reading challenges 2013 & sorting books by continents & finding books by place

in motion
the island time now also brought some changes here - i collected the books i read this year in the upper shelf of my bookshelf, which already was full when i left for the island. now, coming back, there is a pile of books without place. and the reading challenges for the next year now start to take shape - they are about countries and continents:

Reading Challenges 2013
inspired by a global reading challenge in 2012, i look forward to more diverse and global reads in 2013 in collective challenges. there's a challenge i created myself, and one i came across recently:

7 Continents, 7 Billion People, 7 Books
The idea of this challenge is to explore the world by books from different continents and countries, and by visiting various world lists while planning the reads, to encounter the one or other unknown angle and fact about our world.

• The starting point is: to read a book from one of the 7 countries with the most population: China, India, USA, Indonesia, Brazil, Pakistan, Nigeria 
• In the next step, the challenge moves to the mountains: to read a book from one of the 7 highest countries in the world: Nepal, China, Pakistan, India, Bhutan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan
• If this sounds interesting to you, you're welcome to join. I will put an introduction post together for each of the 7 themes, with links and possible reads etc. 

Around the World in 12 Books Challenge
This is a globe-trotter reading challenge which specifies the countries visited by participants. The challenge: to read at least 1 book from the designated country, during the assigned month. The first months are:

• January: France
• February: Sudan

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Sorting books .. by continents

The challenges now brought the idea to sort at least a part of the bookshelf in a new and different way: by continent. It was both fun and interesting to do that, and i rediscovered some books that were stuck somewhere in the second row since ages, but that might fit into the challenges. 

Right now, the rough sorting is: 

• America & Europe
• France & Africa & Middle East 
• Asia & Ozeania

Finding books by country

A participant of the around-the-world challenge posted a link that is both helpful and makes for great virtual blog-trotting: Goodreads has book lists by places, based on the book description:

Goodreads/Places

I tried this for Sudan yesterday, and found a book that i will read, it's ordered already. Here's the list: Goodreads/Sudan,  the book i picked is the one by Halima Bashir. Not sure which book to read for France yet - the Goodreads/France list is rather long.  For most populated, i will go for India or China probably. Will see. Here are the lists: Goodreads/India & Goodreads/China.

I enjoy the browsing and looking. So many books out there. So many places. 2013 will be a paper-shaped road trip of reading around the world :)

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Update: French book + Pakistan issue
Yesterday evening I checked out the French bestseller list at Amazon, and now arrived at the book I will read in January: The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery from 2006, a contemporary bestseller in France.

Also I visited the current longlist of the Man Asian Liteary Prize, and clicking on from there, arrived at a Pakistan issue of Granta that looks like a good starting point to explore the literature of the country: Granta 112: Pakistan, from 2010.