Reading The World: Top 5

Near the beginning of the year, I decided to sign up to the Reading The World Challenge on Storygraph, where the aim is to read a book from every country in the world by an author from that country. So far I have read books from 32 different countries and am 16% of my way through the challenge, which for only 9 months worth of books I’d say was pretty good going. I’d like to start doing wrap ups every three months to let you know what progress I’m making, but to get you up to speed with where I am so far I thought I’d do a top five of the books I’ve read for this challenge so far.

5: China: Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao

Iron Widow is the TikTok sensation retelling of Chinese Empress Wu Zetian’s story, using a war with giant mechas. Men pilot the giant metal fighting machines with their women concubine pilots, who often don’t survive. Our protagonist Wu has a point to prove and wants to kill the man who killed her sister in this fashion, even if she ends up dying in the process, however it seems she has an unusual gift for piloting these machines and not only does she kill him, but she also survives. Now she has a target on her back from the patriarchal system determined to keep its female pilots down. This book takes many of the established YA Fantasy/Sci-Fi tropes and turns them into something new, from chosen one, to enemies to lovers, to love triangle. Is it the most beautiful writing? No. Are the depictions of traditional Chinese foot binding disgusting? Yes. Is it a lot of fun anyway? 100%

4: Zimbabwe: I Will Always Write Back by Caitlin Alifirenka and Martin Gamba

A middle-grade joint memoir about two people who joined a pen-pal scheme through their schools in the 90’s. Catilin is an average middle class all American girl and Martin is from Zimbabwe trying to make his family’s dreams come true and pull them out of poverty through academic success. We see their lives through alternating perspective chapters and showing what they tell each other, and more interestingly what they don’t. The story follows them from being 12 to around 18-19 years old and all the ups and downs life throws at them. Incredibly moving in some places and a simple slice of life in others, I couldn’t put this down

3: Sweden: The Murderer’s Ape by Jacob Wegelius (translated from the Swedish by Peter Graves)

The Murderer’s Ape brings back those feelings of being a child on summer holidays from school spending the whole day with a book. We follow our protagonist Sally Jones, a chimpanzee with human intelligence but unable to speak, as she tries to prove that her friend, Chief, did not commit murder. The setting of early 20th century Lisbon was so captivating and every character was so intricate and interesting, even though this book is a behemoth for a middle-grade at 640 pages, it is 100% worth every single one.

2: Indonesia: The Wandering by Intan Paramaditha (translated from the Indonesian by Stephen J. Epstein)

A woman in Jakarta starts inviting the devil in through her window every night. Over time, they start a relationship and eventually she makes a deal with him. He gifts her s page of red heels, very similar to Dorothy’s ruby slippers and tells her that if she puts them on she will be granted the power to travel the world, but that she can never return to Jakarta. She puts them on and the adventure begins. This is a choose your own adventure novel and the first choice the reader makes is immediately after putting on the shoes our protagonist finds herself in the back of a cab in New York with a plane ticket to Berlin in her bag and she must choose whether to stay in New York or head to Berlin. The multiple versions possible of this story twist and turn in interesting ways and the author clearly intends for the reader to give the story multiple attempts one after the other as deja-vu is a major plot device in the story. I highly recommend reading this on an ereader as it will have links in the file to the different pages you need to turn to, or with multiple bookmarks at the ready so you can use them almost like save points in a video-game.

1: Vietnam: When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain by Nghi Vo

This is a slight cheat as the book I officially used to tick the Vietnam prompt off was the first book in this series, The Empress of Salt and Fortune, but I do think this book is better and the series can be read in any order. The Singing Hills Cycle series follows a monk travelling around a fantasy version of ancient Vietnam collecting stories. In this book Chih runs into a group of tigers and has to, in the tradition of Scheherezade from 1001 Arabian Nights, keep the tigers enthralled with a story to stop them from eating Chih and their travelling companions. I loved this series so much that I’m going to be releasing an article deep diving the series as a whole as soon as I have finished the third and final book Into the Riverlands which comes out 25.10.22, but in short I love this series because queerness is so deeply baked in that it isn’t even remarked upon and the fairy tale atmosphere is so comforting

That’s it from me! Thank you so much for reading, if you want to find me elsewhere, you can check out my Instagram and Storygraph, both under jeannareadsbooks. What’s your favourite book written in a country that isn’t your own? I’d love to hear all about it in the comments