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Thursday 20 January 2011

Round the World Book Challenge


Rather oddly this grew out of the British Book Challenge being run at The Bookette's blog - that rather obviously is about reading books by British authors and I thought it might be a good idea to put together a similar genre mix from round the world.

Looking round our bookshelves, mainly at the TBR pile, I discovered

Canada - Jan Markley - Dead Frog On The Porch (children)
Sweden - Jan Guillou - The Birth of the Kingdom (historical fiction)
France - Françoise Sagan - Engagements of the Heart
Nigeria - Ken Saro Wiwa - Lemona's Tale
Spain - Javier Cercas - The Speed of Light

which is a fairly good start

then saw someone talking about Arto Paasilinna - The year of the Hare - so one from Finland (and from the library)

I picked up Alice Walker's the Color Purple at Bookcrossing. I've never read this so should make a good one for USA

Gav Reads at My Favourite Books recommending Camilla Lackberg - Swedish crime writer

Nicky at Absolute Vanilla suggested Spud by John van der Ruit, from South Africa

Nayuleska at Nayu's Reading Corner is running a Manga Reading Challenge - so as I've never read ANY and after some advice from Nayuleska about where to start, I'm hoping to track some down to read.

I also intend to include Shopaholic attends un bebe - the French version of Shopaholic and baby which my elder daughter bought for me in Paris.


I'm still looking for ideas so if anyone has any offerings I'd be interested - preferably from different countries to those already covered.



Have discovered a blog holding an Argentinian reading challenge for which I've signed up
http://argentinareadingchallenge.blogspot.com/ Fortunately it has some suggestions of what to read.



At last have started reading my way round the world!


The Year of the Hare by Arto Paasilinna - Finland
Please Look after Mother by Kyung-Sook Shin - Korea

5 comments:

  1. Don't forget the one you've got from Portugal ;-)
    Sue

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  2. The challenge is about author nationality EXCEPT the shopaholic which is an excerise in masochism as Maryom's french is badly neglected and now somewhat lacking.

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  3. I would recommend Mr Rosenblum's List by Natasha Solomons - for English or UK (if you aren't going to do Welsh, Scottish,Irish) - link to Guardian Review from when it came out - http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/apr/18/mr-rosenblums-list-book-review it is fantastic reading and very British.

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  4. I hadn't included any UK in this list as I've signed up for the British Books Challenge at The Bookette's blog. There's a separate blog entry for it http://ourbookreviewsonline.blogspot.com/2011/01/bookette-british-books-challenge.html with some of my ideas for that but I'm always willing to add another one. Thanks for the recommendation. - Maryom

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  5. Have just discovered this Argentinian reading challenge http://argentinareadingchallenge.blogspot.com/
    so another place to stop off at Round The World

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