rocketjk's goes forward and back

Greetings! I only recently became aware of this group. I've been posting annual threads at the Reading Globally group, but I think I'll add one here. For fun, I'm going to recreate my global reading by gleaning from my annual RG threads, beginning with my first on way back in 2010! For that group I include every book, based on where the book takes place rather than who wrote it. So an American writing a book in English that takes place in France would count as a reading visit to that country. For this thread I'm going to be much more conscious of including books written by authors from the countries in which the books take place, though allowing myself some wriggle room. I will add short posts as I add books.

2010: 19 points
2011: 5 points
2012: 8 points
2013: 3 points
2014: 2 points
2015: 7 points
2016: 4 points
2017: 14 points
2018: 5 points
2019: 8 points
2020: 8 points
2021: 4 points
2022: 5 points
2023: 7 points
2024: 8 points
2025: 12 points
2026: 4 points
Total: 123 points

AFRICA
Algeria
The Sleep of the Just by Mouloud Mammeri - 2025

Kenya
West with the Night by Beryl Markham (memoir) - 2017

Rwanda
Say You're One of Them by Uwem Akpan (short stories) - 2010 (Each story takes place in a different country. What I think is the best of the stories {they're all excellent} takes place in Rwanda.)

Sudan
Ghost Season by Fatin Abbas - 2023

ASIA
Bangladesh
A Golden Age by Tahmima Anam - 2016

China
1000 Years of Joy and Sorrows by Ai Weiwei (memoir) - 2022
Inheritance by Lan Samantha Chang - 2024
Soul Mountain by Gao Xingjian - 2025

India
The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri - 2015
Fireproof by Raj Kamal Jha - 2016
Each of Us Killers by Jenny Bhatt - 2024

Iran
In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs: a Memoir of Iran by Christopher de Bellaigue (non-fiction) - 2015 (Not written by a native of the country but by someone who lived in the country for many years.)
The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree by Shokoofeh Azar - 2021

Iraq
Iraq + 100: Stories from Another Iraq edited by Hassan Blasim

Japan
First Person Singular by Haruki Murakami - 2025
The Heike Story by Eiji Yoshikawa - 2026

Mesopotamia
The Epic of Gilgamesh translated by N.K. Sandars - 2018

Myanmar
The Glass Palace by Amitav Ghosh - 2018

South Korea
The Innocent by Richard E. Kim - 2010

Sri Lanka
The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka - 2025

The Philippines
When the Rainbow Goddess Wept by Cecilia Manguerra Brainard - 2010

Viet Nam
Land of Frozen Laughter: a Community Development Volunteer in the Vietnam War, 1967-1969 by John Lewallen (Not written by a native of the country but this is a memoir by someone who experienced the Vietnam War as a community worker employed by an NGO.) - 2017

CARIBBEAN
Dominican Republic:
In the Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez - 2011

Jamaica
Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica by Zora Neale Hurston. (Also listed in Haiti and gets half a point for each country) - 2024

Haiti
Foreign Shores by Marie-Hélène Laforest - 2020
The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution by C. L. R. James (history) - 2022
Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica by Zora Neale Hurston. (Also listed in Jamaica and gets half a point for each country) - 2024
We're Alone: Essays by Edwidge Danticat - 2025

CENTRAL AMERICA
Guatemala
One Day of Life by Manlio Argueta - 2010

EUROPE
Albania
The Three-Arched Bridge by Ismail Kadare - 2024

Austria
Reigen, The Affairs of Anatol and Other Plays by Arthur Schnitzler - 2014
Madensky Square by Eva Ibbotson - 2017

Belarus
The Zelmanyaners: A Family Saga by Moyshe Kulbak - 2021

Bosnia & Herzegovinia
The Lazarus Project by Aleksandar Hemon - 2013

Croatia
The Jews of Dubrovnik: a Walk Through Space and Time from the Early Days to the Present by Vesna Miovic (non-fiction) - 2017
Veli Jože by Vladimir Nazor - 2017

Czechoslovakia
The Tenor Saxophonist's Story by Joseph Škvorecký - 2013

Denmark
We, the Drowned by Carsten Jensen - 2015

England
My Favourite Year: A Collection of New Football Writing edited by Nick Hornby (non-fiction) - 2010
Of Human Bondage by Somerset Maugham - 2010
The Devil's Feather by Minette Walters - 2020
Hot Money by Dick Francis - 2010
The Need of Change by Julian Street - 2011

Finland
What the People of the Wilderness Used to Believe In by Oili Räihälä (non-fiction) - 2012
Seven Brothers by Aleksis Kivi - 2016
Under the North Star by Väinö Linna - 2017
The Uprising by Väinö Linna - 2017
Reconciliation by Väinö Linna - 2017

France
International Short Stories (Vol. III - French) edited by William Patten (short stories) - 2010
Pere Goriot by Honore de Balzac - 2010
Maigret and the Pickpocket by Georges Simonen - 2012
The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery - 2014
Strange Defeat: A Statement of Evidence Written in 1940 by Marc Bloch (memoir/history) - 2020

Germany
Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Fallada - 2017
Deductions from the World War by Baron von Freytag-Loringhoven (non-fiction) - 2017
All for Nothing by Walter Kempowski - 2019
John Heartfield: Laughter is a Devastating Weapon by David King and Ernst Volland (biography/art history) - 2022
Good People by Nir Baram - 2025 (also listed in Russia)

Greece
Back to Delphi by Ionna Karystiani - 2017
Nine Greek Dramas edited by Charles William Eliot - 2020

Hungry
The Gates of the Forest by Elie Wiesel - 2010

Iceland
Independent People by Halldór Laxness - 2026

Ireland
The Woman Who Walked Into Walks by Roddy Doyle - 2010
A Star Called Henry by Roddy Doyle - 2015
The Run of the Country by Shane Connaughton - 2016
A Little Bit of Ireland by John Finan - 2018
Guerilla Days in Ireland: a First-Hand Account of the Black and Tan War (1919-1921) by Tom Barry (memoir) - 2019

Italy
The Ciano Diaries 1939-1943: the Complete, Unabridged Diaries of Count Galeazzo Ciano, Italian Minister for Foreign Affairs, 1936-1943 by Count Galeazzo Ciano (non-fiction) - 2015
The Child of Pleasure by Gabriele D'Annunzio - 2019
Sudden Death by Alvaro Enrigue - 2020
The Little World of Don Camillo by Giovanni Guareschi - 2025
The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio - 2025

Kosovo
Under the Blue Flag: My Mission to Kosovo by Philip Kearny (memoir) (Written by an American but it is a memoir of his time taking part in War Crime Trials in Kosovo so it gets special dispensation.) - 2012

Northern Ireland
The Ghosts of Belfast by Stuart Neville - 2015
Milkman by Anna Burns - 2019
The Land of Cain by Peter Lappin - 2019
The House of Ashes by Stuart Neville - 2021
Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe (history) - 2022

Norway
Growth of the Soil by Knut Hamsen - 2020
The Mountains Wait by Theodor Broch - 2024

The Pale of Settlement
Selected Short Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer - 2013
Tevye's Daughters by Sholom Aleichem - 2015

Poland
In My Father's Court by Isaac Bashevis Singer (memoir) - 2019
Satan in Goray by Isaac Bashevis Singer - 2022
The Family Moskat by Isaac Bashevis Singer - 2022
The Magician of Lublin by Isaac Bashevis Singer - 2023
The Slave by Isaac Bashevis Singer - 2023

Romania
The Appointment by Herta Muller - 2018

Russia
The Hermitage: A Stroll around the Halls and Galleries by Sergei Vesnin, S. V. Kudri︠a︡vt︠s︡eva and Tatiana Pashkova (guidebook) - 2012
Good People by Nir Baram - 2025 (also listed in Germany)

Scotland
The World, the Flesh, and Father Smith by Bruce Marshall - 2012
Chronicles of the Canongate by Sir Walter Scott - 2026

Spain:
War is Beautiful: An American Ambulance Driver in the Spanish Civil War by James Neugass (memoir) (Written by an American but it is a memoir of his time taking part in the Spanish Civil War so it gets special dispensation.) - 2011
Sepharad by Antonio Munoz Molina - 2012
Death in the Making by Robert Capa, et. al. - 2024

Switzerland
I'm Not Stiller by Max Frisch - 2012

Turkey
The Towers of Trebizond by Rose Macaulay

Ukraine
Voroshilovgrad by Serhiy Zhadan - 2023
The Betrayers by David Bezmozgis - 2025

Wales
The Betrothed by Sir Walter Scott

MIDDLE EAST
Egypt
Proud Beggars by Albert Cossery - 2023

Israel
A Horse Walks into a Bar by David Grossman - 2017
Picnic Grounds: A Novel in Fragments by Oz Shelach - 2021

Lebanon:
The Dream Palace of the Arabs: a Generation's Odyssey by Fouad Ajami (non-fiction) - 2011

Palestine:
Gaza Mom: Palestine, Politics, Parenting, and Everything in Between by Laila M. El-Haddad (non-fiction) - 2023
Omar Appears in Jerusalem by Najeeb Al-Kelani - 2024

Yemen
From the Land of Sheba: Tales of the Jews of Yemen collected and edited by S. D. Goitein - 2017

NORTH AMERICA
Canada
Labrador by Choice by Benjamin Powell, Sr. (memoir) - 2010
Still Life with June by Darren Greer - 2011
Natasha by David Bezmozgis - 2012
Quietly My Captain Waits by Evelyn Eaton - 2025

Mexico
Antonio's Gun and Delfino's Dream: True Tales of Mexican Migration by Sam Quinones (non-fiction) - 2017

USA
Darling Billy by Alice McDermott - 2010
Anatomy of a Murder by Robert Traver - 2010
Nemesis by Philip Roth - 2010
And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks by William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac - 2010
Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories by Sandra Cisneros (short stories) - 2010

OCEANIA
Australia
Voss by Patrick White - 2018
Wilderness Trek by Zane Grey - 2018 (Grey was, of course, American, but he spent quite a bit of time in Australia and loved the country.)

SOUTH AMERICA
Argentina
The Little Buddhist Monk & The Proof by César Aira - 2019
Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin - 2020
No-one Loves a Policeman by Guillermo Orsi - 2026

Brazil
Enigmas of Spring by João Almino - 2023

Chile
Tierra Del Fuego by Francisco Coloane - 2020
Cape Horn and Other Stories from the End of the World by Francisco Coloane - 2020
A Long Petal of the Sea by Isabel Allende - 2021

Colombia
The Informers by Juan Gabriel Vasquez - 2010
Of Love and Other Demons by Gabriel Garcia Marquez - 2020

Peru
Death in the Andes by Mario Llosa Vargas - 2019

Welcome to the group! :)

OK! I have gone back through my Reading Globally threads, one per year starting in 2010, and added in all the books I thought appropriate for this country counting, using the group's general rules with a little wiggling to fit a few other books that I deemed worthy. All in all, using the 5-per-country maximum that seems reasonable to me, I've totaled 91 books over these last 13 years (2010 through 2022), spread over 49 countries, including the Pale of Settlement and Mesopotamia. As I finish list-appropriate books going forward, I'll add them to the table above, and provide a short post for each below. Cheers!

I like that you have included countries that don't exist anymore. For those I counted where the author's birthplace now lies, but I like the idea of keeping the memory of old places.

>4 RidgewayGirl: Thanks. I like to keep to the spirit of where it was that the stories were written and/or written about. So mythology that arose from Mesopotamia, for example, I think it appropriate to list as originating there.

My first Global Challenge-appropriate book is The Magician of Lublin, representing my fourth reading journey to Poland (all are by Singer) and the 92nd addition to my challenge. I've got a review posted on my Club Read thread. Cheers!

Somehow when I put up my past reading list when I first joined the group in January, I neglected to include Eva Ibbotson's wonderful novel, Madensky Square in with Austria. I reviewed the book in 2018, so I'm adding it now and giving myself an additional point for 2018, adding it, of course, to my total.

OK, I finally read outside the U.S. for the first time since my very first book of this year, finishing Gaza Mom: Palestine, Politics, Parenting, and Everything in Between by Laila M. El-Haddad. The book is a memoir told in blog posts of El-Haddid's experiences, and those of her family and fellow Gazans, living under the repression of the Israeli government and military during the 2000s. Very disturbing. Very important to read. Although I already had two books listed under Israel, this my first included here as Palestine.

>8 rocketjk: I agree with your assessment of Gaza Mom as both disturbing and important. If you ever feel like a graphic novel, Joe Sacco's Palestine was very good too.

I finally added Wales, via my reading of Bruce Chatwin's On the Black Hill, a very fine novel about a rural farming family near the Welsh/English border that takes place over the first eight decades of the 20th century.

I added a fifth book for Poland with my reading of The Slave by Isaac Bashevis Singer. In fact, all five of my Poland books are Singer novels, as I am working on reading through all of Singer's novels at a rate of two per year. My review is on the book's work page and on my 50-Book Challenge thread.

Finally read a book representing Brazil, Enigmas of Spring by João Almino. Taking place from 2011 to about 2013, this skillful novel series as a cautionary tale of youthful alienation, and a protagonist adrift, in a world wrought by social media and privilege.

I finished the very good novel Ghost Season by Fatin Abbas, a writer who was born in Sudan and grew up in the U.S. The novel is about Saraaya, a small town in the middle of Sudan, more or less on the front line between the two sides of the country's intermittent but long lasting civil war that ended up splitting the country in two. We see the town, and fear the possibility of coming conflict, through the eyes of five disperate but intertwined characters. Alex, a young American NGO employee has come to the village with the assignment to create updated maps of the area, which haven't been revised since before the English colonizers left the area. The job is almost impossible, however, as the topography of the region changes with the seasons--rainy and dry--and global warming has wrecked havoc with even these haphazard patterns. Living with him in his small compound are Dana, a young Sudanese-American filmmaker trying to document the lives of the villagers while she simultaneously perfects her craft, William, a Nilot who is hired as Alex's translator, Layla, a young nomad woman who works as cook, and Mustafa, a 12-year-old dynamo who is William's gofer and all-round helper who dreams of escape to the national capital, Khartoum. We see the impending peril through the eyes of these five characters, with their varied perspectives, hopes and troubles. Abbas' powers of observation and description are acute. Her sentence- and paragraph-level writing are gorgeous. Her characters are believable, as are their interactions with each other. So even while the plotting is somewhat slow in the first half, the book was still enjoyable for me. In the meantime, the descriptions of the village, the lifestyle and concerns of its people, the historical and environmental forces that have shaped it all are nothing short of admirable. So I very much recommend the book.

Adding Ghost Season to my wishlist. Enticing review

>14 labfs39: Thanks! The review of the book on my CR thread is a bit longer, if you're interested in my full ramble, though I'm not sure that that longer version really adds much of substance. (I start with a long version for my CR & 50-Book Challenge threads, and then edit down for whatever additional thread the book can be appropriately posted on. I should probably do more editing for CR/50-Book posts, I guess!)

I finished Proud Beggars by Albert Cossery (translated from the French by Thomas W. Cushing). The pocket biography of Cossery on the front page of my NYRB edition of Proud Beggars tells us, "Albert Cossery (1913-2008) was a Cairo-born French writer of Lebanese and Greek Orthodox Syrian descent who settled in Paris at the end of the Second World War and lived there for the rest of his life." Proud Beggars, first published in 1955, brings us the tale of three men living in a poor section of Cairo. The narrative revolves around three friends who have more or less chosen their impoverished status, their sarcastic views of the "bastards and thieves" who control societies power structure and the joy they find in the small details of humanity and urban life. When a young prostitute is murdered in nearby brothel in what appears to be a motiveless crime, into the picture comes police inspector Nour El Dine who feels in the solving of such crimes and punishment of their perpetrators not any compassion for the victims but instead a maintenance of order, a defense of the status quo. Our three heroes take him on gleefully as a worthy if not particularly threatening adversary. And Nour El Dine has his own dissatisfactions and doubts. Although the book is written in French by an author living in Paris, I'm counting this as a reading trip to Egypt due to the narrative's location in Cairo, which is also the location of Cossery's birth.

I finished an very much enjoyed Voroshilovgrad an hallucinatory novel by Ukrainian novelist and poet Serhij Zhadan. The book was written several years before the Russian invasion of the country. And yet, the book is rife with a feeling of the precariousness of the Ukrainian state in the post-Soviet era. Our protagonist Herman has a steady if somewhat shady job in a large city. But he gets a call from an old friend that his brother has suddenly disappeared, presumably to Amersterdam, urging Herman to come out to his home town and "take care of business" in his brother's absence. The "business" turns out to be a small but profitable gas station on the outskirts of the town, located on Ukraine's eastern steppes, now known as Luhansk but formerly known, during the Soviet Era, as Voroshilovgrad. The station is under seige from mysterious forces who want to force Herman to sell it, perhaps (although exact reasons remain obscure) because there is natural gas to be found in the area. There is barely a character in the story who is not mysterious and rough around the edges. Stories of the past are always blurred by secrets and mythology. The representatives from the federal government who make periodic appearances are more likely to be gangsters than legitimate government officials. Or else they're both. Travels across the empty stretches of this country are always hazardous. The people Herman runs into could be from anywhere, and the sights that pass before his eyes, especially at sundown and after dark, swirl into hallucinations and dreams.

Often, reading this novel is like stepping through thin ice and falling into a dream. But the sense of time and place is solid, and the current of hope and compassion carried me along. Highly recommended.

Just making note of the fact that last night I finished The Manor by Isaac B. Singer. As it's my 6th Poland book since I started keeping track, I'm not adding it to my challenge totals above. However, it's a book I highly recommend. Here's a, believe it or not, short version of my review:

As always with Singer's earlier novels, we are in Poland, this time in the later decades of the 19th century. The novel begins just after an 1863 uprising by the Polish nobility against what had become ongoing Russian rule has ended in humiliating disaster. With this nationalist movement quashed, Poland instead turns to business, and the modern world begins seeping into Poland: mines, factories, railroads begin appearing. For Poland's Jews, the period is one of liberalism. In the town of Jampol, one of the insurrectionists, Count Wladislaw Jampolski, has been banished to Siberia, and a Jew, Calman Jacoby, has managed to win the right to lease the count's large landholding and manor house. He judiciously allows the count's family to continue living in the manor house, in order to avoid offending the local Poles, and he begins making money growing and selling crops on the land and, in particular, selling timber to be used as railroad ties. So begins our tale, with Colman at the center of what becomes a whirlwind of cultural and religious change and the personal crises and moral choices, both good and bad, of an expanding group of characters.

Calman himself is an observant Jew. He expects his children to stay within that community and some do. But the Jewish community as a whole does not stand apart from the modernism taking hold in Poland, and Calman, to his woe, as lived to see a growing divide among Poland's Jews: those who demand adherence to the old ways, and those who look westward with approval at the assimilation of the Jews of France, Germany and elsewhere.

Singer's portrayal is laced strongly with affection and understanding. The storyline is a tapestry, or perhaps labyrinth is a better description, of interrelationships between members of the old world and the new, the Jewish society and the Polish Christians, interwoven amongst and strengthened by family, marriage, business and religion. This is a vivid picture of a complex society at a tipping point, full of memorable characters. And of course Singer was writing, and we are reading, within the context of hindsight. In the end, modernization did not save the Jews of Europe. Highly recommended.

I've just finished Inheritance by Lan Samantha Chang

Inheritance is a novel that takes us through three generations of a Chinese family, from the beginning of the 20th century up through the late-1980s. The narrative takes us through the Chinese Revolution of 1911 through the gathering threat of Japanese imperialism, the Japanese invasion and occupation, the Chinese Civil War and the calamity (from the point of view of our protagonists) of the Communist victory and the family's exile to Taiwan. The focus is primarily on the women of the family, told often through the point of view of Hong, the daughter of narrative's central figure, Junan. Although narrative is often in the third person, we understand that the perspective is Hong's and that she is relating the family history as it has been told to her or as she has pieced it together or sometimes even conjectured. This somewhat shifting narrative strategy I found to be largely effective. And as importantly, or perhaps even more importantly as the historical events the family lives through, and are often drastically effected by, the novel takes us through a near-century of shifting and evolving attitudes and expectations of the roles and duties of women in Chinese society, from Hong's grandmother, who had spent 6 years with her feet bound before "the practice went out of fashion," to Hong's adulthood as a professional woman in the United States.

I found Inheritance very much worth reading, offering an interesting (if necessarily limited in focus) picture of Chinese society during extremely turbulent times, with memorable characters throughout. As a first novel, I'd say it's admirable indeed, and I will be keeping an eye out for Chang's subsequent works.

A note that this is my second book set in China for this challenge, and my 100th entry overall!

>19 rocketjk: Thank you for this great review! I immediately added this book to my ever-growing wish list.

>20 MissBrangwen: You're welcome! If you're interested, I've posted a longer review on my Club Read thread.

Congrats on reaching 100!

>22 labfs39: Thanks! It only took me 15 years!

>23 rocketjk: You inspired me to go count, I'm at 91. Woohoo

>19 rocketjk: Congratulations on reaching your 100th book!

>10 rocketjk: I've had Proud Beggars in my wishlist for ages - it might be time to actually track it down ;-)

I read through and viewed Death in the Making, a book of astounding and emotionally charged photographs, mostly by Robert Capa, of the Spanish Civil War. There are 111 images by Capa, 24 by Gerda Taro, Capa's collaborator and sometime romantic partner and 11 by a Polish photographer known as Chim (born Dawid Szymin). You can find my more in-depth comments on my Club Read thread.

I've just read The Mountains Wait a memoir by Theodor Broch. Broch was the mayor of the far northern Norwegian town of Narvik when the Nazis invaded in 1940. He describes here his arrival in Narvik as a young lawyer, his gradual entrance into local politics and election as mayor. Of course, the Nazi invasion and occupation is described in great and effective detail. Finally, there's Broch's escape from his arrest and successful trek over the mountains into Sweden, and his time in the U.S. lecturing about the plight of Norway and trying to raise money from American Norwegian immigrants for the country's government and armed forces in exile. The American college students he talks to wonder how Norway could have allowed itself to be so surprised by the German attack. Right up to Pearl Harbor Day, that is. The Mountains Wait was published in 1943, while the war, obviously, was still ongoing. Broch couldn't know that Norway would still be in German hands when the Nazis surrendered to the Allies. Since this book was published originally in English, I would not normally include it here. But it was written by a Norwegian, so I bending my rule in that regard.

I've finished The Three-Arched Bridge by Ismaîl Kadaré. We are in the late 14th Century, and change is coming to a small Albanian village in the form of a new stone bridge being build over the river, previously traversed only by ferrymen, and in the ever-more-threatening encroachment of the Ottoman Empire which is already crowding up against the borders of the Balkans. These two developments may not be unrelated. The tale is told by Gjon, a Catholic monk who, because of his ability to speak many languages, is often called upon to translate at the meetings between the local nobleman and the various visiting envoys and businessmen, such as the interests who bribe the nobleman into accepting the construction of the bridge.

The plan to bring the villagers around to the idea of the bridge is long-range and cunning, although the locals watch the bridge construction with growing dread. The use of a local legend to intimidate the town turns deadly. In the meantime, the leaders of the small local principalities press their grievances against each other, seemingly blind to the growing threat to the east. A fable-like story in which the town itself, really, is the main character.

I've completed Each of Us Killers by Jenny Bhatt. This is a fine set of short stories. Most are about life in India, though some are about the Indian-American immigrant experience. Quite a few, in both settings, deal with the devious and difficult paths laid out for women to navigate at all levels of society and business. At any rate, I'm counting this as my third India book.

Bhatt was born and grew up in India. She moved to England for her undergraduate degree in engineering, then worked for multinational corporations in several European countries before moving to the U.S. Each of Us Killers was published in 2020 and began getting notice and awards immediately. You can find more details on her Wikipedia page.

The stories are sharply written and effective, with few extraneous or wasted words. I found the tales about working class people in India to be the most effective, perhaps because those stories were placed in settings I had so little knowledge about. On the other hand, the reflections on the human predicament they highlight are more than familiar. Among my favorite stories were “The God of Wind,” about a rickshaw driver who finds an infant and has to decide what to do, “Time and Opportunity,” about a food stall owner who suspects one of his employees of stealing, and “Neeru’s New World,” about a young servant girl who finds her dreams of a new life shattered by the realities of her vulnerability as a woman alone.” Most humorous is “Separation Notice,” wherein, due to a trend of global disasters, Lord Vishnu is notified that he is being fired from the pantheon of dieties. The most devastating was the title story, which comes last in the collection and highlights the terrible oppression and indignities suffered by the Dalit underclass in India.

These aren’t among the very best short stories I’ve ever read, but, in both plot and writing quality, they are all satisfying and of high quality.

I finished The Estate by Isaac Bashevis Singer, but thanks to my twice-per-year read through of Singer's novels in chronological order, I've already got five Poland books on my list. However, I also just completed Iraq + 100: Stories from Another Iraq edited by Hassan Blasim.In 2013, "amid the chaos and destruction left by the U.S. and British occupation of Iraq," Iraqi writer Hassan Blasim sent out invitations to other Iraqi authors, inviting them to write and submit stories imagining the country 100 years in the future. The result is this fascinating volume, published in Great Britain in 2016 and in the U.S. a year later. (The quote is from Blasim's introduction to the collection, in which he also lays out the history of wars and destruction Iraq has endured since the British Invasion of 1914 as well as the reasons for the overall dearth of science fiction writing in Iraq specifically and the Middle East generally over the years.)

Almost all of the stories presented are dystopian in nature, and almost all of them are excellent. Here are a few of my favorites among them, along with the very brief notes I wrote as reminders as I read each:

"The Gardens of Babylon" by Blasim himself:
A video game designer either is or isn’t the writer who committed suicide whose life he must make a video board from. Or maybe that’s his grandfather.

"The Corporal" by Ali Bader
A corporal comes back 100 years after being shot by a sniper in the U.S./Iraq war.

"Day by Day Mosque" by Mortada Gzar
The world is being turned back to front, and snot has become a valuable commodity. Or as Dubya put it right after the U.S. invasion, “Day by day, the Iraqi people are closer to freedom.”

"Baghdad Syndrome" by Zhraa Alhaboby
Genetic mutations from chemical weapons used 100 years ago during the U.S. invasion are affecting Baghdadis, and one afflicted architect tracks down the legends of Scheherazade and her lover, and the statue of them that has disappeared.

I highly recommend this collection, and though it's accurately labeled a science fiction anthology, I don't think you need to be a science fiction enthusiast to appreciate and enjoy these stories. It is instructive to learn that of the writers included here, only Blasim himself was still living in Iraq at the time of publication. The others were in diaspora, for the most part due to the repressive nature of the Iraqi government.

I've just finished Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica by Zora Neale Hurston. The book is Hurston's anthropological memoir of her time in the two countries of the title in the late 1930s, traveling those countries and learning about the people and their lifestyles, customs and religious beliefs. As per the title, there is a lot of effort spent on describing Voodoo practices in great detail. Much of the book is very interesting indeed. I'm going to give this one half a point for each of the two countries described. Cheers!

My France section is full at five and has been for some time, but just a note here that over the past year+ I have read the first two books in Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time series, Swann's Way and In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower and I'm just starting the third book, The Guermantes Way. Also, I've just completed the first book in Emile Zola's 20-book Les Rougon-Macquart series, The Fortune of the Rougons.

>32 rocketjk: wow - that's some serious mileage! I'm still trying to get up nerve to start La Comédie humaine. All that I've read by Balzac I've enjoyed so I don't know what my mental block is.

>32 rocketjk: You can always choose to remove the cap. It's up to you how you want to structure your challenge. I just started the Fortune of the Rougons today. I hope it sticks.

>34 labfs39: "You can always choose to remove the cap. It's up to you how you want to structure your challenge. I just started the Fortune of the Rougons today. I hope it sticks."

I may remove the cap, but I will never bend the knee! (Sorry, Game of Thrones reference there.)

Yes, I'm aware that the challenge structure is up to the individual. For me, the point of the "challenge," such as it is in my case, is not just to count up all the books I've read arranged by country, but to see how well (or, anyway, how much) I spread my reading around, geographically. So the five-book-per-country limit works for me. But, certainly, to each his/her/their own.

I think you will enjoy the Fortune of the Rougons.

I doff my cap to you, my friend, and wish you a wonderful day. Cheers

>Lol. Funny guy.

I'm still only 35 pages into FotR, because I had to stop and do some background reading on French history. Another area of which I am woefully ignorant.

I haven't had an opportunity to post here in a while, but finally! . . . . I finished Omar Appears in Jerusalem by Najeeb Al-Kelani. This novel, originally published in 1970 and translated to English in 1986, is a fable-like tale about the return of Omar Ben Al-Khattab, an extremely important 7th Century Caliph, to Jerusalem soon after the Israeli occupation of the Arab part of the city during the 1967 war. Listing it above as Palestine. My full review is posted on my Club Read thread.

I finished The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, Shehan Karunatilaka's 2022 Booker Prize winning novel about violence, horror, love and the afterlife in Sri Lanka. You can find my longer review on my Club Read thread. This is my first addition to my global list in 2025!

I finished Good People by Nir Baram, which I listed both in Germany and Russia, as it's basically split between those two countries, though I'm counting it as only one book in my yearly point total.

Good People is an early novel by Israeli author Nir Baram, who also wrote A Land Without Borders: My Journey Around East Jerusalem and the West Bank a memoir that I've seen reviewed well more than once here on LT. This is a novel about the ways in which people who think of themselves as "good" can easily get tripped up by their own illusions and entangled in compromises within evil systems. The book begins in 1938 and follows two characters. Thomas Heiselberg is a young businessman in Berlin. He a market researcher and rising quickly within an American-owned company. He has devised the company's business strategies for their branch offices in Berlin, Warsaw and Paris. He is not antiSemitic, and though he mostly goes along to get along, he does try to help his Jewish therapist escape Germany and makes other such gestures. He sees himself as a master persuader, able to put any face forward that he needs to accomplish any given agenda, and to get people to act accordingly, and to manage any situation. Sasha Weissberg is a young woman in Leningrad, the daughter of intellectuals, who begins reporting on the conversations of her parents circle of poets and philosophers to the NKVD, Stalin's secret police, imagining she is thereby somehow protecting her parents. Both characters become ever more firmly ensnared in the trap of their own self-regard and their confidence in their abilities to turn the power of the evil worlds they are navigating to their own ends.

We see the world very tightly through the perspectives of these two characters, and so the narrative takes on a somewhat hallucinatory character, and yet also maintains (or at least maintain for me) a certain thinness of scope that left me wanting a touch more, somehow. Also, I thought the book could have used some editing, shedding perhaps 20% of the 421 pages of my Australian edition. Nevertheless, Good People is an impressive achievement, I think, and overall I very much enjoyed the reading experience. Whether or not we're meant to experience the novel as any sort of allegory for contemporary (the book was first published in Hebrew in 2010) is unclear to me, though we know that Baram has been a voice for the left in Israel.

While on vacation I read The Towers of Trebizond, a delightful novel about trio of privileged Englanders traveling around Turkey in the mid-1950s (the book was published in 1956). The narrator is a relatively young woman (early 30s perhaps) named Laurie traveling essentially in support of her aunt Dot. Also on the journey is their friend a High Anglican priest named Father Hugh Chantry-Pigg. Father Hugh's goal is to proselytize for the Anglican Church among the Moslems of Turkey. Aunt Dot is alarmed at the social condition of the women of the Turkish countryside, who are still weighed by the rules governing Moslem women despite Kemal Ataturk's secularization efforts in the 1920s and 30s, and imagines she can wage an educational campaign to encourage oppressed Turkish women to demand their rights. She also wants to write a book about her travels and efforts. Laurie is on hand to be a helper to her aunt, and also to contribute to Dot's book with short descriptive passages and artwork. They gain several co-travelers along the way. Also, Dot has brought along her camel, which Dot and sometimes the Father ride during a good part of the journey. ("'Take my camel, dear,' said my aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass," is the book's marvelous opening line, a line that, according to writer Jan Morris in her introduction in my NYRB edition, was much quoted when the novel was new and in the public consciousness.) The first half of the book in particular is a satire on both these upper class English folks rolling around Turkey expecting to impress the locals with their sincerity on matters both social and religious. The Turks come in for some satirizing, as well. Since these are upper class English people, they are classically educated, and their interest in, and over-romanticizing of, the ancient artifacts and remains of churches, mosques, castles and cities they search out, and the civilizations that produced them, are described as essentially a matter of course. The characters' preoccupations and prejudices are there to chuckle at, and yet the romance of those histories and ancient empires is often described quite movingly.

I've just finished The Sleep of the Just by Mouloud Mammeri. Mammeri (1917-1989) was an Algerian writer and professor, a scholar and teacher of Berber, his native language. The Sleep of the Just, a novel about a Berber family from a small village in Algeria, was first published in its original French in 1956 and in the U.S, in English translation in 1958. My copy seems to be a first American edition, published by Beacon Press. The description on the inside flyleaf begins with the claim that "This is the first book by an Algerian Arab to appear in translation in America." Whether this is accurate, I've no idea.

At any rate, I found this novel to be mostly fascinating. 1956, when the book was published, was two years after the beginning of the Algerian War of Independence from French colonial rule, but Mammeri begins his tale at the beginning of World War Two, just as the shooting has begun. Young Arezki feels smothered by life in his family's small village. The village's culture is a mix of Islam, and ancient Berber customs, including a generations-long blood feud involving his family, and the injustices of French colonial rule, in the person of a local administrator entirely contemptuous of the town's inhabitants. In addition is the presence of Toudert, Arezki's cousin, effectively rapacious and, with the administrator's blessing, gradually buying up all the agricultural land of the village. They speak Berber, not Arabic, which they do not even understand. As the tale begins, Arezki's younger brother Sliman is exclaiming that the war is going to be good for the poor of Algeria, sweeping the country clean. "The whole business will start afresh," he says. "It'll be like a game of dominos; there'll be a new deal." This is referred to as "Sliman's dominos theory" for the rest of the book. In the book's opening pages, Arezki makes a statement in the town square doubting the existence of God. Soon his father had dragged him home to explain himself. Arezki elaborates, and his father, enraged, goes for his rifle. Arezki dives out a window and tumbles into a creek bed, with his father's rifle shot missing him by inches. The novel, for the most part, follows Arezki and Sliman in turn as both leave the village and have their separate experiences, which add up to Mammeri's descriptions of the various pressures and lures of life for these young Berber men, reared and expected to live out their lives in subservient poverty: subservient to their religious leaders, to the stifling (to them) ancient customs of their village, and to their French colonial rulers. Mammeri moves his lens around frequently, from Arezki to Sliman, as well as to some of the book's supporting characters, showing us the various pressures, temptation and cultural influences that combine to sculpt their lives. This is a very interesting timepiece of a very interesting historical moment, and we come to care about both brothers as they try to make their separate ways.

I very much enjoyed First Person Singular, a collection of eight short stories by Japanese author Haruki Murakami, an author I'm chagrined to say I was reading for the first time, here. I think the collection is particularly apt for folks in my time of life (I'll turn 70 in about five weeks), as I think all of the eight stories are narrated by a man in his 60s or 70s looking back at his life. They each revolve around a memory, and most of those memories seem unlikely or uncertain. In the first story, the narrator is remembering being invited to a piano recital by someone he knew in school but hasn't been in contact with for some years, and whom he'd thought didn't particularly like him. Why the invitation now? But when he gets to the concert hall, it's locked and there's no one around, though his invitation says he's in the right place on the correct evening. The narrator looks back at this event, and another odd event that's taken place right after, now decades in the past, never having solved the mystery of the phantom invitation. Obviously, a story like this wouldn't work without an author with the ability to use language with a superb adroitness, subtly dreamlike and yet straightforward. As I mentioned, these stories delve into the nature of memory, especially over the passage of time, and the ability to accept the memories of unlikely events intact, as memories, without dwelling overmuch on their "reality" or lack thereof. All in all I loved these, and will now have to make a point of reading more Murakami, just like the rest of the literate world has already done.

It's hard to believe that, for the purposes of this challenge, this is the first book from Japan that I've read since my LT membership began in 2008!

I kept my reading in Asia, China specifically this time, by enjoying (with a few reservations) Soul Mountain by Gao Xingjian. Readers looking for anything like a standard plot, or even standard character development, should look elsewhere than this long (506 pages in my Perennial paperback edition), often intriguingly written, reverie on memory, history, and the mysteries, beauty, cruelty and absurdities of human nature. As the description on my copy's back cover tells us, Soul Mountain is semi-autobiographical. In 1983, Gao Xingjiam was diagnosed with lung cancer and given only months to live. Six weeks later he found out the diagnosis had been wrong. He had no cancer. In the meantime, the prolific playwright, novelist, painter and critic was under scrutiny from the Chinese regime. Says the book's description, "Faced with a repressive cultural environment and the threat of a spell in a prison farm, Gao fled Beijing and began a journey of 15,000 kilometers into the remote mountains and ancient forests of Sichuan in southeast China." Soul Mountain is the result of that journey, but this is much more than a fictionalized travelogue. The stories the fictional Gao relates have to do with his searches for remnants of the many layers of Chinese history, giving him a several thousand year deep territory to explore. He tells tales ranging from ancient history right up through the Cultural Revolution. He runs into very old Daoist priests and young archeologists, all of whom have stories to tell him and places to show him, or at least to point him towards. He tells tales of wars and famines, but also of love, friendship, devotion and courage. He adds in stories about his own life and family history as well, all the while exploring the importance of the natural world (as well as the environmental degradation he finds, mostly portrayed by the clearcutting of ancient forests). As one would expect from the book's title, mountains, and the climbing of mountains, fuel a recurring theme, as does the beauty of music, and especially singing and chanting, heard indistinctly and from a distance.

I read my fourth entry for Canada, Quietly My Captain Waits by Evelyn Eaton. This very entertaining book is an historical romance that takes place in New France, a French colony in what is now Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and parts of Maine, during the final decade or so before the area was taken over by the English during Queen Anne's War. Published in 1940, this novel is many cuts above what one would consider standard fare in the genre and was evidently quite popular when it first appeared.

You can find a long review on my Club Read thread or in the book's LT review section.

I've finished my fourth entry for Italy, the delightful short story collection, The Little World of Don Camillo by Giovanni Guareschi. Published in the U.S. in 1950, these satirical, loving stories tell of the rivalry between the village priest in a small, rural Italian town and the town's Communist mayor. You can read my longer review on my Club Read thread.

I finished The Betrayers my second entry for Ukraine, although the country designation is, I guess, debatable. The novel tells the morally complicated story of Baruch Kotler, a former Refusenik in the Soviet Union who's been imprisoned for his agitation in support of the cause of allowing Russian Jews to emigrate to Israel, become a hero and then a politician in Israel. As the story begins, Kotler has refused to bend to the blackmail of the Israeli Prime Minister who wants Kotler to stand down from his public disagreement with a controversial government policy. Kotler has refused to accede to the threat, as a result having his affair with a much younger woman made public. Fleeing the scandal, Kotler and his lover head off to the Crimea to wait for the storm to die down. At this point, the action of the novel commences, as Kotler comes face to face with his past. So while the story takes place in Crimea, the novel is really about events in Israel. Nevertheless, my rule of them is to place books for the purposes of this thread in the locale where they take place. Hence: Ukraine. And for political reasons: not Russia.

I finished We're Alone a set of excellent essays by Edwidge Danticat. Most of the essays here center on, or at least spring from Danticat's concerns about, Haiti, the country of her birth and early upbringing, or more generally about the insecurities and injustices experienced by immigrants in the U.S. We live through a hurricane in Haiti with her, learn the details of the violent coup that overturned the administration of Haiti's elected president, and, in the essay "By the Time You Read This . . . " share Danticat's terror in the midst of a loose shooter incident in Florida that she spins out into a discussion of the current administration's sudden disappearances of immigrants and those deemed "illegal." Everywhere, Danticat's writing is clear and powerful. Always the more global issues she deals with are brought compellingly, sometimes devastatingly, to the level of personal experience and observation.

I highly recommend this slim volume of powerful and very accessible essays.

I finished The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio (translated by Wayne A, Rebhorn). In the book, 10 wealthy young people, 7 women and 3 men, decide to head out into the countryside of Italy for several days in hopes of avoiding the disease, and also to amuse themselves and each other. Each day for 10 days, they gather together for some storytelling. Each day they must each tell a tale to amuse the others, and each day they have a different topic to spin a yarn about. The stories are for the most part short, from four to eight or ten pages, and often they are irreverent. And especially in the first half of the book, they are often, famously, quite bawdy. The stories are fun, all right, and they do open a window into the time they were written, and that Boccaccio is satirizing. But, other than the historical perspective they provide about the attitudes of the day, they are not particularly compelling or enlightening. So my own personal reaction is that only a scholar of mid-14th century Italian literature and/or culture would be likely find plowing through all of these stories from cover to cover a particularly entertaining or rewarding reading experience. However, I did quite enjoy reading the tales one at a time, one tale between each of the novels/histories/etc. that I read straight through during the past couple of years.

That's my fifth book listed in Italy, finishing off the country for the purposes of this challenge.

Yea, my first listing for Wales! I've just read and enjoyed The Betrothed by Sir Walter Scott.

These Waverly Novels are not particularly deep, but they are fun, if one has a taste for historical adventure story/romances that glorify the age of chivalry, with all its attendant prescribed gender roles. It is the 12th Century. The Normans have completed their invasion of England and solidified their hold over the country. But there are still the Welsh to deal with, or rather to try to deal with. The Normans have been pushing their castles deeper into Wales land, and the Welsh, understandably, are not pleased. Welsh prince Gwenwyn* and Norman knight Raymond Berenger, who rules the castle Garde Doloureuse, have attempted to make peace with each other. But when Gwenwyn asks for Berenger's daughter Eveline's hand in marriage, Berenger replies that she is already promised to another Norman noble, Sir Hugo de Lacy, the Constable of Chester. The Welsh take this as an affront, and attack the castle. To the rescue comes de Lacy and his army. All this takes place within the context of the imminent Crusades, which Baldwin,* the Archbishop of Canterbury, is urging all British nobility to take part in. Eveline and de Lacy, he being around 30 years her elder, are married, but due to the meddling of Baldwin, de Lacy is forced to ride off to the Crusades before the marriage can be consummated. He leaves his young, handsome nephew, Damian, to look after Eveline and be her protector during the three years de Lacy is to be away. What could go wrong? This is just a bare outline of the very beginning of the action. The story proceeds apace, often hurtling along, although sometimes a bit slow. Scott provides plenty of side characters for our entertainment, some amusing, some upright, some dastardly. And there is lots of wonderful natural description of the beauty of Wales. I enjoyed reading The Betrothed, as I found it to be fun in the reading, the stereotypes of the genre, and of Scott's time (including antisemitism), notwithstanding.

* Based, according to Wikipedia, on historical figures, as are several other characters in the narrative.

I've had the book on my shelves since before my LT "Big Bang" in 2008. The volume also includes both The Highland Widow which is noted on the title page, and The Chronicles of the Cannongate, which is not. I'll be reading those other two works in the relatively near future.

My first addition to this challenge for 2026 and my first entry for Iceland is Independent People by Halldór Laxness. Independent People is, I think it's fair to say, considered a modern classic of Icelandic literature. It won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Originally published in 1946, the novel describes the life of rural farmers at the early part of the 20th century and takes its characters through the WW1 years and beyond. The title refers to the state of being that the book's protagonist, Bjartur of Summerhouses, aspires to. To be "independent" means to be totally debt free, to survive only on one's own labor, with no sacrifice being too extreme to reach and retain this independence. The needs and desires of this wife and children are entirely beside the point when "independence" is at stake. The large landowners and merchants are, of course, eager to extend credit of one sort or another to such farmers, in order to put them and keep them in debt. Thoughout the book, Bjartur will go to extreme and sometimes wholly regrettable (to the reader) lengths to avoid this snare. No level of poverty is too oppressive to stand in service of his goal. He shrugs off and sometimes even causes personal losses that others, and most readers, would consider tragic. Bjartur, instead, is entirely focused on his sheep, as he sees increasing his flock as the road to remaining independent. This frequently enough makes Bjartur a rather unsympathetic figure to spend time with. And yet Bjartur is also a poet, enamored of the ancient Icelandic sagas, and acutely aware of the beauty of the natural world around him. Laxness simply presents him to us with relatively little editorializing. Sometimes we see the world through Bjartur's eyes, and sometimes through the eyes of one or the other of his several children or his elderly mother-in-law. Particularly effective is the perspective of Bjartur's youngest son, Nonni, who dreams of visiting other lands. There is a lot of spectacular natural description, and we get a visceral feeling of what life in the family's falling apart house is like.

While Bjartur in many crucial ways is an unsympathetic character, Laxness manages to allow us to feel a significant level of compassion for him, even in his extremities, and makes his world and his struggles interesting enough so that the reading experience one attains through Independent People is memorable and rewarding, or at least it was for me.

>50 rocketjk: Fantastic review! This sounds like a fascinating novel, thought not an easy one.

>50 rocketjk: I appreciate your review, Jerry. While I agree with what you wrote, I enjoyed it less than you. I find it very hard to feel compassion for a man who treated others (and especially his daughter) the way he did. While I understand his point of view, "independence" being a pervasive motivator in northern New England as well, I could not condone his actions, whatever his motives.

>52 labfs39: I sympathize strongly with your reaction, though mine was different. I didn't think Laxness meant readers to condone Bjartur's actions, though. I thought his intent was just to present the fellow, flaws, even tragic flaws, and all, and allow us to feel a shared humanity with him despite those flaws. At least that was my reaction. For the record, I didn't condone his actions, either, but somehow did not see him as a villain, for all that. I understand, though, that there is a range of comfort levels for this sort of character, and of course a range of reactions. I totally understand your difficulty in being able to feel compassion for Bjartur. He is presented as the extreme edge of the "independent people" view of life. I saw him, in fact, as Laxness' presentation of the damages caused both by the system that left nothing else for Bjartur to hang his hat on, but also by Bjartur's own hard-headed dogmatic submission to that code. Cheers!

>53 rocketjk: I agree that condone was the wrong word: perhaps accept? or get past? I am particularly interested in your last point, as I hadn't thought of it that way. Instead I thought Laxness was holding up the "independent people" as the stoic, salt of the earth, bedrock of the country, which, while now more modern, still owed a debt of thanks to them. This is why I love discussions on LT, I learn so much from fellow readers. Thanks!

>54 labfs39: "Instead I thought Laxness was holding up the "independent people" as the stoic, salt of the earth, bedrock of the country, which, while now more modern, still owed a debt of thanks to them."

Well, now that you put it that way, I kind of think it's both at once, sort of a yin/yang, if you will. I think Laxness does admire the "independent people" for the reasons you provide here, but at the same time portrays Bjartur as the damage done when that philosophy, or maybe any philosophy, is taken to an extreme. But I think it's also valuable to recall that Bjartur had had to put in, what was it? 16 years? as basically an indentured servant/tenant farmer before being able to buy his own land, and on a tract of land that is widely believed to be cursed, which I think we can at least recognize as a metaphor, though to what purpose, I haven't quite worked out for myself. But can we say that it is those long years of toil for someone else's profit that has caused, or at least greatly contributed to, Bjartur's hardness and unhappy tunnel vision? I think there's at least a strong case to be made for that. What I loved about the book was its richness in all these elements, and the ways in which Laxness leaves the reader to make his/her/their own determinations about the character and the culture and system that's created him.

>55 rocketjk: I like this idea. You have convinced me to give Laxness another try. I think I have Salka Valka around somewhere. Perhaps I will appreciate Laxness more with a character I don't dislike so much. I had a hard time reading Independent People after Bjartur sexually abused his daughter.

My second entry for Scotland is Chronicles of the Canongate by Sir Walter Scott, a collection of three long short stories, or perhaps two long stories and one novella, published by Scott in 1827 (200 years ago!). The volume also includes a long introductory narrative by Scott's fictional author Chrystal Croftangry, explaining a humorous "how and why" of the writing of the tales, plus shorter introductions before the second and third tales. The stories are all historic tales (taking place around 75 years before Scott wrote them) recounting legends of the Scottish Highlands. I found the three tales to be of varying enjoyment.

"The Highland Widow" relays the history of a reclusive old women, the widow of a notorious outlaw who, who resides alone in the Scottish Highlands and is by now the subject of much superstition and suspicion. Here, she tells her story to the woman who, years later, relayed it to Croftangry. She is mourning, not the death of her husband, but of her son, and the part she herself played in his downfall. The writing is certainly entertaining, but I couldn't work up a sympathy for this tragic heroine.

"The Two Drovers" tells the story of the falling out of two friends over a minor disagreement, and the tragic consequences. Pride and a faulty sense of honor are the villains, here. I only found this story moderately enjoyable, I'm afraid.

"The Surgeon's Daughter" is the longest story, the one I referred to as a novella, and it is, thankfully, the best of the three. The titular character is not the main one of the tale, though she plays a prominent role in the action. It is the two young men who both serve as apprentices to the kindly country surgeon of the title whose differing degrees of character strength and capacity for folly moves the narrative, as the scene moves from a small Scottish village to India in the days of the Raj and the heyday of the British East India Company. Who will prevail, and how will the heroine, buffeted by events mostly out of her control, fare in these stormy events. This one, as I said, was the most fun.

All in all, this is not the best of the Scott "Waverly" tales I have read, but there was enjoyment to be derived all in all from the set.

My second entry for Japan is The Heiké Story by Eiji Yoshikawa. The Heiké Story is a modern (1956) retelling of the The Heiké Monogatari, a Japanese epic from the thirteenth century that related the feudal wars that had raged throughout Japan during the previous centuries between the powerful, Heiké, Fujiwara and Genji clans. The action of Yoshikawa's modernization takes place during the 12th century, and centers around the maturation, education, rise to power and reign of Heita Kiyomori of the Heiké. (Reminiscent somewhat of watching Prince Hal become Henry V.) The original epic, as we're told in the helpful translator's afterward, is essentially a chronicle of "the deeds of warriors and princes." Yoshikawa brings the story to a personal level, following the lives of several characters in both the dueling Heiké and Genji clans, also portraying the subservient lives that the culture's women were forced to endure. There are some battle scenes, to be sure, and these are pretty well done, without much graphic gore. But the dominant themes of Yoshikawa's narrative are clearly the burdens of power, the tragedy and futility of war, and the folly of human (particularly male) pride, as personified by the warrior class, whose members refuse to foreswear vengeance and bloodshed even when they know that the resulting wars will lead to suffering, starvation, disease and death for thousands of innocent people. Still, we spend time with characters working to mute these cultural imperatives, and the power of both family and romantic love is a theme that runs through the narrative, as well. According to the historical translator's afterward, the influence of the clans and the warrior culture in Japan endured right through the events of World War II, and those events clearly influenced Yoshikawa's work.

I've just finished the Argentinian noir thriller, No-one Loves a Policeman by Guillermo Orsi. First published in 2007, with action taking place beginning in December 2001, this mystery has plenty of action, but is also to a great extent a narrative about the chaotic nature of the many Argentinian government upheavals of the time period. You can find a longer review on the book's work page and on my Club Read thread. This is only my third entry for Argentina!