Around the World in 80 Books
Come on in, we’re hosting a challenge! We have put some music on, donned our most chic lounge-wear, and shall be providing drinks and nibbles*. All you have to do is pick books that are linked by either content or author to far away places, which will enable you to go off on a booky world tour. We shall be doing 80 books, but the amount, speed, countries and routes taken is entirely up to you. Feel free to add your links in the comments section of any of our posts that are tagged with #AW80books, and also add that tag to your own post.
If you’re wondering where we’re headed on our #AW80books reading challenge, pull up a chair, shove those maps out of the way, and take a sneaky peek at our provisional globe-trotting reading lists.
*Nibbles may contain nuts, and be imaginary.
Sarah
- Americanah – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Nigeria & USA)
2. The Master and Margarita – Mikhail Bulgakov (Russia)
3. Pointed Roofs – Dorothy Richardson (Germany)
4. Compartment No. 6 – Rosa Liksom (Russia & Travel)
5. Wolf Totem – Jiang Rong (Mongolia)
6. Herman Hesse – Siddartha (India)
7. The Green Road – Anne Enright (Ireland)
8. Snow Blind – Ragnar Jonasson (Iceland)
9. Roseanna – Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö (Sweden)
10. The Fall Of The Stone City – Ismail Kadare (Albania)
11. The Enchanted April – Elizabeth Von Arnim (Italy)
12. The Vegetarian – Han Kang (South Korea)
13. Irmina – Barbara Yelin (Germany & Barbados)
14. Like Water for Chocolate – Laura Esquivel (Mexico)
15. Pétronille – Amélie Nothomb (France)
16. A Tale for the Time Being – Ruth Ozeki (Canada & Japan)
17. Mr Fortune’s Maggot – Sylvia Townsend Warner (Cook Islands/Polynesia)
18. The Man who went up in Smoke – Maj Sjöwall & Per Wahlöö (Hungary)
19. The Quiet American – Graham Greene (Vietnam)
20. The Glorious Heresies – Lisa McInerney (Ireland)
21. Swing Time – Zadie Smith (Gambia)
Santa Evita – Tomas Eloy Martinez
Out Stealing Horses – Per Petterson
The Feast of Goats – Mario Vargas Llosa
The House of the Spirits – Isabel Allende
The Garlic Ballads – Mo Tan
The Lost and Forgotten Languages of Shanghai – Ruiyan Xu
The Gift of Rain – Tan Twain Eng
The Greengage Summer – Rumer Godden
The Black Book – Orhan Pamuk
Star of The Sea – Joseph O’Connor
Remembering Babylon – David Malouf
Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage – Haruki Murakami
South: the Endurance Expedition – Ernest Shackleton
White Fang – Jack London
The Motorcycle Diaries – Ernesto Che Guevara
Hopscotch – Julio Cortazar
Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe
Disgrace – J.M. Coetzee
The Forty Rules of Love – Elif Shafak
Moby Dick – Herman Melville
Lucy
- A House for Mr Biswas – V. S. Naipaul (Trinidad)
2. Burial Rites – Hannah Kent (Iceland)
3. The Room – Jonas Karlsson (Sweden)
4. The Name of the Rose – Umberto Eco (Italy)
American Pastoral – Philip Roth
The Elephant Keeper’s Children – Peter Høeg
The Charterhouse of Parma – Stendhal
Lucy
Sarah