New Year Reading

Since March 2020 I have been logging on to member of Around the World in 80 Books, a community on goodreads.com, for ideas of reading projects. I have now completed two big challenges, Trekker (reading books from 80 countries) and Three-quarter Century (one book first published in each year of my life, later expanded to cover 1900 to 2022). Each year there is also a “Magic Squares” challenge, reading 25 books fulfilling various conditions laid down on the “bingo card” for the year. I make this one more difficult by my own rules: the books must be set in 25 different countries, I must finish by the beginning of Lent, and spend as little money as possible.

In the first two weeks since I found the bingo card, I have completed 2 columns:

Column A:

Category	Author	Title	Country
Translated from Hindi	Pavrita Mohan*	Strewn Flowers	India
Set on an island	Elif Sharak	The Island of Missing Trees	Cyprus
Has character that shares your profession	David Lewis	Priest in the Pyrenees	France
Tropical setting	H W Tilman	Snow on the Equator	Kenya
Best Translated Book Award	Tove Jansson tr Thomas Teal	The True Deceiver	Finland

Column B

Category	Author	Title	Country
Fire. flood or hurricane	Carolyn Brown	The Sandcastle Hurricane	USA
Dream Vacation	Robert Thorogood	A Meditation on Murder	Guadeloupe*
To-Be-Read Book Completion	Olga Tokarczuk tr Antonia Lloyd-Jones	Drive your Plow over the Bones of the Dead	Poland
Central or South American author	Sofia Segovia	The Murmur of Bees	Mexico
BIPOC (Black, indigenous, people of color) author	Maya Angelou	All God’s Children need Travelling Shoes	Ghana

You can find my book-by-book comments here.