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Member: depressaholic

CollectionsYour library (588)

Reviews118 reviews

TagsFiction (483), Reading Globally Challenge (143), UK (120), USA (96), Short Stories (67), Nobel Laureate (61), Russia (48), World War II (31), Germany (21), Italy (19) — see all tags

Cloudstag cloud, author cloud

GroupsArab, North African and Middle Eastern Literature, Asian Fiction & Non-Fiction, Board Room, Book Nudgers, Club Read 2009, Fans of Russian authors, Girlybooks, Reading Globally, Workspace B

Favorite authorsChinua Achebe, Albert Camus, Alejo Carpentier, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Umberto Eco, Patricia Grace, Günter Grass, Joseph Heller, Hermann Hesse, James Joyce, Malcolm Lowry, Katherine Mansfield, Salman Rushdie, Josef Škvorecký, Aleksandr Soljenitsin (Shared favorites)

About meI am on a literary journey in which I would like to visit every country on the planet. I am trying to read at least one book by an author from every country. I am also reading plenty of things not from 'new' countries, so it is a very slow trip, but has been well worth it so far. Wikipedia lists 192 members of the UN, 10 countries without international recognition, and a whole bunch of dependent states, so my initial target is 192, but if I ever achieve that there will be plenty of world left. I am charting my progress in the Reading Globally group. I tag my books by the extant nation that I think best represents a particular writer. This can lead to oddities, like authors being tagged as being from nations that didn't even exist when they were alive, but it works for me.

In other respects I am relatively normal.

About my libraryI made my list by including every book I can remember reading cover-to-cover, some of which I still own. Having looked at it I realise that my reading life consists of 3 separate phases:
Fantasy and humour (Adams, Pratchett, Williams, etc.) in my late teens/early twenties
Popular science (Dawkins, Gould, etc.) in my mid-twenties
World Literature (lots of stuff) up until now (thirtysomething)
I was tempted to exclude the first set to make my library more representative of me now (and to look a bit more intellectual), but reading has always been important to me, and these are the men and women who made me the person I currently am, so they all go in. And by the way, Rowling is only in there because I lost a bet.

Also onBookMooch

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Real nameAndy

LocationBristol, UK

Account typepublic, lifetime

Connection NewsConnection News

URLs http://www.librarything.com/profile/depressaholic (profile)
http://www.librarything.com/catalog/depressaholic (library)

Common KnowledgeSeries (60), Awards (198), Characters (2459), Places (469)

Member sinceOct 3, 2006