Tuesday, May 11, 2010

What the hell am I doing?

Well, about a year ago, a guy/girl called Sam the copywriter began documenting a reading journey over at the Penguin blog. Basically, s/he aimed to read himself around the world, one book per country, within roughly 80 books.

Awesome idea, right? Unfortunately, within the year s/he'd only read six books (UK-France-Switzerland-Italy-Austria-Germany), and s/he'd chosen 18th or 19th century authors for four of them ("Great Expectations"!!! Honestly) and British exoticising novelists for the other two ("I Claudius" for Italy???), which is really kinda lame if you're serious about confronting world literature.

Granted, s/he was probably constrained into only reading books published by Penguin. And s/he made a cool map.

Anyhow, I've decided: I can do that too. I can do it better. I read lots of books in all genres and if I begin from Singapore, within a couple of stops I'm in Australasia already, new continent, woohoo, and next thing I know I'm in South America, which looks bloody impressive if I say so myself.

So I'm embarking on a similar journey. Rules are:

1. I can travel only between countries that share a border, or are either side of a body of water that needs crossing. (Lifted from Sam's original post.)

2. To qualify for being from that country, the book should ideally be set in that country and written by an author living in that country, although an either/or situation is acceptable when I just wanna read the book anyway.

3. The number 80 doesn't really matter so much. I just kinda wanna see if I can circumnavigate the globe with my reading habits.

Oh yeah, and this lady (her name is Shelbi) rules. I just found her blog: she started in January this year, and she's up to Book 27 out of 80, and she's going through continents thoroughly, my god, even a book for the Channel Islands and now she's all the way in Nigeria.

(One advantage of living in Singapore is that I can go the Southern route and skip Europe entirely, until the second time I try circumnavigating of course.)

Now, let's start reading!

1 comment:

litsf said...

What happened to your literary challenge? Don't tell me you stopped too. I am starting a similar things and I am looking for readers who already challenged themselves for a similar reading journey.