That sounds like a pretty ambitious claim. But it is true – if the author is Mary Ann Miller (Bates).

Maybe a better title would be: "Book of her year". Mary Ann Miller (now married to Matthew Bates) arrived in Switzerland in the summer of 2006. It was her second year-long trip to Europe since leaving Germany in June 1997 with her family to relocate to Ohio. Fluent in German and armed with a brand new B.A. degree in International Studies and English Literature, she was now a Fulbright Fellowship recipient and planned to spend an academic year researching the historical context of early Swiss Anabaptism in Bern. One of the things she did during that year was to get me to keep my word to run a marathon with her – a promise I had made some three years earlier when I saw her on a Sunday afternoon in Cincinnati. Earlier that day she had just completed the "Flying Pig" marathon.

Besides getting me to keep my word and doing her Fulbright research, Mary Ann spent her year experiencing all kinds of mini-adventures in her host country. She is a spunky, adventuresome type, so I am sure it wasn’t hard for her to find a way to experience some unusual things. She shared her adventures in Bern and elsewhere in Switzerland via a weekly newspaper column for the local paper back home. The result of that column is her book "CH is for Chocolate: Individually Wrapped Tastes of Switzerland", which is now available in paperback on Amazon. There the book is described this way:

Once she arrives in the "Confederatio Helvetica" she faces indecipherable local dialects and Bern’s inexplicable obsession with bears. Her camera lens zooms from the precision-stacked woodpiles lining mountain chalets to graffiti sprayed on train station walls. She juxtaposes visits to the hideouts and prison chambers of the ancestors of the Amish and Mennonites with descriptions of an annual festival dedicated to consuming 45 tons of onions. Drinking straight from the city fountains of Bern, Miller weaves a picture of Switzerland more vibrant than simple postcard snapshots.

Interested in Mary Ann’s first book? You can find out more about it on the Amazon website.