A_Musing A_Round A World

Following Depressaholic, I've finally assembled my "big list" and am including it here with ratings (in parens) I'll explain the ratings in a second post, but it is a 1 to 10 scale. I've generally put either the best or the last book I've read from each country, and where I read the book long ago and can't rate the book clearly today, I've put a question mark (this is from about 30 years of reading, so some are tough to remember). I really need to read something else from everyplace with a question mark. I discovered while compiling this that I've been misrepresenting myself as having read a Portugese work - but it was Brazilian! And, I mis-classified a Brit as an Aussie - what are you going to do about this American myopia? So, I get a two-country set-back from the exercise.

I've limited myself to works I view as mainly "fictional" or "literary", but not necessarily to novels. In a few places it is a close call.

Afghanistan - Majrouh, Songs of Love and War (5)
Albania - Kadere, Chronicle in Stone (7)
Algeria - Camus, The Stranger (6.5)
Argentina - Borges, Labyrinths (7)
Armenia - Raffi (?)
Azerbaijan - Ali and Nino (6)
Bangladesh - Tagore, Hungry Stones (7)
Bosnia and Herzegovina - Ivo Andric, The Bridge on the Drina (8)
Brazil - Telles, The Girl in the Photograph (?)
Canada - Margaret Laurence, The Stone Angel (6.5)
Chile - Pablo Neruda, Residence on Earth (7)
China - Siije, Balzac and the Little Seamstress (6)
Colombia - Gabriel Garcia Marquez, My Melancholy Whore (5)
Czech Republic -Milan Kundera, Book of Laughter and Forgetting (7.5)
Denmark - Hans Christian Anderson, Stories (6.5)
Dominica - Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (7)
Egypt - Mahfouz, Arabian Days and Nights (8)
France - Paul Nizan, Antoine Bloye (8)
Germany - Thomas Mann, Transposed Heads (9)
Greece - Elytis, Selected Poems (8)
Iceland - Laxness, Christianity in Glacier (8)
India - Breathless in Bombay (6)
Indonesia - Lee, Behind My Eyes (7)
Iran - Shahnameh (8.5)
Iraq - Gilgamesh (9)
Ireland - Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist (8)
Isreal - Amos Oz, Unto Death (6)
Italy - Lampedusa, The Leopard (7.5)
Japan - Marukami, After Dark (4)
Mali - Epic of Sundiata (4.5)
Mexico Paz, multiples (7)
Morocco - Ibn Battuta, Travels (7)
Netherlands - Nootebloom, Paradise Lost (6.5)
New Zealand - Katherine Mansfield, In a German Pension (?)
Nigeria - Achebe, Things Fall Apart (6)
Norway - Ibsen, Plays (8)
Pakistan - The Reluctant Fundamentalist (6)
Poland - I.B. Singer, Stories from my Fathers Court (7)
Russia - Dosteyevski, Brothers Karamazov (9)
Saint Lucia - Walcott, Omeros (9)
Saudi Arabia - Pre-Islamic Arabic Poetry (collection) (7.5)
South Africa - Alan Paton, Cry, The Beloved Country (7)
Spain - Cervantes, Don Quixote (8)
Sudan - Aboulela, The Translator (6)
Sweden - Strindberg, Plays (6.5)
Switzerland - Swiss Family Robinson (6)
Trinidad and Tobago -Naipaul, A Bend in the River (6)
Tunisia - Augustine, City of God (7)
Turkey - Orhan Pamuk, My Name Is Red (8)
Ukraine - Gogol, Dead Souls (7)
United Kingdom - Lamb, A Dissertation Upon Roast Pig (9)
United States - Melville, Moby Dick (10)
Uzbekistan - the Baburnama (6.5)
Vietnam - Marguerite Duras, The Lover (7)
Zimbabwe -Doris Lessing, Summer Before the Dark (?)

Here's my rating system, which I acknowledge to be deeply biased and highly personal.

1 - The author ought to be ashamed of him(her)self(C.S. Lewis' The Last Battle)
2 - A bad book that can and should be ignored (Atwood's The Edible Woman)
3 - Written well enough, but why? (Dan Brown's DaVinci Code)
4 - Neither memorable nor a waste of time (Murakami's After Dark)
5 - Well written, fun, not very filling and easily forgotten (Gabriel Garcia Marquez's My Melancholy Whore)
6 - A solid, good book, worth reading (most of Hemingway or Atwood falls here)
7 - A book that reaches deep inside you and twists something (average Faulkner)
8 - Memorable and moving with a lasting impact on my life (Mahfouz, Katherine Anne Porter, Joyce). Everyone around me knows I like these books.
9 - Wow! Books I feel compelled to force on other people. (Thomas Mann's Transposed Heads)
10 - Moby Dick

Thanks for the grading system, but I hated Moby Dick. One of us needs help. You or me?

It may well be me.

In college, I painted one chapter of Moby Dick on the back of my door where I could read it from my bed or desk. Does that suggest that help is needed?

But anyone relying on my ratings for recommendations has a right to know of my quirks.

Umm... Yes? Actually, I thought the story of Ahab and his pursuit of the White Whale was genius, but everything else in the book was painful. I liked the Feejeeian, but how many descriptions of a boat do I need before I realise that my love life can't be desscribed by a bit of rigging. At least, I hope it can't...

It was the deep dives into philosophy and history coupled with the detailed but loaded descriptions of ordinary things that I loved. There's a treatise on theology in the appearance of the water, and he makes no bones about it. Everywhere the color white appears is important, even if its the glint of a spear.

It's not for everyone. But it is my 10. I hope someday to find an 11.

Impressive list, A_musing, but I'm a bit confused by your using Powell's Dance to the music of time for Australia. Powell was an Englishman, born in Westminster, educated at Eton and Balliol College, Oxford, worked in London for the publishing firm, Duckworth and Company after graduation, married an English aristocrat, etc. etc. I haven't read the entire 12 volume 'Dance' cycle but I seem to remember it being set in England and following quintessentially English characters. Is this a misattribution or am I missing something by not having read the later volumes in the cycle?

Great list, A_musing! I love the rating system. Not a big fan of Moby Dick, but then, we all have our favorites . . .

Someday I will construct a list like this that encompasses the whole world but that would take some extra time that I don't have at the moment. I will have to content myself with chronicling my reads of other lands, peoples as I read.

MarieTherese - Ugh! I mis-catalogued that one for some reason (read it in High School, yes, whole damn thing, and it showed up when I looked in my catalogue for Australian - I remember it as being uneven and not awe-inspiring and, as you can see, I didn't pay enough attention). Let me see what else I've got! But it's been a while.

Added: OK, I just looked. I have nothing else catalogued Australian in my library, and looking at books tagged Australian can't think of anything I've read! One more country off the list and a huge hole exposed in my reading -- time to add Patrick White to the TBR list and go look at the threads on Australia for some more ideas.

So my whole cultural appreciation of Australia comes from seeing a few movies: one about walk-about, another about a man and his crocs, then there's the British woman in Burma falling for an Aussie truck driver and, of course, the bunch of transvestites in the middle of nowhere. That's a high movie to book ratio. And a pretty strange place.

A_musing, I would highly recommend amandameale as a user who can recommend excellent Australian reading for you (she has been keeping me busy reading:-) Perhaps she will take a peek at your library and take a stab at picking THE Aussie book for you!

What you didn't see "Strictly Ballroom" or "Muriel's Wedding"?

I've updated my list to reflect a couple new countries from 2008 - Israel and Indonesia (OK, for Indonesia, I added poet Li-Young Lee, of Chinese ancestry, born in Jakarta, writing in English and living in the US - but I've got an Indonesian story collection on the tbr for the purists among you).

One of my resolutions is to add 9 new countries this year. My other new resolution is to ignore that resolution in picking books and just read what I like.

I'm certain I'll achieve one of them, but really want to do both!

I think that "Cortazar, Hopscotch," is Argentina, rather than Mexico.

Correct - thanks! I'll have to replace that with some Paz or something.

>2 A_musing:, Love the rating system! Very personal and idiosyncratic.

I'm adding Uzbekistan! Having completed the Baburnama, I've been debating where to put it (I've got a short review on my 999 thread - it is an enjoyable, quirky and very literary memoir/diary). Since he begins his life in what is now Uzbekistan and writes in Turkish, there is a way he belongs in Uzbekistan. However, the Uzbeks are his principal rivals early in his military career, and he views himself as Timurid and Chagatai, and the closest we come to a successor state for the Timurids would likely be Iran and the closest to a successor state for the Chagatai would likely be Turkestan, though there would be other candidates as well.

But it's not clear Babur set foot in what is now Iran (maybe some part of eastern Iran near Herat, now in Afghanistan) and I don't think he'd want Shi'ite Iran claiming his heritage. As to Turkmenistan, he is much too focused on locations in Uzbekistan itself, including Bukhara, Samarkind and Ferguna, so I land there. He could also be put in Afghanistan, since so much of his life is lived in and so much of his culture emanates from Kabul, Qandahar and Herat.

A difficult one to place, as with much that is pre-modern. Of course, he is best known for founding the Moghul dynasty of Northern India, but, somehow, he himself does not seem to be much of India - that will be his descendents.

A_musing,

I find the same problem with modern works. So many authors emigrate, change citizenship, etc. To which country do they really belong? Perhaps we could take an average of the various longitudes and latitudes of the writer (factoring in some form of time weighting) and put the person there ;-)