Read Around the World: Saudi Arabia

Marhaba! Welcome to Saudi Arabia where the weather is hot and the women are ruled by the men in their lives.

Rajaa Alsanea, a woman, receives the honour of representing Saudi Arabia and, specifically, their women with her novel The Girls of Riyadh.

Plot Summary: One brave Saudi girl sends out emails using a list serve, revealing the lives of four of her friends as they struggle to find love while remaining within the confines of their religion and culture.

My progress:

Read Around the World: Portugal

Olá!
It’s time for a dip over to Europe with a stop in Portugal. Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist will be representing Portugal in the United Nations of books.

Plot Summary: A young shepard in Spain (See? I’m breaking that live and write about the same country rule again.) dreams that he must follow omens to find his treasure near the pyramids.

My progress around the world:

Read Around the World: USA

Next up: The United States of America.

I’d say that about 80% of what I read is American. So, who gets to represent the USA? I’m going to choose John Steinbeck and his novel East of Eden even though it has been awhile since I’ve read him. In 1962 Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature and I think he’s worthy of representing the USA.

Every time I read Steinbeck, he pleasantly surprises me and this novel was no exception.

A very brief plot summary: Basically, the story follows several families in the Californian Salinas Valley in the time before world war II. The Hamiltons have a large family and are trying to survive on infertile land and everyone struggles to find their place in the world and ‘make it’ in their own way.

Read Around the World Progress:

Read Around the World: Canada

First up: Canada.

Being Canadian, I’ve been reading Canadian literature all my life. But which book will I choose to represent Canada in my Read Around the World challenge to myself?

Oops. I just ran into a hitch. Shoot. Already. I said books written by an author in one country but set in another didn’t count. The problem is that the last two books written by Canadians (The Flying Troutmans and Divisadero) that I’ve read were set in the USA. Damn.

Now what? Do I skim through my mind’s reading archives until I come up against No Great Mischief or The Stone Angel? Something so quintessentially Canadian it couldn’t be anything else?

No. I play dirty. (You can’t say I didn’t warn you.)

The Flying Troutmans begins in Manitoba, and the characters are kooky Canadians. The story setting is a character in the novel, but it isn’t so major that it makes the story non-Canadian–if that makes any sense. So, The Flying Troutmans by Miriam Toews gets to represent Canada. Ta-da!!!

Plot summary: Main character comes back from France to place her sister to the psych ward and then take care of her niece and nephew. She decides she needs to find the children’s birth father and off they go in an aging minivan across the US, hoping to find a man nobody has seen in over a decade.

Reading Around the World Progress:

Read Around the World: Part 2

Okay, this is how my read around the world challenge/event/mission/thing is going to go down…

Each time I read a book from somewhere in the world, I’m going to brag about it, I mean post it on my blog to keep me accountable. That is, until I realize that this challenge is a grossly mislead idea and a stupid fit of inspiration that hit me way too late at night for my inner critic to do something about, and I sneak in and delete all my posts that contain even a whisper about me reading my way around the world. That’s right. I play dirty.

And because I play dirty, I am also going to come flying out of the gate on this challenge. You might want to stand back. I am going to go a little postal. I mean, a little post crazy. A small difference, yet a very important one. So… wait for it. It’s coming. Many posts today.

Alrighty then. Still with me?

Here goes: each post will have a short blurb about the book, a world map with the country of the book’s origin coloured in, as well as a lovely map marking my progress around the world. You can watch me colour in all 195 of the world’s freaking countries. And let me state for the record, if I am breathing down the neck of country 195 and some loony in charge decides to rearrange borders, rename the place, and generally piss me off by making this crazy challenge more difficult, I reserve the right to do whatever the heck I want in order to make things ‘right’ again. Cool?

We’re cool.

Am I missing anything?