7 Continents, 7 Billion People, 7 Books - Reading Challenge 2015

    

The idea of this reading 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.

7 Continents Reading Challenge 2015
To join the challenge, select and read seven books, each belonging to one of the following categories - or, if this works better for you, simply pick one book from each continent:

A book from....
- the 7 countries with the most population

- the 7 highest countries in the world

- the 7 oldest countries of the world

- one of the 7 megacities of the world

- the 7 countries with the most immigrants

- a continent not visited yet

- and a book with a journey from one continent to another

There's more information about the categories included below, with links to country lists.

Why 7 Books? 
To keep it simple and playful, and leave space for extra reads that might be inspired by the lists. Also, with 7 continents, and the world population reaching 7 billions, the 7 seems to be the best number for this kind of challenge.

Challenge Guidelines: 

• This challenge will run from Jan 1, 2015 – Dec 31, 2015
• Books can be any format (novel, non-fiction, poetry or story collection, anthology, as well as any phyisal format: print, ebook, audio)
• The idea of the challenge is to read books from different cultures and continents - so if ithis works better for you, you can alternatively simply pick one book from each continent
• You are welcome to count these books towards any other challenges as well
• You can start wherever you want. 
• When picking a country, the idea is to also pick an author from that country. If that turns out to be difficult, try to find an expat author who lived in the country for a while.

Resources, lists, links: 
Here is more about the 7 country categories, with links to the global lists, and with the top 7 countries listed already. The lists mostly are wiki-lists, as those often offer addditional search options.

1) The starting point: 
A book from one of the 7 countries with the most population

• Link: List of countries by population
• Top 7: China, India, USA, Indonesia, Brazil, Pakistan, Nigeria 

2) From most populated to the mountains:
A book from one of the 7 highest countries in the world

• Link: List of countries by highest point
• Top 7: Nepal, China, Pakistan, India, Bhutan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan

3) From high to old:
A book from one of the 7 oldest countries of the world

• It's an own challenge to create a definite ranking of the oldest countries of the world, some references: About/Geography and here: Wiki-answers.
• Some of the oldest countries: Japan, China, San Marino, Egypt + Iraq, Iran, Greece

4) From old to new:
 A book from one of the megacities of the world 

• Link: About Megacities + List of megacities 
• Top 7: Tokyo (Japan), Delhi (India), Seoul (South Korea), Shanghai (China), Mumbai (India), Mexico City, Sao Paulo (Brazil)

5) From megacity to migration:
 A book from one of the 7 countries with the most immigrants 

• Link: List of countries by foreign-born population
• Top 7: USA, Russia, Germany, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, UK, France

6) From migration to continents
 A book from a continent you havn't visited yet in this challenge  

• The 7 continents: Asia, Africa, Europe, North America, South America, Australia/Ozeania, North Pole 
• The listing is sorted by population, more about the 7 continents: Wiki/Continent

7) From continents to journey

• A book that includes a journey from one continent to another.  

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How to find books by country

How to find books set in particular countries? And preferably books that are written by an author who is coming from the country, or who has lived in it for a while? Here are also some lists that focus on the country: 

• Wikipedia: literature by country (overview)
• Goodreads: Cultural Books (with many subpages + lists)
• Guardian "best books from".. series
• Goodreads/Places (based on book description)
• Nobel Prize in Literature
• Three Percent: a resource for international literature 
• Around the world in 80 books (Goodreads group with lists) 
• And a blog post with more links and information:
  Finding books by country: helpful links + resources 

Searching for a place in an e-reader
If you have an e-reader, it might be interesting to run a search there: e-book readers can look for a word in all e-books they have in their files, and create a neat sorted list with bookmarks.

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To join the reading challenge 

To join the challenge, just leave a comment with the link to your blog.

There also is a 7 continents / 7 books facebook group, to post review links, or just the cover or title of a book you enjoyed, or other related news and links - it's open to everyone who is interested in global reads. 

Looking forward to this different kind of journey around the world! And don't worry that some already started – it's never to late to start!

taboos & role models: the myths of heroes

The great thing about second hand book shops is that they provide a space to come across books you otherwise might have missed - like this book about ancient Greek myths by Luciano De Crescenzo. Not sure who invented the German title ("Back when men were still allowed to be heroes") - the original Italian one is "I Miti degli Eroi" - "The myths of Heroes".

It's a brief book, 190 pages, yet De Crescenzo manages to provide both the ancient tales of The Argonauts, Herakles, Theseus, the Minotaur, and more - and puts them into their historic content with knowledge and wit, and many quotes from the original texts.

Greece, it's the cradle of democracy, and also the cradle of epic drama tales and heroes, all of which turned to role models for our Western culture. Interesting to note that in Greece, democracy didn't mean one adult = one vote. Slavery was a part of the Greek society, as was war - which made the figure of the hero so important as protector. Yet the heroes weren't free from fault, just like the Greek Gods they were wrapped in conflicts, desires and dramas, and were primarily warriors: "In Homeric Greek, "hero" refers to a man who was fighting on either side during the Trojan War. A hero was more than human but less than a god" (Greek hero cult).

Greek mythology also delivered the name for Europe: in the myth, Europa was a woman of high lineage, abducted by Zeus, who turned into a white bull to trick her, as he "was enamored of Europa and decided to seduce or ravish her, the two being near-equivalent in Greek myth". And just as the Gods, the heroes weren't exactly bound by ethics, either. (and how this story seems like a great name myth for a continent still is unanswered, here's more: Europa/mythology)

There's another taboo that didn't exist back then in ancient Greece: homosexuality was part of the normal culture. And it was just while reading the book that the Orange Prize winner was announced, and it turned out to be: Madeline Miller with ‘The Song of Achilles’ - a story based on the Trojan War, and on the friendship (and beyond it, the relationship) bewtween Achilles and his close friend Patroclus. Savidge Reads has a book review with a summary that goes for a lot of the Greek heroes, gods, and mortals of that time: "we soon learn the gods have stated a prophecy which isn’t going to reach a happy conclusion for anyone concerned". 

Two other bits of news that were announced in these days: the Orange Prize - which ranks as one of the most prestigous literary prizes, and was established to recognise the contribution of female writers - will change its name, as Orange ends its sponsorship. But that's okay, they supported it for a long time, despite the criticism the gender aspect caused - the prize was even accused of being "sexist", as if it hadn't been a noteworthy gender gap that initiated it in first place. Here's more, in an Alternet article on Book Prizes and the Literary Canon. Looking at the ratios mentioned in the article for the Nobel Prize or the Booker Prize, the gender gap is more than obvious. A fact that got highlighted by the second bit of news, about the Cannes film festival this year: guess how many films by female directors were shown there? (here's the answer: no, not even one).

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Global + European Reading Challenge: In the read this year, i am taking part in a global and in an european reading challenge. the idea: to read books from each continent of the world / several countries of europe. here are the other books from the series: reading challenge

Taboos & Role models: Parallel to the reading challenge, there's a string of posts on books that touch the theme of taboos and role models. Well, a developing string: this is the second post. the first post is here: taboos & role models: the un-sanitized antiheroine + the next top model.

Antelope Summer + Europe today: rolling

June is flash fiction month in New Zealand, and in celebration of this, the Aotearoa Affair invited authors to send their stories for a "Flash Across Borders". This is mine, the memory of a summer that moved across borders. All 26 stories + reflections on flash are now online at Flash Across Borders.  
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Antelope Summer

It was the summer of vuvuzelas. The ball rolled on and on, down there in the South of Africa, between all those countries of the world. Huge screens glowed in the night, green reflections of success and failure.

Then suddenly, it was over. The TV channels returned to their normal daily and weekly schedules. The heat kept lingering, though. It turned lawns into patches of prairie: yellow and stubby the grass stood, as if waiting for antelopes and hyenas. Still hesitant, you went, and bought one of the last vuvuzelas on sale, and we finally learned to do the rain dance.

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meanwhile, in Europe today, the countdown is running:
at 5 pm the europan soccer championships will start, the first match is Portugal vs. Greece. it will be a weird championship - the ball rolling while the prime ministers keep trying to save the Euro from tumbling. 21st century reality, it is. 

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related links:
- more on the Euro crisis in this blog: Europe, Quo Vadis?
- Antelope Summer was first published in Dog Days of Summer 2010

Europe, Quo Vadis? (or: how could things go so wrong?)

after being away for 2 weeks on an island in an almost news-free environment, the stream of ongoing breaking news now finally got to me. and after the time of open easy skies, the weight of this world feels scarily heavy.

the main news here in Europe this week still is: Europe, or rather the Euro, and its foundation that seemed so stable, and now keeps tumbling. Greece in ongoing turmoil, and no solution in sight. Spain is tumbling, too, together with other countries. right now, Greece is practically out-of-government, with people pulling their Euros in cash from the banks, afraid of what might come.

one of the odd things of this crisis is that on one hand, it's all over the news, and on the other, it's almost abstract: the Euro in your hand looks like it always looked. the twin ghost of it, the turmoil it is in, is not directly visible.

in all this drama, a smaller news also made it to the front pages: the unemployment rates of the generation that now should be finding their first real jobs and start to build their future. in Spain and Greece, it's around 50%. In Italy, Portugal, Ireland and other Europen states, it's over 30%. France: over 20%. the Zeit newspaper has an article with the diagram that shows how dramatic the structural problem in Europe is, here: Europas abgehängte Generation ("Europe's blanked generation")

how could things go so wrong?

or is it that we all got so convinced by the idea of constant growth - of a new millennium, of Europe as a place of security - that we now stand in disbelief, together with all the experts?

in contrast or in connection to all, a youtube clip spread through the web this week: an animation that shows the changes from 1000 to 2003 in Europe, and with it, shows that the world in time always has been a complex being in constant (yet probalby mostly unexpected) change: Epic time lapse map of Europe

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in addition, a note from an earlier post on the same subject, from December 2011:
"the only thing that is continuing steadily since months is the troubled news - one Euro crisis after the other. yesterday, the European Central Bank warned that there's again a risk of a systematic bank crisis, like in 2008. and each month, the amount of money needed to fix credit gaps and to avoid the worst rises. millions and billions here, then there. amounts that are impossible to imagine. where did all the money go? and how long will the money-patrol be able to keep this going?
it's like a ghost - in the streets, life goes on as always. and no one really can imagine how it would look like: the worst. what it would do to everyday life. what the answer to it could be."
- the walking ghost of a crisis