Where In The World Are You Now? - March 2011

I am in Scotland with The Italian Secretary and simultaneously in Quebec where they Bury Your Dead.

Oh, so many places - in Japan with Donald Keene in Chronicles of My Life, in medieval England with CJ Sansom in Dissolution, in Lebanon with Yalo.

Not sure where I'll end up this month .

Am spending Mornings in Jenin with Susan Abulhawa, and the rest of the day in Russia in War and Peace.

Have returned to late 1995 in the Jerusalem hills - Homesick by Eshkol Nevo.

Just finished Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. It is also March in that book although a lot more dreary that where I live. Guess that's to be expected for a book in England. I never read this in school so I figured I'd read it now. Exactly what I expected but still fun to read.

@5

That's such a great book - hope you like it! If you do, I'd recommend picking up his World Cup Wishes, which is told using similar techniques, but is a tad more polished.

At the moment I'm delivering mail in Los Angeles with Bukowski's Post Office.

I'm in Ireland with Tipperary, New Brunswick, Canada with Evening Snow Will Bring Such Peace

I've just left the Open City of New York, with side trips to Brussels and Nigeria.

I am in Hotel Berlin in 1943, and still on A Voyage Long and Strange with the Conquistadors in sixteenth-century America, where the native inhabitants use dogs to carry things.

I am in Room and also in Quebec where they Bury Your Dead.

Hi bookoholic13! Yes, I have that on the shelf waiting to go...to tell the truth I wanted to read that one even more, but thought I'd read Nevo's 1st novel first. Enjoying it so far, and if World Cup Wishes is even better then I can't wait!

I've escaped Libyan dictator Muammar el-Qaddafi's henchmen in 1979 Tripoli by escaping to Cairo in In the Country of Men by Hisham Matar, and I've now time traveled back to an East African coastal town in 1899 in Desertion by Abdulrazak Gurnah.

I've been suffering with The Vet's Daughter, mostly on the outskirts of London in the 1930s.

@13

Yes, better, but definitely a good choice to read Homesick first - that way you can really tell the development of Nevo as a writer, which at least I find fascinating.

Like kidzdoc, I too am in North Africa -- in Libya with Ibrahim al-Koni's The Bleeding of the Stone.

I've just left depression era London where Our Spoons Came from Woolworths.

Discovering France.

I'm in France and Morocco with Tahar Ben Jelloun's latest (I forget the title!)

I've just arrived to a colonial backwater somewhere in northeastern Argentina with Antonio di Benedetto's Zama. At the same time, I'm in medieval Spain with Juan Ruíz's incredible Libro de buen amor. And I was able to get my library to obtain a copy of the original Spanish translation of Wytold Gombrowicz's Ferdydurke, done by the author himself, so I'm back in Poland by way of Buenos Aires. I just read the new English translation in January, and it's the first time I've ever read a book translated into two different languages. It's pretty cool!

I'm amongst Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, with Liyana Badr's A Balcony over the Fakihani (actually a collection of three novellas).

I'm in the Indian hill station of Panchgani, 1974, at a boarding school for girls, courtesy of the ER book I just received, Miss Timmins School for Girls by Nayana Currimbhoy.

I must say, I am loving this book!

I've just got back from Minnesota (The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks) and have nipped across to Dublin to visit The Woman Who Walked into Doors.

#25> I read The Woman Who Walked into Doors last year and thought it was extremely good, if also very disturbing.

Right now I'm in exotic New Jersey, learning just how corrupt government is in my home state by reading The Soprano State: New Jersey's Culture of Corruption by Bob Ingle.

#26 I'd heard so much good stuff about it I think I may have been expecting too much - but then I've never really understood all the fuss about Doyle.

I'm now in Manhattan at 31 Bond Street.

On the island of Malta, looking for The Cellini Masterpiece.

In a park in Moscow called The Patriarch's Ponds in the very first scene of The Master and Margarita. I have a feeling this book will take me very far from there before I'm through, though.

I'm in Yemen with Black Mamba Boy, and I think I'm going by boat to Eritrea soon.

Just returned from Alaska. Fire and Ice by Dana Stabenow.

I'm off-earth in the asteroid belt, working things out in the Aftermath.

I am in Ankh-Morpork playing football (soccer) with the Unseen Academicals.

I am just heading into an unidentified Islamic country with Right of Thirst by Frank Huyler.

I am in the Scottish Highlands with Corrag and on a ship bound for the Olympics in Berlin with Unbroken.

I have just arrived Aburiria, in the first pages of Wizard of the Crow.

I'm "in a certain European village, in the middle of a civil war" according to the blurb on the back of Schopenhauer's Telescope.

Going back to London to experience some Ordinary Thunderstorms.

Now I'm in the home of Lady Britomart Undershaft on Wilton Crescent (whether that's Dublin, London, or some other Irish or English city I'm not sure.)

I'm reading Major Barbara by George Bernard Shaw.

I am drifting at the mercy of the Gulf Stream reading Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea.

I'm on a train heading from a poor coastal town in Tanzania to Nairobi, the capital of Kenya, in Memory of Departure by Abdulrazak Gurnah.

I've recently been to post-World War II Japan with David Peace's Occupied City and Tokyo: Year Zero. Then I headed to Antarctica with The Birthday Boys by Beryl Bainbridge.

Right now I'm in Yemen - Aden, actually, with a young boy named Jama and his mother Ambaro.

Edited because I was silly enough to forget to mention which book I'm reading, Black Mamba Boy by Nadifa Mohamed.

@43 - Birthday Boys is a beautiful book, it really moved me. One of my favourites and a very original approach to literature.

I've just left the Leoncio Prado Military Academy in Peru during The Time of the Hero and have played Shadow Tag in Minnesota.

And now I'm back in Yorkshire with Shirley. (Put the kettle on, Jody.)

Kashmir! Just finished Death in Kashmir by M.M. Kaye and am travelling to Italy with The Flight of the Falcon and A Farewell to Arms.

I am in Swindon with Lost in a Good Book.

I'm in various locales with Snow Plain (stories) by Chinese author and poet Duo Duo.

I'm giggling and snorting as I watch a man with an insatiable appetite repeatedly make a fool of himself while trying to reclaim his wife, in Redemption in Indigo by Karen Lord, which is based on a Senegalese folk tale. So far it's one of my favorite novels of the year.

I'm in Chile in September, 1986 with Pedro Lemebel's Tengo miedo torero (My Tender Matador).

Back to the north of England, to solve crimes with Dr. Tony Hill in The Torment of Others by Val McDermid.

I like Dr Tony Hill, the series is well written.

After traveling all over North Africa from 1935 - 1947 with the Black Mamba Boy by Nadifa Mohamed, I'm now in India, moving between 1947 and 1855, under The Sandalwood Tree by Elle Newmark.

#56 You must be exhausted! I just bought The Sandalwood Tree too so I'm looking forward to hearing what you think of it.

In England and corresponding with The Channel Islands in The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society.

I just left Agnes Browne in Ireland with The Mammy by Brendan O'Carroll and am now in Sweden with The Man from Beijing by Henning Mankell.

# 58 : It's especially exhausting to travel between centuries. ;-)

I'm really loving The Sandalwood Tree so far, and I'm more than 1/3 in now.

I only have a couple of slight problems with what seem like a couple of anachronisms, but that isn't ruining my enjoyment at all. (I can't even remember any examples to give, just that once in a blue moon the characters both from 1947 and 1855 seem to be speaking more in a manner that we use today.) It's barely noticeable, though, and doesn't detract from the book at all, IMO.

I honestly think you'll enjoy it! the person I got it from also loved it.

#63 That's another bump up the TBR pile :)

I am in West Virginia and Washington DC mainly, with a sense a dread about what could easily happen in Republic: A Novel of America's Future, which I got in the Member Giveaway program.

I am in the tribal area of Pakistan and New York City in A Rope and a Prayer : A Kidnapping from Two Sides by David Rohde and Kristen Mulvihill. David Rohde is a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist for the New York Times, and recounts the experience of his kidnapping, along with his driver and an Afghan journalist, by the Taliban, 2008-2009. Meanwhile, in alternating chapters, we read Kristen's (a photo director at Cosmopolitan magazine) account of dealing with her husband's kidnapping stateside.

I've just arrived in 1915 Russia at John Boyne's House of Special Purpose.

I'm in Russia in 1940 as Germany invades (obviously not smart enough to pay attention to Napoleon's debacle in the past) in Roosevelt's Secret War and in Missouri with So Brave, Young, and Handsome.

Still in the north of England, but now with Beneath the Bleeding by Val McDermid.
I will probably stay here to finish the series. This writer is just amazing.

I'm toying with Hygiene and the Assassin, so I'm in France, but still every now and again reading The Snow Plain, so I am sometimes in China and other places. Oy, the literary jetlag...

I've left the dark, grim North of England in the 70s and 80s with David Peace's Red Riding Quartet (Nineteen Seventy-Four, Nineteen Seventy-Seven, Nineteen Eighty, and Nineteen Eighty-Three and am now in The Fierce and Beautiful World and the Gulag -- both Soviet Russia.

I'm about to step off the plane in Morocco with The Last Patriarch by Najat El Hachmi.

Moved to the new April thread.

I am in Brasil with "Capitães do Brasil" of Eduardo Buena. I went to there in 1500 with de first settlers.