Can a book cure culture shock?
Every summer, bookshops flaunt holiday reads and invite us to while away those hours on the plane or the beach with an array of enticingly-marketed paperbacks.
Picture postcard views don't help
But what about when you're not going away for a week in the sun, but heading off to live abroad, perhaps indefinitely? Can books ease your passage into a different country, language or culture?
This evening I'm flying to Switzerland for an extra-long weekend – it'll be my first visit since I came back from a year working in Zurich last summer, and I'm feeling a bit nostalgic.
When I was preparing to move out to Zurich, my employer's swanky relocation agents saw fit to send me a book called Culture shock: Switzerland.
The title surely a bit of an overstatement for someone moving from one European city to another set alarm bells ringing, along with the jazzy font on the cover.
However, in a state of excited anticipation over my first foreign posting, I pounced on it and started to read.
According to this worthy repository of local knowledge, Swiss supermarkets get busy when people finish work, the tap water is OK but you should boil it first if you're worried, and Zurich is a melting pot of multiculturalism.
The first tip is only as useful as it is blindingly obvious, whereas you could safely drink from your average Swiss inner-city canal and Zurich is international in the sense that you can find white bankers there from Germany, France, Italy or even, if you look hard enough, Belgium.
As a guide to a new country, it comprehensively failed. I would have liked to have been tipped off about Switzerland's formality, patriotism, stubborn parochialism, compulsive addiction to rules and savage rejection of the very notion of political correctness.
The only culture shock came when a Dutch colleague told me his local relocation agent had warned him off settling in an area where there were 'foreigners.'
"But I am a foreigner!" he replied, genuinely baffled. Apparently she meant a different sort of foreigner. Clearly I was no longer in London.
I had a glance at how this book fared on the Amazon review pageÂ and was relieved to find I'm not alone in giving it pretty short shrift. Apparently other titles in the series are not so bad.
I prefer the alternative approach to cultural handbooks however notably the 'Xenophobe's guide to….' which sells itself as "an irreverent look at the beliefs and foibles of nations, almost guaranteed to cure xenophobia."
There is a fine and fuzzy line between making harmless generalisations about national characteristics and straying into prejudice and racism, and I was a little sceptical of this mission statement.
As a Swansea girl, I was given the guide to Wales as an ironic Christmas present, while the France edition was a leaving gift when I spent a year in Paris
Both impressed me with their ability to make cutting, astute observations with a lightness of touch that makes it almost impossible to take offence.
The Welsh are gently mocked for their tendency to define themselves in opposition to what they don't like (usually the English), or make friends on the basis of a common enemy (usually any country playing the English at rugby.)
The French, meanwhile, "may sometimes behave badly, but always act superbly;" "believe intensely in what they call la rÃ¨gle: that everything that matters should be done in the right way and in the right place at the right time. What they don't like, and ignore at their discretion, are petty regulations."
The humour sometimes feels a little over-written and hammy, but these books are still infinitely preferable to the saccharine earnestness of Culture Shock: Switzerland.
For anyone with a fondness for literature and a desire to learn something about a new language along with a new culture, I cannot recommend the Penguin Parallel Text short stories series highly enough.
These allow you to pick your way through high-quality foreign-language stories, with an English translation on the opposite page to guide you through difficult words or phrases.
There is nothing more satisfying than revisiting a story to find you can actually get the gist of it in a foreign language, having previously crawled through reading every sentence in translation. Far more motivating than verb tables.
All this, of course, relates to the fairly minor adjustment required to live in a different European country. I'd be interested to hear from anyone whose reading helped them settle in somewhere far-flung enough to cause genuine culture