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Reading Around the World
(4)Following Harry, whose experiences are intriguing, I’ve joined the “Around the World” group at goodreads. The group has the goal of reading one book from every country in the world. So far I’ve got:
- Chile — Gabriela Mistral’s Madwomen
- Ireland — Paul Muldoon’s Moy Sand and Gravel (I think I can count him; if not I’ll have to fall back on Yeats or Heaney)
- England — Reginald Hill’s A Cure for All Diseases (and more and more…)
- Scotland — Ian Rankin’s Set in Darkness
- Spain — Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s The Shadow of the Wind
- Zimbabwe — Doris Lessing’s Particularly Cats (Can I count her? and with such a minor book?)
- Germany — Erich Maria Remarque’s All’s Quiet on the Western Front
- Lithuania — Czeslaw Milosz’s The Witness of Poetry
- Libya — Can I count Hisham Matar’s In the Country of Men???
- Russia — Mikhail Bulgalov’s The Master and Margarita
- France — Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal
- Greece — Nikos Kazantzakis’s Zorba the Greek
Hmmm, that’s
teneleven in my current goodreads list, all added since I joined Good Reads in April, 2007.Considering that Harry says there are 192 member nations in the U.N, looks like I’ve got a way to go. My rate of reading comes out to about one every quarter, which means at that rate I”m not going to make it before I die.
I hope to revisit this subject.
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4 Responses to “Reading Around the World”
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koshembos November 23rd, 2008 at 2:23 am
I wonder what is the rationale behind the selection. Many of the books above are quite old, older than me, and I read them when I was very young.
Milosz I read in three languages: Hebrew, English and the original Polish. The latter is unbelievable. He himself was a great man. Arabic books I want to read someday in Arabic; I can understand spoken Arabic, but that’s it. Another difficulty with Arabic is: it’s two languages standard and spoken. I understand spoken but books are written in standard Arabic.
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Welcome to the fun.
Neither Muldoon nor Heaney were actually born in the Republic of Ireland, although the identity politics of Northern Ireland is a messy old business and far be it from me to claim that they’re not Irish. On the other hand Yeats, Swift, Joyce and Wilde were all born in Dublin (though I suppose strictly speaking not in the modern Republic of Ireland), so it’s not hard to find alternatives. I know I’ve read some contemporary Irish writers as well, though the names aren’t springing to mind.
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BTW, I’m not quite sure why the link from my name goes the IMDb entry for Paris, Texas…
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Thanks, Harry. I fixed the link. And I’ve read Roddy Doyle’s The Van so I guess I could add it to my Goodreads list and count it. It’s been a year or two. I have, of course, read Joyce & Swift & Wilde but I was being sort of arbitrary and only using books that I’ve read since I started Goodreads.
Which is the answer, Koshembos, to why the list is so odd. As far as I know, there’s no official reading list. Everybody’s free to find their own books. I tend to read whatever falls under my hand. And for some reason, I tend not to read the big blockbusters like Rushdie and Solzhenitsyn and Khaled Hosseini. I’m impressed that you can read in so many languages. I can limp along in French enough to read a little Baudelaire, but don’t ask me to read Proust (in French that is).
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