This week I made a start on one of my goals for 2013 — to read more literature from around the world parts of the world, using a self-imposed challenge called Lines of Connection to give me a framework. I’ve sent the past few days trying to identify which authors I’ll read for each of the countries on the list.

I sent out an appeal early in the week  to other bloggers, connections on GoodReads and LibraryThing as well as former university tutors, to help me identify which author/book to select to represent England (see the original appeal here). The response has been wonderful with some widely different suggestions – I’ll make a decision by the end of this week which to choose.

Here are the suggestions received so far:

Zadie Smith
Peter Ackroyd
R F Delderfield
Jerome K Jerome
Anthony Trollope
John Galsworthy
Anthony Powell
Iris Murdoch (The Sea, The Sea) recommended by my creative writing tutor
Margaret Foster
Bernard Cornwell
Laurie Lee
Colin Dexter (the Inspector Morse series)
Agatha Christie
P G Wodehouse
Melvyn Burgess
Susan Hill
Bernard Cornwell

Of these I’ll probably go for either Iris Murdoch, Zadie Smith or Peter Ackroyd (the last two write about London which has close links with the Prime Meridian so has a particular resonance with the theme of the challenge)

For other countries, so far I’ve narrowed down my choices for the Congo where I plan to read Broken Glass by Alain Mabanckou and for Colombia where it will be a choice between The Armies by Evello Rosero and Delirium by Laura Restrepo.  Some countries will be more difficult to than others because of lack of availability of novels in English including Sao Tome and Principe where apparently the only novel in English is one that was translated as a social enterprise for a blog site called A Year of Reading the World but isn’t actually published.

And in other news……

Just finished reading the first novel of the year  – Dissolution by C J Sansom – what a delightful book to kick off a new year. The review is posted here. 

Also listened to my first audio book – The Girl who Fell from the Sky by Simon Mawer. I haven’t written the review yet but it wasn’t great. Not bad, but just not that good either.