my read around the world challenge + 25 books on my tbr
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- čas přidán 28. 06. 2024
- I wanted to share a bit about how I’m structuring my read around the world challenge and share with you 25 books from my TBR, from 19 different countries, and translated from 10 different languages.
If I mispronounced any of the authors’ names, please let me know!
0:00 Intro
1:02 Guidelines/rules for challenge
4:04 My reading priorities/where I'm starting
6:14 South American Literature
8:50 African/Middle Eastern Literature
10:29 European Literature
13:01 Outro
Books Mentioned
\\ South American Lit //
🇬🇾 Guyana: Buxton Spice, Oonya Kempadoo.
🇧🇿 Belize: The Festival of San Joaquin, Zee Edgell.
🇦🇷 Argentina: Elena Knows, Claudia Piñeiro. Translated by Frances Riddle from the Spanish.
🇨🇴 Colombia: Fish Soup by Margarita Garcia Roboyo. Translated by Charlotte Coombe from the Spanish.
🇨🇱 Chile: The Private Lives of Trees, Alejandro Zambra. Translated Megan McDowell from the Spanish.
🇦🇷 Argentina: Ficciones, Jorge Luis Borges.
Translated by John Sturrock + Anthony Kerrigan from the Spanish.
🇺🇾 Uruguay: Springtime in a Broken Mirror, Mario Benedetti. Translated by Nick Caistor from the Spanish.
🇧🇷 Brazil: Family Ties, Clarice Lispector. Translated by Giovanni Pontiero from the Portuguese.
\\ African/Middle Eastern Lit //
🇸🇩 Sudan: Season of Migration to the North, Tayeb Salih. Translated by Denys Johnson-Davies from the Arabic.
🇮🇶 Iraq: Frankenstein in Baghdad, Ahmed Saadawi. Translated by Jonathan Wright from the Arabic.
🇪🇬 Egypt: The Quarter, Naguib Mahfouz. Translated by Roger Allen from the Arabic.
🇬🇶 Equatorial Guinea: By the Mountain Burns, Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel. Translated by Jethro Soutar from the Spanish.
🇿🇦 South Africa: Mine Boy, Peter Abrahams.
🇿🇦 South Africa: The Yearning, Mohale Mashigo.
🇿🇦 South Africa: The Whale Caller, Zakes Mda.
\\ European Lit //
🇲🇹 Malta: Island Faces, Lino Spiteri.
Translated by Joseph Agius from the Maltese.
🇲🇹 Malta: Beyond a Satin Sea, edited by Terrence Portelli.
🇬🇪 Georgia: The Pear Field, Nana Ekvtimishvili. Translated by Elizabeth Heighway from the Georgian.
🇷🇺 Russia: Bride & Groom by Alisa Geneva. Translated by Carol Apollonio from the Russian.
🇳🇴 Norway: The Looking Glass Sisters, Gøhril Gabrielson. Translated by John Irons from the Norwegian.
🇮🇸 Iceland: Paradise Reclaimed, Halldór Laxness. Translated by Magnus Magnusson from the Icelandic.
🇮🇸 Iceland: The Greenhouse, Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir. Translated by Brian FitzGibbon from the Icelandic.
🇭🇷 Croatia: Singer in the Night, Olja Savičevič. Translated by Celia Hawkesworth from the Croatian.
🇭🇷 Croatia: No Signal Area, Rober Perišić. Translated by Ellen Elias-Bursać from the Croatian.
🇺🇦 Ukraine: Carbide, Andriy Lyubka. Translated by Reilly Costigan-Humes and Isaac Stockhouse Wheeler from the Ukrainian.
#readingaroundtheworld #readaroundtheworld #ReadAroundTheWorldChallenge #translatedbooks #translatedfiction #invisiblecitiesproject #invisiblecities
\\ Social Media //
StoryGraph: app.thestorygraph.com/profile...
Goodreads: / ketevan
Also loved this challenge and also how you’ve expanded it. It’s inspired me to expand mine as well. I’ll defo keep checking here for updates and more recommendations.
It's really great to find something else 'reading around the world'. It's such a great way to diversify your reading. A really interesting selection of books. I'm mainly using my local and county library so I my scope is limited and my criteria is broader than what you have. But I'm so pleased with how many books I found to fit my criteria and can support my local library. I love the three different authors you are choosing for each country. I'm really looking forward to seeing your thoughts on all of these books.
It is so great to connect with others, even if the details don't match up exactly. I really appreciate that your looser criteria will help show people that this can be more accessible than they might have realized, which can put people off from trying to diversify their reading.
I promised myself that I would read any book that interested me even if it doesn't "officially" count because it's not really about a list of rules, right? I look forward to hearing about your picks as well as I'm sure I'll be wanting to read many of them, challenge be damned! 🙂
What a great challenge! Excited to hear about the ones you love. Elena Knows is fantastic and I have Johnny Appleseed but haven't gotten around to it yet.
I keep hearing such fantastic things I really do need to make Elena Knows happen asap!!
I liked hearing about the parameters of your project, sounds wonderful! I thought Elena Knows was fantastic. I also really enjoyed Alejandro Zambra's essays and would love to read some of his fiction.
Elena Knows is probably number one to read from this list, I keep hearing nothing but praise and adoration!
Wow, I didn't know you've lived in so many different countries ! That's impressive !
And yet such a shame I wasn’t reading anything from them at the time. Gotta make up for lost time! 😅
This is a very ambitious version of read around the world!
Yes, I’m definitely considering this a lifelong journey. I’m in no rush and will happily take many detours along the way!
Hi I just found your channel from Draw Your Book, I'm also doing a Read around the world challenge and I'm always looking for new ideas (it *is* a lot of countries - and I'm also including the kinds of territories you mention in addition, so even more!), so happy to 'meet' you! I'm particularly interested in gleaning ideas from others who have fairly strict criteria - my own criteria is that the author needs to have been born and raised in that country, and if they left it has to be no earlier than for college. I prefer to find authors who have stayed, but for various reasons it's *really* hard to find authors that fit those criteria for some countries. They can't have left as children. I do have the added criteria that preferably the book is set in or about that country, or if speculative has significant elements from that culture. I've been at it a few years now already, and my goal is to add 10 new countries a year, but I also revisit old ones. (I've read 26 books this year that meet my criteria, but only 9 are new visits so far...) I will count white authors from colonized countries (many South Amerian writers, including many on the list you shared, are white/of European extraction, and at some point I'm not interested in researching their geneology...) but I try to prioritize indigenous voices wherever I can.
A suggestion for Georgia, it's a chunkster and a half, but The Eighth Life!
I wish Storygraph would let us see what books our friends there have added to the RtW Challenge. I'm tracking with a Word Doc as well, but that would be a great way to get ideas from others with similar criteria.
Happy to ‘meet’ you as well! Yes all the criteria are very difficult to manage for many places, but what I’ve decided is that if a book interests me, I’ll still read it and share but I won’t tick it off on my challenge doc. I agree with your childhood spent in the country piece, just because so many great writers went to uni in the west, it would be a shame to exclude them (and also make it impossible as well!)
And re indigenous vs. colonizer backgrounds, for example Uruguay off the top of my head I remember realizing he was likely a colonizer but I read his bio and he was influential in politics as well as literature so I’ll read his work and still keep my eyes peeled for more indigenous voices.
Thank you so much for your comment, looking forward to hearing more about what you’re reading as well!
@@KetevanReads I do that as well - I read a *lot* books of about immigrant experiences, or books set in one country written by someone from elsewhere - I really like those, just don't count them for this challenge. I read over 100 books a year, and only aiming for 10 new countries for this challenge per year, so lots of room for other books!
Pretty much all the 'great' Latin American authors (according to 'canon') are old white men, not just of European extraction but machisto to boot. I do count them if I read them (like García Márquez for Colombia) but make a point to seek out diverse authors from those countries as well. I read in Spanish, so I read a lot of Latin American books. But still a lot of countries are underrepresented. Like... still looking for something good from Honduras and Paraguay.
I do really wish Storygraph would let friends see what books they've used for particular challenges. I asked them to add that feature, and for some reason they thought people would want to keep that private. Uh, it's a social media site! I can see why maybe not the whole world, but there's already privacy settings that say just followers or friends can see your stuff, so why in heck wouldn't I want my friends to see that? Isn't sharing this kind of stuff with friends what social media is *for*?? They did say they might reconsider if more people asked... hint, hint... 😅
@@erinh7450 That doesn’t make much sense! I’ll be sure to list it next time I go into the feature request section.
This is such a cool challenge! I’m trying to read from a lot more countries this year too, mostly in translation, so I’ll be looking deeper into some of the book you mentioned. Currently I’m reading some Nordic authors like Karl Ove Knausgaard and Jon Fosse.
Nice! Which of their books would you recommend? So far I've been reading Norwegian authors as well, but have no qualms about diving in deeper 🙂
@@KetevanReads I really enjoyed the Quartet of seasons by Karl Ove and look forward to reading the second book of his My Struggle series next month. Jon Fosse’s Septology is a bit too slow for me but I’ll still be reading his The Birds
The First Woman by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi - Uganda
The Mountains Sing by Nguyen Phan Que Mai - Vietnam
Sightseeing by Rattawat Lapcharoensap - Thailand
At Night All Blood is Black by David Diop - Senegal
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe - Nigeria
Thanks for the suggestions! I've read Things Fall Apart and enjoyed it, and just picked up At Night All Blood Is Black. Particularly intrigued by The Mountains Sing. I looked up Nguyen Phan Que Mai and she seems like an amazing person.