August Round Up

 

Another month gone, and as I type this the weather also seems to have left summer behind and turned more autumnal, although more heatwaves or hot blips are being forecast. It has been an incredible summer however and I hope that there isn't the extreme cold to counter balance the extreme heat, although I don't mind the cooler temps it is just the ice I loathe!

August was another good month for me - the highlight being our extreme day trip to Valladolid in Spain to see the total eclipse. This was our fifth eclipse, making us true umbraphiles I think, and it was certainly special as it came shortly before sunset giving many new colours and experiences. Full photos of the experience can be found on my Flickr page and as Valladolid was the birth place of Cervantes I think that a forthcoming reading project should be for me to read Don Quixote.

Reading wise I did spend a lot of time reading for the excellent Women In Translation month and will round up my full thoughts in a separate post soon. I missed the Reading Around the World book group as I was eclipse chasing but by all accounts they all enjoyed visiting Scotland and at our September meeting we'll be visiting Italy.

As for me I visited 16 countries (if you include the UK and USA) by book and 7 were new for my map - Central African Republic, Mauretania, Bahrain, Gabon, DRC, Moldova, and Thailand. The books set in the USA were mainly ones for a reading project and so didn't add any new states to my list sadly.

Top reads of the month definitely Nicola Chester's Ghosts of the Farm, which I talked about earlier and The Man Who Read Books by Rachid Benzine (tr. Sam Taylor). Honourable mention to the Booker longlisted May We Feed The King by Rebecca Perry which I found fun and also recognised myself in -  as when I start researching something I'm interested in I can easily fall down rabbit holes...

Thoughts on more of the translations soon!

March Round Up

 

March seems to have passed in a flash this year but it was another good reading month - this time helped by two days of travel and also being trapped in Iceland for an extra day thanks to a late winter storm shutting everything down!

Before it all got complicated and we had to try to rebook flights and hotels etc we'd had a lovely time in Iceland - we saw the Northern Lights, tried the food (including the infamous fermented shark!), got to see the most amazing scenery on a sunny day, and also spent hours lounging in the Blue Lagoon!

I did also find the theatre and a couple of bookshops so all was well in the world 😉. I am even more at a loss to explain the proliferation of dark crime novels set in Iceland. One of our tour guides talked about the incredibly low crime rate on the island and also said that the total prison population is only around 80. Sadly it is the case that the majority of prisoners are foreigners, and the guide postulated that this was because Iceland is so small that every local knows everyone else making crime hard to get away with!

Before we went away it was the third Reading Around the World book group meeting where we talked all things Japanese. There was very little duplication in titles read this time although books by Murakami did crop up a few times. For April we're reading from North Africa...

In my own project I read books from China, the Australian state of Victoria, Oregon, Malaysia, Morocco, Mongolia, Japan, Venice, Mali, South Korea, Albania, Denmark, and Taiwan. Only those in italics  were new locations to me and my map of the world doesn't look too different this month. 

My top reads of the month were the International Booker shortlisted Taiwan Travelogue by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ (translated by Lin King) along with Cecile Pin's second novel Celestial Lights.

I didn't read a lot of non fiction this month and while Alan Bennett's new volume of diaries started well by the end the title, Enough Said, felt very apt.