Thursday, February 12, 2015

language, timothy

I'm a sucker for a book list, as you know, so when I came across this list of foreign novels YOU MUST READ in the Independent this week (I have read one, Norwegian Wood, and own another, Foucault's Pendulum) and spotted a link to a story about a woman who'd set herself the task of reading a book from every country in the world, I was intrigued. Needless to say this was a stunt itself designed to generate a book (and here it is) but it's quite interesting nonetheless.

Slightly frustratingly, there isn't just a list of what she read, but you can get it from here since the relevant book from each country is the hyperlinked one. There aren't many places where the list coincides with stuff I've read, but it does happen occasionally, specifically for Australia, Norway and Russia.

A quick and very unscientific scan of my bookshelves for novels originally written in foreign yields the following list of authors, in no particular order:
Plenty of gaps to be filled in there, even just in Europe: Polish, Greek, Finnish, Dutch. There are a couple of authors who you assume might generate some entries on this list, but who turn out to have actually written most of their novels in English, like Chinua Achebe and Vladimir Nabokov.

4 comments:

The black rabbit said...

"Finnish Dutch"

Who the feck are you. Ferrrigin "Predator" or sammink?

"GET TO DA CHARPPPPER!"
(DUGGADUGGADUGGA)

The black rabbit said...

http://youtu.be/eEe7EraTeDs

http://www.imdb.com/character/ch0000846/quotes

The black rabbit said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
The black rabbit said...

Hmmm.
I think I may make it my bidnid this year to find any reason from your blog posts to base any comment I make around Arnie film quotes.
No matter how tenuous the link...