Saturday, December 31, 2011

My 2012 Reading Challenge Resolution: Around the World in 52 Books

In 2011, I got a Kindle, and as a result, I read nearly 2 dozen books. That's not a lot - I have friends who have read 3 times that many books this year, and more - but I work 50+ hours a week and for several years I haven't made a lot of time in my schedule for reading, so for me, it was a lot. Now that I've gotten into the somewhat regular habit of reading daily or nearly daily, I wanted to organize my reading efforts and become even more well-read this year, as well as increase the number of books I read from the year prior, and simultaneously learn a lot more about world history and current events.

The Around the World in 52 Books Challenge

Using my GoodReads account, I stumbled across a reading challenge called Around the World in 52 Books. The idea is that you read approximately one book per week, and each book must be set in a different country. The books can be set in the past, present or future; they can be of any genre (and, indeed, I have everything from non-fiction, to romance, to mystery, to historical fiction, to sci-fi in mine). Dozens of people have shared their reading lists, and GoodReads made it easy for me to find books tagged with specific countries as settings.

Criteria for Book Choices

I researched several books for each country, and read many book lists for many different countries of origin. For non-European books and cultures, I tried to avoid choosing books that were told from the point of view of a European visitor or outsider, i.e., no Out of Africa for Kenya, no Mosquito Coast for Belize, etc., with a few hopefully notable exceptions. For example, Egypt's book is the first of a series of plucky female European heroine mysteries. I happen to like mystery series with female protagonists, and this particular book was said by reviewers to include a lot of accurate detail about Egyptian history. Likewise, the book for Afghanistan is about a failed US mission in the war in Afghanistan. I chose it because it came highly recommended, was about current events, and presents a diverse array of local people on both sides of the war. Finally, I chose between books on the basis of genre-diversity, plot appeal and reviews from other GoodReads users.

Keeping Track of My Reading


I'm keeping track of my reading in several ways.

First, I have put all these books on their own shelf (category) on my account on GoodReads, which is a social network for bookworms.  I have many of these books already, and will try to read only one book per week. Some of these are quite short and some, like Russka, will likely take longer than a week to read, so I don't anticipate keeping to a very strict schedule, but the general goal is to average one book per week. Secondly, I'm keeping a travel map of all the countries I've "visited" in my reading using the mapping feature of TravellersPoint. You can see my bookshelf and my map with the details of the places I'm reading about and my "trip trajectory" on the 2012 Reading Challenge page on this blog. Pretty cool!

My Personal List


Below is the list I put together for myself. As you can see, Europe is slightly over-represented at this time. So I may tweak it a bit as time goes on and my interests shift.  This is just my own personal list, not intended to be definitive in any way. If this challenge sounds interesting to you, I recommend looking through the book challenge message board where people in the ATW52 challenge have posted literally dozens of lists.

Are you doing any reading challenges right now? Be sure to tell me about them in the comments!

Africa & The Middle East

Asia & the Far East
North America & the Caribbean
Europe
South and Central America
Australian Continent
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Location: Everett, MA, USA

3 comments:

  1. Jan SJanuary 1, 2012 at 9:12 AM

    I am looking forward to doing this challenge as well. Did you see the various images that people are going to use to identify their Around the World challenge entries? You will find them in the thread on blogging.

    I approached my list in a similar manner. I wanted my books set in the country I chose. Others, chose author nationality. I also wanted a good selection of genres.

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  2. AndieJanuary 2, 2012 at 9:26 PM

    Jan, I did see that! I think with blogger that's not strictly necessary just because we can tag them, but it's a cute idea and I may still do it anyway :)

    My main purpose for participating in this is to learn about a bunch of different cultures, histories and countries by immersion in a work of literature, so the book being set in the country and preferably being written by someone native to it was super important to me! You have a terrific list, too - as I said over on your blog, it was majorly influential on mine :)

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  3. Tanya @ Moms Small VictoriesDecember 28, 2012 at 5:07 AM

    I just joined this Goodreads group and like your list. I will be posting my reviews on my blogs as well once my blog transfer to another host is complete. Hope you will stop by. Www.momssmallvictories.com. On my blogpost about the Around the World in 80 Books, the blog host had a map to highlight the countries visited. So once a country is complete it's colored. I like that little map, except the first book I read was for the Dominican Republic which is a tiny country, doesn't look like I've done much yet!

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