I am hereby announcing my New Year’s Resolution for 2010. The goal is to explore the world in books or at least 26 countries of it. To increase the chances of me sticking to my resolution I am gonna blog about it. I hope at least few people interested in books will read my blog and push me to continue.
So now you might be asking yourself, why in the world would anyone come up with such a resolution? Well… two of my three main obsessions in life are books and traveling. At some point I started selecting my vacation reading according to the location I was about to visit. I felt it enriched my experience of the place and after a while it became a full blown obsession. I had some nice encounters with places connected to authors and books and I will probably blog about some of those during the year. I started looking at where the books I was reading were from and what I noticed was that American and British authors were overrepresented. This annoyed me. So I figured it was about time I started expanding my reading horizon! In 2008 I set myself a secret goal to read books from 26 countries and I failed with only 18. In 2009 I did even worse with only 13 nationalities. This year however I am gonna go all the way with your help!
The long term goal is of course to read a book from every country in the world but for now I will start with rummaging through my shelfs of unread books and pick the first country.
Congrats to this decision! Two weeks per book per country is quite ambitious…
Hm, you might have ended your 2009 with this great Swiss Homo Faber, how about starting with German Daniel Kehlmann’s ‘Measuring the World’ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measuring_the_World) which is surely worth a read? At least IMHO…
I’ll try US David Foster Wallace’s ‘Infinite Jest’ at first, which might be a challenge.
Measuring the World sounds very interesting! I am gonna put that on my list of books to consider!
The Infinite Jest is a bit too scary to try. Maybe later in the year if I am doing really well
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Thanks for the suggestions!
And how is a book going to make it from your List to Consider to physical appearance on your bedside locker?
Ah, and one last suggestion for now – just because it might be used to cheat a little bit: An Australian about India (for the end of the year, hence this could count as two countries): Shantaram. But one should forget about the hype around this book and its author to enjoy it.
By mail from some obscure Play.com location. Then the sloppy postman will hopefully manage to put it in the right mailbox and I than will carry it from there to my nightstand…
Not what you meant?
I will probably try to read some of my unread books in the next couple of months and then I will start seriously considering suggestions. Thinking about making a page for it to keep track of them. If I don’t read some of them during the year I want to remember them for later.
I have actually read Shantaram. Interesting and well written book but I found the glorifying of himself (and his crimes) a bit annoying. I would only count it as Australia though. I never cheat
!
Grrrr! Why do smileys show up at the wrong end of the line…
Of course I do believe you that you never ever cheat and I won’t try anything the like again…
And speaking about Shantaram: I did not feel Roberts glorifying himself nor did I see im in a kind of male hero role. This man is just erm, weird (without any positive or negative judgement) IMO. Smoking that amount of heroine, putting fingers in other peoples eyes and fighting slum dogs and illnesses just made up another reality for me. Interesting and stirring to drop into…
My bookclub read that book and few of us felt he was glorifying himself a bit and others didn’t feel like that at all. I am not very forgiving when it comes to criminals so maybe I approached the book in the wrong way.
I really liked the part when he was living in the slum but got less interested when he went to Afghanistan. What I keep wondering though is how much is true. I guess we will never know.
Would it make difference when we knew how much actually was true? (huh, dangerous and intersting topic, the truth…
)
I came across Roberts as I watched a video – interview with him. At least it looked like he was well known in the quarter he lived in in Bombay. In a way which fits the book. This interview made me read Shantaram.
As a side note: Their favourite bar, the ‘Leopold’s’ was one of the places attacked two years ago…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_2008_Mumbai_attacks
I also saw an interview with him. Seemed quite reflected but you could also tell by the way he looked that he had _lived_ hard.
I think knowing the truth could change a lot about how I feel about the book. I am actually more interested in knowing which of his good deeds are true than his crimes. I think this means I am secretly hoping I could like him more because it was a very well written and interesting book… It is very difficult to say though what impact it would have. Would be interesting to compare people’s opinion between the ones that thought it was all true and the ones that had read beforehand his statement that he takes some creative control.
What does upset you about his crimes? The crimes itself, or your feeling of him glorifying them, not regretting or even making money out of them?
I am more interested in the circumstances and environment he describes (eg. the slum, Bombay and Indish behaviour – do they like singing that much?) when it comes to the question ‘was it all true’. Too much ‘creative control’ here might spoil the book for me somehow. But I would not mind it in his own story (did Karla ‘really’ exist, did he ‘really’ feel that way, …?) I regard this as fictional anyway, as nobody /can/ tell the truth here, not even Roberts himself. But I like his fiction.
Do you think that male and female reception of this book differ?
Not regretting I guess. I missed a certain humbleness.
I think male and female reception might differ. I think men are much better at just ignoring the crimes thinking that it is his problem not mine and enjoying the rest of the book.
Then there are two groups of women. One that is upset about the crimes and another that finds them a bit fascinating (the bad boy syndrome).
I might of course be misjudging people here but that is the over simplified impression I get.
finally, I found this post once more. You have few useful tips for my school project. Now, I won’t forget to bookmark it.
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