies of dead foreigners occur in hospitals -
The Russian Donation by Christoph Spielberg

Coroners solve crimes via chatty post-autopsy ghosts -
Morgue Drawer Four by Jutta Profijt

Bearing an uncanny resemblance to someone who then offers you money to impersonate them can result in terrifying consequences -
The Lie by Petra Hammesfahr

Teenage immigrants live in housing projects and write essays entitled “The Story of an Idiotic, Redheaded Woman Who Would Still Be Alive if Only She Had Listened to Her Smart, Oldest Daughter” -
Broken Glass Park by Alina Bronsky

My anxiety was forever put to rest by a timely visit over the May Day holiday. Who can dislike a country where flavorful, smoked beer is placed in a little red wagon and pulled from one small village to another by groups of friends celebrating with a moving picnic? Just wish they’d believe in keeping the beverages cold…

Check out my Pinterest board for more reasons to break out of your cultural box.

What country has your favorite authors?

It’s the plight of voracious readers everywhere. I love the way my mom puts it: “Now I know why I was so drawn to this book. Turns out I’ve read it before!” Lucky is the reader who realizes this before hitting the 100-page mark. I’ve seen how people keep track of the books they’ve read or plan to read: backs of receipts, napkins, messy notebooks filled with newspaper articles, post-it notes, and illegible writing.

But take heart, my friends! There are a number of free websites that give you the ability to track your reading habits, write reviews, and see the books and reviews of other users (including friends). Most will link up to Facebook or Twitter, too. If you’d rather not be social, mark your profile as private. No one will know how much you loved that book about crime-fighting teen zombies that fall in love under tragic circumstances. I made that plot up, but I think I may be on to something.


GoodReads

GoodReads uses the concept of virtual bookshelves. Many users opt to keep it simple by creating only a “read” and “to-read” shelf, but you can get as sophisticated and creative as you’d like. For instance, create a bookshelf entitled “science-fiction” to see what you’ve read in that category, or create a bookshelf entitled “give-me-those-hours-back-plz” to classify books that made you wish you were illiterate. (Bonus feature: link your account to the library catalog to see if that book you discovered is available!) GoodReads also has Android and iPhone/iPad apps available, making accessing your booklists a breeze when you visit the library.


LibraryThing

Like GoodReads, LibraryThing boasts a large community of users and customizable ways of tracking your reading. While the site has a messy interface, their tagging features and Suggester tool is pretty fun to use and makes it easy to find new books.


Shelfari

Arguably the most visual of the three, Shelfari also uses virtual bookshelves. The strength of this site is that you can view a lot of information about a book, including a detailed character list, quotes, themes, symbolism, and more.


Books & Authors

Unlike the services mentioned above, Books & Authors is not a website with built-in social functionality. Instead, B&A is a database you have free access to through your library card. B&A is primarily used to find your next great read. There are tools to find books with a certain subject matter, character, time period, location, and more. Tracking your reading through this database is private by design, and our catalog is linked to it automatically.

How do YOU track your reading?