2024: an interlude

I know, I know. I haven’t finished my reviews of last year’s books. But we’re getting further and further into 2024, and I’m in danger of putting myself in the same situation as I did last year: ending up with 143 books to cover all at once!

So we’re going to interrupt your regularly scheduled blogging with a quick recap of the last two and a half months of reading.

I am most excited about my new reading challenge this year. I saw a librarian post somewhere (don’t ask me where I saw it; I spend a grotesque amount of time doom scrolling) about a Read Around the World challenge, where you try to read a book from every country in the world. The post suggested a specific book from each country, but I am going with what I have available to me at my local library for now, and as I get into the literature of smaller countries, I’ll have to see what I can find.

I am not limiting my reading this year ONLY to books from this challenge. 195 is too many books to read in one year, even for me! So I’m going to pace it out over a few years, but I’m peppering in a selection from different countries each month. Here’s what I’ve read so far:

JANUARY

1. The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk (Poland)
2. Shadow on the Sun by Richard Matheson
3. Lost Gods by Brom
4. Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt
5. Home Safe by Elizabeth Berg
6. The Dark Descent of Elizabeth Frankenstein by Kiersten White
7. Gold Dust by Ibrahim al-Koni (Libya)
8. The Clown by Heinrich Boll (Germany)
9. Bastard out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison
10. Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan (Ireland)

FEBRUARY

1. Bitter Grounds by Sandra Benitez
2. Under an Outlaw Moon by Dietrich Kalteis
3. The Secret Adversary by Agatha Christie
4. Diary of an Oxygen Thief by Anonymous
5. Time Squared by Leslie Krueger
6. First Comes Summer by Maria Hesselager (Denmark)
7. Memento Mori by Muriel Spark
8. Goodbye Tsugumi by Banana Yoshimoto (Japan)
9. Hotel Cuba by Aaron Hamburger
10. Cradle of the Deep by Dietrich Kalteis
11. The Taste of Sugar by Marisel Vera
12. July’s People by Nadine Gordimer (South Africa)

MARCH

1. Here Goes Nothing by Eamon McGrath (Canada)
2. The Man in the High Tower by Philip K. Dick
3. Triburbia by Karl Taro Greenfield
4. One Summer in Savannah by Terah Shelton Harris
5. The Room by Jonas Karlsson (Sweden)
6. After the Flood by Kassandra Montag
7. Human Acts by Han Kang (South Korea)
8. Madame Tussaud by Michelle Moran
9. Marriage and the Mystery of the Gospel by Ray Ortlund
10. The Faithful Executioner by Joel F. Harrington (in progress)
11. A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James (Jamaica) (in progress)

I love the practice of reading in translation. It’s such a different experience from reading a work by an author in their original language, but I feel like it still provides a window into a worldview and a culture ordinarily unknown to me. Each of the works in translation that I’ve read so far this year had unique and wildly disparate styles of writing, from the spare, beautiful details of familial love in Keegan’s Small Things Like These, to the jarring and casual violence in Han Kang’s nonfiction Human Acts, to the wild and haunting Viking land in Hesselager’s First Comes Summer, to the sprawling multilingual historical epic in Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob.

As I have time, I’ll try to dive deeper into some of my favorites as I go. And yes, at some point you’ll get the promised reviews of my favorites from LAST year as well!

Tell me, are you doing any reading challenges right now? What books are you loving?