Category: 52 countries

#28 – The Attack

Yasmina Khadra’s The Attack explodes even before it starts. The first few pages describe a woman’s first-hand experience with a bomb in Tel Aviv. Her husband, the story’s narrator, Amin, is a surgeon at the local hospital, and it’s only after a long shift sorting through the casualties after the bomb that he finds out about his wife’s death. For Amin, though, this is just the beginning of the tragedy. It soon comes to light that it was Amin’s wife, Sihem, who wore the bomb that caused the blast. The revelation that his wife became a suicide bomber, a fanatic, someone so unlike the woman he thought he married, turns his life upside down.

Unconvinced that he’s heard even an inch of the full story, Amin turns his back on the entire life he’s built in Tel Aviv, pushed away by angry neighbours, by the pressures of a racially charged situation, he retraces his wife’s last steps. And as many know, when loved ones keep secrets, it’s never easy to learn the truth.

The Attack is a powerful novel, it cuts to the heart of the trouble in the Middle East and portrays a man unable to find himself, he turns his back on his own tribe only to find that it’s just as impossible to fit into the society he’s chosen. Despite the urgent nature of the narrative, the dialogue feels clunky to the point of didacticism. You get the feeling that Khadra’s writing a very important book, but on the whole I felt the novel missed a slight emotional edge. That said, I was utterly engrossed in the story from the very first, most excellent, sentence: “I don’t remember hearing an explosion.”

Amin’s journey is heartbreaking, difficult and, in some ways, unbearably pointless. It’s easy to criticize the awkward storytelling, but absolutely impossible to take the author’s motivation, if I can be so bold as to address it, to task. It’s a raw, honest book that wants to open up a discussion about the very real issues driving the conflict. In that sense, it’s terribly successful. And my criticism about the dialogue aside, there are some wonderful bits of prose in the book, and here’s just one of the many passages I marked:

The bottom’s no good for anybody. In this kind of implosion, if you don’t react very quickly, you lose control of absolutely everything. You become a spectator of your own collapse, and you don’t realize that the abyss is about to close over you forever.

PHOTO IN CONTEXT: Simply the book sitting on my desk, no biggie. I am excited about the fact that in a few weeks I’ll be back to taking pictures of the books in context at the cottage. Goodness, I miss the cottage.

READING CHALLENGES: I had The Swallows of Kabul on my Around the World in 52 Books last year and only managed to get halfway through the first third of the novel. This year, I had it back again, but am replacing it with The Attack. Because Yasmina Khadra (the nom de plume for Mohammed Moulessehoul) was born in Algeria, I’ll cross off that country, despite the fact that the novel takes place in the Middle East. It’s also the first of eight books in the IMPAC Challenge. I didn’t realize that The Swallows of Kabul was also nominated for the IMPAC, so it’s nice to see this book on the shortlist as well.

WHAT’S UP NEXT: Until the packages from Amazon arrive with the rest of the books in the challenge, I’ll probably dive into a classic or finish Emma Donoghue’s latest, The Sealed Letter.

The IMPAC Challenge

Quinn left a comment on a book post a little while ago when I was asking for summer reading suggestions. He had a fabulous one, one that I’ve already started. Said he:

“dude! we can be on the pretend jury for the Impac prize and try to get through the 8 novels on this year’s shortlist in the next 2 months”.

Of course, I think this is a fab idea, considering that a) my all-time favourite book of last year, Out Stealing Horses, was an IMPAC winner, and b) it’s quite an international list, which means 52 Countries books as well. Also, I like that librarians all around the world nominate the books, even if a jury does do the final deliberations, and let’s not forget to mention it’s the richest literary prize in the whole damn world.

Here are the 8 shortlisted books for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award:

1. The Speed of Light by Javier Cercas
*This will also count as Spain

2. The Sweet and Simple Kind by Yasmine Gooneratne
*This will count as Sri Lanka

3. DeNiro’s Game by Rawi Hage
*This will count as Lebanon, as Hage was born in Beirut.

4. Dreams of Speaking by Gail Jones
*This would have been Australia if I hadn’t already read the amazing Tim Winton.

5. Let it be Morning by Sayed Kashua
*This will count as Israel

6. The Attack by Yasmina Khadra
*This will be Algeria
Finished on Saturday, April 19th, 2008

7. Winterwood by Patrick McCabe

8. The Woman Who Waited by Andrei Makine

So there you have it, all eight titles, many of which I’m having a heck of a time getting in Canada. Right now I’ve started with The Attack (Quinn’s already one book ahead of me) and once my package arrives from Amazon.ca with The Speed of Light, The Woman Who Waited, and DeNiro’s Game, I’ll at least have half the titles I need. The rest I’m going to try to track down this weekend.

UPDATED TO ADD: Winterwood, Let It Be Morning, and Dreams of Speaking are coming from Amazon.co.uk. That just leaves one title, The Sweet and Simple Kind, that I can’t seem to buy anywhere.

#21 – The Outcast

For a first novel, Sadie Jones’s The Outcast is remarkably accomplished. However, I’d say that the novel is much richer in character development than in plot, which wasn’t necessarily cliched, but it was a bit predictable. Regardless, Jones’s tale remains captivating from start to finish. It caught me enough to keep me awake one night far, far into the hours of the early morning, and the book’s amazing ending (which I will not spoil here) made me cry so much I had to go back and read it again the next day to make sure I didn’t miss anything.

Set in England in 1957, the outcast of the title is Lewis Aldridge, a teenager just out of jail, and the back story about how he got there in the first place, and what happens upon his return, fills in the richness of his tortured soul. With as much of the story taking place behind the closed familial doors, where personal tragedy seems to reign supreme for all of the characters, The Outcast richly imagines the social constructions that worked to keep it there in the decades where the novel takes place.

I don’t want to say much more except the book is definitely worth reading, and I’d be curious to see if other people were as taken by the ending as I was, feeling like it’s the hardest part to write of any bits and pieces, and getting it right must just seem like such an accomplishment.

READING CHALLENGES: I have this book down as England in my Around the World in 52 Books challenge, and really feel like Jones captures the spirit and essence of the setting extremely well. You could feel the upper-crust clutching to their conventions, feel the classicism that almost destroys not one but two families, and it made me wish my grandmother was still alive so we could talk about the book together.

WHAT’S UP NEXT: Considering I read this book a couple of months ago but couldn’t blog about it until it was actually in stores, I’m halfway through The Age of Innocence and absolutely obsessed with Wharton’s masterpiece at the moment. Then I might take up Denis Johnson’s massive Tree of Smoke, simply because I think it’ll become my book for the USA in the aforementioned challenge.

#20 – The Turning

How have I made it this far in my life and not read all of Tim Winton’s books? Seriously? I don’t think there was a single story in The Turning that wasn’t ridiculously successful, and his writing is so full of angst and ambiance that it’s impossible not to get a sense of both character and place, often within the first few sentences. I’d have to say my favourite stories were “Family,” “Boner McPharlin’s Moll,” and the title story, “The Turning.”

While not all the stories are linked, some have characters that appear in more than one, and many take Angelus, a small town on the coast in Western Australia, as the main setting. One of the neat technical aspects to the collection that I enjoyed was how Winton ordered the stories. We’d read about one character as an adult, and then the next story would be him as a child, exploring how something in childhood led him to the man he was, but in reverse. I also felt like it takes a deft, dedicated hand to describe adolescence so well, and this is a quality The Turning shares with Winton’s excellent new novel coming out in a few months, Breath.

I read Winton for Australia in my Around the World in 52 Books challenge. And I have not note that I’ve had such a visceral reaction to both of his books that’s kind of akin to how I felt after finishing Peter Carey’s ridiculously good Theft. Winton’s writing is so urgent, so driving, so gut wrenching that I think it’s impossible not to relate to it on that kind of level. And while I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I would crawl up into bed with any of these characters, I could certainly understand why Jackie gets in the car with Boner McPharlin, and how it turns out exactly the opposite of what she wants and needs, scarring her for life.

One line from “Commission” sent a rock-and-roll-style reverb right through me: “Drunks and junkies take everything out of you, all your patience, all your time and will. You soften and and obscure and compensate and endure until they’ve eaten you alive and afterwards, when you think you’re finally free of it for good, it’s hard not to be angry at the prospect of dealing with the squalor again.”

See? Angst and ambiance. Brilliant.

PHOTO IN CONTEXT: I’m at work this morning so a book cover will have to do. Love the colours and the image of the surfer.

READING CHALLENGES: As I said, it’s all about Australia, and the novel does encapsulate a world that I’ve never been to, which makes it rich for the imagination.

WHAT’S UP NEXT: The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

#19 – The Sea

While not at all typical in its writing style or its telling, John Banville’s The Sea is a book with a familiar story. An older man suffers a tragedy that stops his life short and in the process looks back at a particular point in his youth, another moment that he realizes far too late that defines him. It’s the story Richard B. Wright told so well in October, that Per Petterson’s Out Stealing Horses explores so deftly, and that Banville toys with in The Sea. His protagonist, Max Morden, has just watched his wife die from an insufferable illness and simply can’t cope. He leaves his life (and even refuses to go back to the house they shared together) and returns to the small sea side town where he used to vacation with his parents before they split up.

The small village of Ballyless, miles away from a town ironically called Ballymore by Max, holds sway over him. It was the site where he fell for his first love, a tempestuous, temperamental and even bullying tomboy of a girl named Chloe. As Max grieves for his wife, he rolls back over the motions of his life, the summer he spent with Chloe and her (I’m assuming autistic) brother Myles, their governess Rose, and their parents, Mr. and Mrs. Grace. Much more than a symbol, the sea itself governs all of his actions that summer, he shows off swimming, they play at the seaside, and every character changes during the time they spend by the water, some for better, some for worse.

With both of his defining relationships now behind him, his marriage and his definitive first love, Max seems unable to move beyond either. Moored to both experiences as a boat to a dock, he can’t cast himself off from the past, even though his daughter desperately wants to save him from himself. An art critic, he can’t help but look at everything with the same discerning eye he would apply to a painting, pulling his life apart strip by beautiful strip, setting it under the same disturbing light he applies to his professional life.

I dogeared so many of the almost-200 pages of this novel and constantly wondered about Banville’s impressive vocabulary, his superb ability to create suspense within a story without the reader ever expecting the tale’s many twists, and how he packed so much into such a short novel. I can absolutely see how and why he won the Booker for this novel in 2005.

PHOTO IN CONTEXT: The book sitting on top of my book, that I printed out in its entirety yesterday, shocked and kind of thrilled at the size of the manuscript.

READING CHALLENGES: Tackling two lists: Around the World in 52 Books, The Sea counts toward Ireland, and it’s also a 1001 Books book.

WHAT’S UP NEXT: Tim Winton’s The Turning.

#12 – What Is The What


For the first time in my Around the World in 52 Books two-year reading odyssey, I am going to break the rules. You heard me. I’m going to bust them wide open and actually let the setting of the novel define my country choice, and not the author’s birth. It’s impossible to ignore the fact that the voice in Dave Egger’s What is the What seems so completely that of Valentino Achak Deng that to name this my book from the US might do it a disservice.

When I saw Eggers back in November, I was very taken by the social commentary found within his slide show presentation. The idea that China’s need for oil propels the terrible situation in Sudan still makes me think twice every time I see a Made In China stamp on just about everything we buy and/or own. But now that I’ve read the book, I’m thinking more about the accomplishments of its writer and main character, and not just about the social-political underpinnings of the book and its incredibly important message. It’s as if it all has a human face now.

Subtitled “The Autobiography of Valentine Achak Deng,” What is the What is such a skilled, intense and utterly compelling book that it held my interest through every one of its 535 pages. The structure of the novel develops around an epistolary format reminiscent to an early scene in the book where Achak, still living then with his parents quite happily in Marial Bal, sits with a group of men and listens to them debate ‘What is the What.’ Achak speaks to a number of different people directly within the novel as he tells his story, the nurse/clerk at the hospital, the boy set to watch him as he gets robbed in his own home, members of the health club where he works, and as a narrative tool, it’s ridiculously effective. It’s almost as if, as a larger theme, the entire story sets out with the need to find and define ‘the What,’ an elusive, angry at times, but always tragic quest for Valentino to discover not only his own purpose, but a larger sense of the universe.

It’s an unbearably sat, yet utterly uplifting story, as the rebels fight against the Arab government, war breaks out and a country falls apart, and then Achak begins a long, arduous walk to Ethiopia surrounded by hundreds of other Lost Boys. Finally settling at a refugee camp in Kenya called Kakuma, Achak lives with a foster family, receives an education, and finds a decent job before being relocated to Atlanta to start a new life in the United States. The novel opens with a harrowing scene of Valentino being beaten and robbed in his own home, and still, the utter strength of his character remains steadfast. When any number of truly horrible events conspire against him, Achak carries on.

In places, Valentino describes a feeling that tears through him, not that he is cursed per se, but that bad luck has a way of following him around, shadow-like, in every facet of his life. I am not going to lie, and I know it might seem almost shameful for me to have felt akin to him in this way, but for many, many years I fought with the idea that I too must have been cursed in another life to have endured what I have. Nothing, nothing at all compared to Achak’s own struggles, I know, I have always had a roof over my head and have never had to walk further then a few blocks to a bus stop, but the feeling that life seems to consistently be a current working against you, well that’s something I can absolutely empathize with in more ways than one.

READING CHALLENGE UPDATE: Am declaring What is the What as my book from Sudan and not the United States as I had originally intended, which is good because I think I’d like to read Tom Perrotta’s Little Children instead. And because I did not buy my copy of the book, and with all the author proceeds going to Valentino’s charity, I went online and made a donation in lieu of the cost of the novel.

PHOTO IN CONTEXT: I want to thank Baby Got Books for linking to the place to buy the t-shirt that had just arrived the day I finished the novel, where it ended up on my desk amongst a whole bunch of mail clutter from when we were away. I also want to give Tim an extra shout-out for saying that I “had” to read Eggers’s novel, because he was so very, very right, I did.

CURRENTLY READING: The Talented Mr. Ripley and last Saturday’s Globe and Mail crossword puzzle.

#s6 – 10 – Vacation Reading

So, this is the stack of books I brought with me on vacation. Maybe a bit too ambitious, but I did read 5.5 of them. Not bad, eh? At one point, I was so totally engrossed in The Good Soldier that my husband and friends marveled at how I totally ignored them until I had finished the last page. Ocean? Waves? Wha?

#6 – Another Thing to Fall

I know, I know, before anyone actually says it, I should never read the ARC of the LAST book in a mystery series before reading the first, well, many books. But after loving Laura Lippman’s What the Dead Know this summer and being utterly giddy at the sight of her cameo in the first episode of The Wire this season (why are you not watching that show? Go. Right now, stop reading and start watching, honestly. It’s the best show television has ever produced in my lifetime.), I couldn’t help myself. I grabbed a copy off the publicity shelves and snuck it out before anyone could notice (yes, yes, I replaced it when I got back to work and my own copies arrived). Annnywwaaay. It’s a Tess Monaghan novel. Once a fearless reporter for a Baltimore newspaper, Tess is now a private investigator, and in this book she’s charged with the protection of an uppity actress who seems to be causing all kinds of problems on the set of the HBO series in which she stars. It’s a taut, action-packed, first-rate detective novel that hooked me from start to finish. And I have to admit, the tongue-in-cheek references to a certain production currently filming in the so-called Charm City, were all kinds of wicked fun. Plus, isn’t the cover bloody gorgeous?

#7 – The Abstinence Teacher

I came home convinced that my life needs more Tom Perrotta. My friend Randy gave me the ARC for The Abstinence Teacher back in the summer and it’s taken me a few months to get here, but I am so glad that I took this book along with me and had the chance to give it the attention it deserved. Perrotta has such a gift for capturing the nuances of American life, the contradictions, the confusions, the Christian right in battle with the more liberal left, while ensuring that his characters aren’t sacrificed in anyway for the overall themes conveyed in the story, that it’s impossible to put the book down after you begin.

The book’s two main characters: Ruth Ramsey, a sexual education teacher convinced that proper information and open honesty are the best tools she could possibly equip herself with in terms of her job; and Tim Mason, an addict turned born-again Christian who coaches the local soccer team Ruth’s younger daughter plays on, find themselves in very adult and very difficult situations when it comes to their own families, their lives, and their careers. The themes in this novel, of how religion is polarizing much of the States, and the evaporation of the middle class, never overpower the story of Ruth and Tim’s friendship. But they certainly make you think twice about the state of our society as a whole, which might be a bit heavy for the usual beach fare (goodness I counted a lot of Da Vinci Codes, honestly), but not for me. Highly recommended.

#8 – Astrid and Veronika

The Swedish entry in my Around the World in 52 Books, Sam lent me this novel before I left and it was a last-minute addition to the vacation pile. Veronika, a young writer who has just suffered a terrible tragedy, arrives at her rented cottage adjacent to a small Swedish village to find her only neighbour, Astrid, is nothing like the “witch” she was told lived in the house next door. The two women, separated by an entire lifetime, form a fast and furious friendship that allows each to free themselves of the ghosts plaguing both of their pasts.

Linda Olsson’s novel is sweet and tender as the two women reveal themselves to one another through their stories. I have to admit that I found Olsson’s storytelling a bit cloying: “Oh, let me tell you that story”, but the further I drifted with Astrid, the more I enjoyed her character, and realized that the book means for you to find it awkward at first, just as all friendships are, until it’s as if you’ve known the person beside you all your life. And the setting, especially Astrid’s house and its descriptions, well, they absolutely made me think of Per Petterson’s Out Stealing Horses, and good grief did I love that novel. The landscape is rich and overall I did enjoy this book. One I never would have read if not for my challenge. And isn’t that always the point?

#9 – My Name is Bosnia

My friend Kat recommended this book to me when we were discussing Russian novels for my Around the World in 52 Books challenge. I’m pleased I picked it up last year on a whim, because it fit nicely with my quest to finish The Canadian Book Challenge. As the book’s author, Madeleine Gagnon, is from Quebec and part of the novel takes place outside of Quebec City and in Montreal, it’s my book for that province. Gut-wrenching and unbearably sad, but hopeful by the time you get to the end, it was another book, like Astrid and Veronika that took me aback in terms of the writing style (but that could be down to the translation). The story of a young girl, Sabaheta, who comes out of the forests surrounding Sarajevo after the death of her father and changes her name to Bosnia, her journey, both emotional and physical, is epic as she tries to escape the war. Heartbreaking, that’s a good word for this book, just heartbreaking.

#10 – The Good Soldier

Saving the best for last, of course. After many, many false starts, I was determined to bring Ford Madox Ford’s classic novel with me so I would absolutely have no choice but to finish. I’ve mentioned, at least two or three times on the blog before, how much I love the first sentence of this book: “This is the saddest story I have ever heard.” And considering the man telling the story, John Dowell, is also central to its plot, setting it up this way immediately clues one to the fact that he’s an utterly unreliable narrator, and isn’t that just delicious. When we first meet John, he’s still in love with his wife, a woman with a bad heart who needs constant caretaking and long, restful periods spent at Nauheim. An American couple of a certain stature, the Dowells count themselves lucky to find company with the Ashburnhams, an upper calls British couple who also vacation for their health. “The Good Soldier” of the novel’s title refers to Ashburnham, and the further we go into the utter depths of why it’s such a sad story, the more we uncover, or discover, rather, that nothing is as it seems, either with the Dowells or the Ashburnhams.

Indeed, it’s the saddest story I’d read in a while, but the writing is just so exact and so true, and the narrative so utterly engaging that I am ashamed to have put the novel down so many times before actually finishing it. I earmarked passage after passage of prose, and even pressed the book to my chest and uttered a few, “oh no’s” while reading in a totally melodramatic fashion as I grew cold on the beach when the sun started to go down, and literally refused to speak until I had finished. Part of my own 1001 Books challenge, I utterly agree with the inclusion of this novel on the list, and if I were still studying, I think I would devote pages and pages to the effectiveness of Ford’s unreliable, utterly immovable and somewhat (if I’m being honest) idiotic narrator.

Whew! It certainly was a lot of very good reading. Good, I love vacation. I started What is the What on the last day we were there, and I’m this-close to finishing. So it was 5 Beach Books, Ragdoll styles on vacation last week.

PHOTO IN CONTEXT: The stack of novels on my hotel room bed.

READING CHALLENGES: Oh, almost too many to list: 1001 Books, The Canadian Book Challenge, Around the World in 52 Books, it was a great catch-up week.

#4 – The Outlander


Preamble: I’ve got to write things in order or else I’ll totally forget bits and pieces along the way. Just before finishing up The Outlander for The Canadian Book Challenge I read the second book in the Pretty Little Liars series, Flawless, and thought it was a bit of fun (#3 for the year). Then, just before we left for Mexico, I finally finished Gil Adamson’s The Outlander, which I’m using as Alberta for the before-mentioned reading challenge. Adamson’s book has been on my nightstand for months. I picked it up after reading the somewhat controversial article by Noah Richler in Macleans last year, with the thought to reading all three novels discussed (next up, and the final title Richler critiques in his piece, Jacqueline Baker’s The Horseman’s Graves).

The Outlander tells the story of a nineteen-year-old widow, Mary Boulton, who flees her homestead in rural Alberta after murdering her cheating brute of a husband. Chased by his almost-twin brothers, each tall, blonde and brutish, the widow soon finds herself deep in the Rockies, lost in the wilderness and on the edge of death. That is, until she meets the ridgerunner, William Moreland, who saves her from starvation and a little from the madness that has haunted her ever since the terribly tragedy forced her from her miserable home. Their time together is brief, but it has an impact on both Mary and William, and their feelings form the emotional backdrop for the rest of the novel.

Alone again, and now hunted almost to the brink of her own sanity, the widow is finally shown kindness by the Reverend Bonnycastle, or “Bonny” as she calls him, in a tiny mining town called Frank. A world away from her own upbringing, the widow finds herself approaching happiness for the first time in her young life. But the hunters do not give up the hunt, and each day they grow closer to finding her, and ruining her tenuous grip on both reality and her own survival.

Adamson’s book feels epic, both in its scope and its language, as it sweeps across the landscape, leaving trails of interesting metaphors and intricate detail that create a vivid picture of the experiences of her protagonist. It’s an engaging novel, and one that I thoroughly enjoyed. If the purpose of my participation in The Canadian Book Challenge is to read from coast to coast, I am certainly glad I finally read Adamson’s book. Filled up with local history and real people (although fictionalized for the purposes of the narrative, of course), the most interesting parts of the book are the things that happen to the widow and the people she meets, not necessarily the drive for her to escape her dead husband’s merciless brothers.

PHOTO IN CONTEXT: Simply a link taken from the publisher’s website, in case anyone was interested in knowing that it took Adamson 10 years to write this novel.

READING CHALLENGE UPDATE: So…this takes care of Alberta! And Canada for that matter (I’m killing two challenges with one read).

#2 – July’s People

Nadine Gordimer’s July’s People is a bloody good book. A book I wasn’t necessarily expecting to be as riveting as I certainly found it, and by far one of the best titles I’ve read from the 1001 Books list. In fact, I was so obsessed with finishing that I stood on Lansdowne Ave and read the last two pages before walking home. Some guy walked by, chuckled, and said, “Must be a really good book.”

Uh, duh.

The story takes place in South Africa in 1980 during an uprising, which is fictional, where the country is invaded by Mozambique. With mayhem all around, Maureen, her husband Bam, and their three children are forced to flee the city. Their servant, whom they call July, offers to take them to his village, where they settle in his mother-in-law’s hut for the time being.

Stripped of their city life, their status, and with nothing but the colour of their skin and a few prized possessions (a “bakkie” [truck] and a rifle) to remind them of what life was once like and despite their fiercely liberal beliefs, Bam and Maureen struggle to get along in this foreign world. Fighting fleas, sickness in their children, language difficulties, and a whole host of other problems, it’s a challenge just to get through a day.

After weeks pass, the family starts to adjust, and the little motions that happen in families start again. The children make friends, and even Maureen finds herself more comfortable around the other women, gathering greens for dinner with them, speaking in broken Afrikaans to them, and managing the hut with a strong hand. But as a whole the family cannot flourish in the environment, and as a result, the relationship between July and the Smales breaks down.

Once affable, even amiable, small things pick away at the core differences between them: how July refuses to give back the car keys after taking a trip to town; how Maureen lords the information of his city mistress over him; and how he adjusts to life back in the village full time, how his own presence effects his family unused to seeing him home. Themes of racial inequality are impossible to ignore, as they’re turned on their heads, then ripped apart, and forced into situations that exploit how the idea of the liberalism so cherished by Maureen and her husband in a philosophical way is almost farcical.

In one of my undergraduate classes in post-colonial literature, I read Gordimer’s Burger’s Daughter, which I remember to be just as poignant and readable as July’s People. It was the same year that I read my first novel by J.M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians, but for some reason, I carried on reading him and abandoned Gordimer altogether. Maybe now is the time for me to read more Gordimer? Especially considering how much I enjoyed this novel.

PHOTO IN CONTEXT: Because I didn’t have my camera with me on Lansdowne as I read the last two pages, I’ve piled the book up on a stack of ARCs that I have to take back to work. Oh, and there are some stocking feet poking their way in as well as the library book I need to return. Ah, the life of a literary gal.

READING CHALLENGES: July’s People is on two of my lists: the 1001 Books I’d like to read this year, and the South African entry in my current Around the World in 52 Books. I’d highly recommend it for either. Oh, and I think Nadine Gordimer won the Nobel Prize for Literature (which I just confirmed on Wikipedia; she won in 1991), so we can add that to the major award winners that I’ve read in my lifetime too. Whew. Kind of like a bird life list for bookish peeps.

Around the World in 52 Books – 2008

I’ve been mulling over whether or not I want to restrict my reading by doing the Around the World in 52 Books challenge again this year. But I think my overall reading was absolutely enriched by forcing myself out of my comfort zone (read: Canadian fiction) that it would be a shame not to try again, even if I did only manage 33 overall countries. So, here’s the list. I’ve copied the remaining countries I didn’t get to in 2007, and added a few books that have been lingering on my shelves, and will be adding more authors as we go along, having promised myself not to simply read another book by the same writer I read last year as a way of easily knocking countries down off the list. So, here’s where we are so far:

1. The Successor, Ismail Kadare, Albania
2. The Attack, Yasmina Khadra, Algeria
3. The Turning, Tim Winton, Australia
4. The Outlander, Gil Adamson, Canada
5. The House of the Spirits, Isabel Allende, Chile
6. Soul Mountain, Gao Xingjian, China
7. The Trial, Franz Kafka, Czech Republic
8. The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz, Dominican Republic
9. The Outcast, Sadie Jones, England
10. Voice Over, Celine Curiol, France
11. Austerlitz, W.G. Sebald, Germany
12. Our Sister Killjoy, Ama Ata Aidoo, Ghana
13. Disappearance, David Dabydeen, Guyana
14. The Melancholy of Resistance, Laszlo Krasznahorkai, Hungary
15. Halldór Laxness, Independent People, Iceland
16. The Inheritance of Loss, Kiran Desai, India
17. The Sea, John Banville, Ireland
18. Let it be Morning, Sayed Kashua, Israel
19. From Harvey River, Lorna Goodison, Jamaica
20. The Unconsoled, Kazuo Ishiguro, Japan
21. Petals of Blood, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, Kenya
22. DeNiro’s Game, Rawi Hage, Lebanon
23. The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Mohsin Hamid, Pakistan
24. Blindness, Jose Saramago, Portugal
25. The Woman Who Waited, Makine, Russia
26. Nurudin Farah, Links, Somalia
27. The Speed of Light, Javier Cercas, Spain
28. The Sweet and Simple Kind, Yasmine Gooneratne, Sri Lanka
29. July’s People, Nadine Gordimer, South Africa
30. Javier Cercas, Soldiers of Salamis, Spain
31. Dave Eggers / Valentino Achak Deng, What is the What, Sudan
32. Astrid and Veronika, Linda Olsson, Sweden
33. All Soul’s Day, Cees Nooteboom, The Netherlands
34. In a Free State, V.S. Naipul, Trinidad
35. My Name is Red, Orhan Pamuk, Turkey
36. Unaccustomed Earth, Jhumpa Lahiri, United States

Added after this master list:

37. Hunger, Knut Hamsun, Norway