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I've seen videos of the principle demoed before, but this is impressive.
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Year: 2008
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Read the world: a map
I’ve made an interactive map to show which countries I’ve read books from.
Short version: I’ve read books from the countries marked blue or green, but not the ones marked yellow or red.
Blue are books I had already read before starting the challenge.
Green are books read since starting the challenge. Red is for countries I haven’t read yet; a black dot means a country I have an idea for.
Yellow is for countries where I have a copy of the book waiting to be read.
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Links
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A fabulous idea: 'Adaptive Eyeglasses bring vision correction to literacy programs in Ghana and help people all over the world make their own eyeglasses without aid of an optometrist.'
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'Every time I mention this developmentally significant molecule, Sonic hedgehog, I get a volley of questions about whether it is really called that, and what it does… a brief introduction to the hedgehog family of signaling molecules.'
Half of a Yellow Sun is a novel about the Biafran war, told from the perspective of three people on the Biafran side. It switches back and forth between their lives pre-war and the war years. Adichie is too young to have been part of the war herself, but I gather from the Author’s Note that her parents and grandparents were in the middle of it, and that this novel is at least in part based on their stories about it.
Although it is in a sense written from a partisan perspective, in that all the main characters are fairly keenly pro-Biafran, the novel is inevitably written and read with the knowledge that Biafra was a doomed entity. So that gives a gloomy irony to all the optimistic political rhetoric.
Sitting here with the book in front of me, with the Daily Mail quoted on the cover as saying that it is “without doubt, a literary masterpiece and a classic”, I am churlishly inclined to start finding fault, because I’m not quite sure that it is an undoubted instant classic. It’s a well-written if fairly conventional novel with strong characters, touches of humour even amid the gloom, a streak of satire and interesting subject matter. But a masterpiece? Maybe not.
Still, it’s a really good novel and something of a page-turner, and I would unreservedly recommend it to anyone.
We killed Mangy-Dog & other Mozambique stories is one for the reading around the world challenge and also for the African Reading Challenge. I came across it when I was browsing through my bookshelves looking for books by people with foreign-sounding names.
I have actually read it before — I read it when I bought it, about 15 years ago — but it’s short, so I thought I’d re-read it before ticking Mozambique off the list. I don’t remember it making much impact on me then, but this time I was impressed. It’s a slim (117 page) collection of vivid, fatalistic short stories, set in rural Mozambique and mainly told from a child’s perspective. Stylistically it has a kind of plain directness, in this translation at least. Kind of Hemingwayish. Not that I’ve read any Hemingway recently.
It seems to be out of print, unfortunately, but if you happen upon a copy somewhere, pick it up.
» The picture, Students returning from the school farm, was posted to Flickr by afronie and is used under a by-sa CC licence. It has no particular connection to the book except that it was taken in Mozambique.
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Reading is a way round the world
I used to have a cookbook for kids — still do, come to think of it — called Cooking is a Way Round the World. Hence the post title. To quote Julie:
In one of my Goodreads groups, a clever person had the idea of each of us challenging ourselves to read a book by an author from every country. Obviously, this is a big challenge, and not something that can be banged out in three minutes, or even three months (for most of us!)
This struck me as an excellent idea. I think of it as like Munroing: there may be a few nutters who race to climb all 284 peaks in the fastest possible time, but for most people it’s a lifetime target, just picking off a few a year as opportunity allows.
Until the sport’s governing body comes up with an official set of rules, I’m allowing myself any genre, fiction, non-fiction, poetry, whatever; and I’m starting with the 192 member states of the UN plus any additional pseudo-nations I think are worth adding. At the moment the target is 201: the UN states, with the UK broken down into four regions, plus Palestine, Tibet, Antarctica, Greenland and the Cook Islands. EDIT: And as of July 2011, South Sudan; which isn’t a member of the UN yet, but I assume will be soon.
Just racking my brains for books I’d already read, my starting score was 36.
My current total is: 157 read, 44 to go.
Details below the fold.