7 continents reading challenge: new places + where to start?

New year, new books! As January is the time of new year resolutions and new reading challenges, I now put a new version of the "7 continents" reading challenge together for 2016. As always, the idea of the challenge is to read books from different cultures and continents. The task is: to read one book from each continent. Here is the challenge page, with the details and with links:
7 Continents, 7 Billion People, 7 Books

Looking forward to the world reading - yesterday I went on a bit of a book browse, looking for possible reads. One thing I really like about the world read idea is that it makes me go and look for books in a different way, searching the country lists at goodreads (like this one; Goodreads/Australia), or just googling "best books Africa", and arriving at this telegraph-series for world reads, here's the link for Africa + for South America. So the new places aren't only about the books themselves, but also about the links that lead to them.

While browsing, I came across a book that might be a good starting point for me, it actually is a journey around the whole world: “Over the Edge of the World: Magellan's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe” by Laurence Bergreen. Here's more at the author page, there also is an interactive map.

Looking at the book, I thought: that one would neatly fit with the place I'm going to be later in January: Lanzarote. Magellan stopped at the Canary islands on his way to South America. And reading world books while staying not far from a lighthouse feels like a good match.

Some extra links + time 

While reading the Magellan description, I remembered a book website which hosts all kind of free books, but especially out-of-print books: Project Gutenberg

They have an old Magellan book listed: The Story of Magellan, from 1899

Might be interesting to read a bit into this parallel to the new book, and also to look for other "parallel" reads there - for example, for Antarctica, there are Scott's and Amundsen's Expedition notes online: Gutenberg/Antarctica. 

It would also turn the world journey into a journey through time - and in contrast to the old volumes, I might also include some future stories. Litro featured an African science fiction anthology, somehow I remembered that and found it: Litro/AfroSF.