World Cup of Reading

So, the FIFA World Cup ended over a month ago, but I still used this year’s tournament as inspiration to revive my ongoing Around the World for a Good Book project.  The basic gist is that I’m attempting to read a work of fiction (in English or English translation) from every country in the world.  So far I’ve been able to read literature from more fifty nations, but I’ve stalled out the past couple of years.

My goal for 2014 is to try to read a book for all 32 nations represented in this years World Cup.  Luckily, countries I’ve read abundantly – such as England and the United States – as well as other countries I’ve read for the project were represented in the tournament, so I will only have 12 books to read to complete the field.

Here are the books I’ve read, or plan to read, for the World Cup nations of 2014.  As always, I’m open to suggestions.

• Australia: Woman of the Inner Sea by Thomas Keneally
• Algeria: Cousin K by Yasmina Khadra
• Argentina: Hopscotch by Julio Cortázar
• Belgium: Life Form by Amélie Nothomb
  
• Bosnia and Herzegovina: The Lazarus Project by Alexsandr Hemon
• Brazil:  Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon by Jorge Amado
• Cameroon: The Story of the Madman : A Novel by Mongo Beti
• Chile:  The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende
• Colombia: One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• Costa Rica: Cocorí by Joaquín Gutiérrez
• Côte d’Ivoire: Aya by Marguerite Abouet
• Croatia:  Baba Yaga Laid an Egg by Dubravka Ugrešić
• Ecuador:  Bruna and Her Sisters in the Sleeping City by Yanez Cossio
• England: Under the Net by Iris Murdoch
• France:  The Castle of Whispers by Carole Martinez
• Germany: Billiards at Half-Past Nine by Heinrich Böll
• Ghana: Wife of the Gods by Kwei J. Quartey
• Greece: Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis
• Honduras: Senselessness by Horacio Castellanos Moya
• Iran: Persepolis & Persepolis 2 by Marjane Satrapi
• Italy:  Conclave by Roberto Pazzi
• Japan: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
• Mexico:  The Law of Love by Laura Esquivel
• Netherlands:  The Book of Everything by Guus Kuijer
• Nigeria:  Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
• Portugal: Jerusalem by Gonçalo Tavares
• Russia:  Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
• South Korea: Silver Stallion by  Ahn Junghyo
• Spain:  The Man of Feeling by Javier Marías,
• Switzerland: My Mother’s Lover by Urs Widmer
• Uruguay: The Invisible Mountain by Carolina de Robertis.