As the year draws to a close our thoughts turn to 2017, a new year and new beginning with resolutions, plans and promises being made and challenges being accepted.
Here at For Reading Addicts we wanted to create another reading challenge for ourselves and our followers, something a little different, something that perhaps takes us all out of our reading comfort zone and so we have decided that the For Reading Addicts reading challenge for 2017 will feature authors from around the world.
Each month we will select five books written by authors who hail from a specific country and will then share that list on our Social Media pages and groups. We will then set up a discussion event for those who are taking part to chat about the books they read and to share their experiences of reading books from authors they may not ever have come across otherwise. We will also create a poll question asking for suggestions of authors for the next month’s country.
The first country to feature in our reading challenge for 2017 is Japan; a country with a long literary history and hundreds of authors to choose from. These are the five books we have chosen for our For Reading Addicts Reading Challenge 2017 January edition.
Haruki Murakami – The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
With a wife who is becoming more and more distant, the increasingly explicit phonecalls he has been receiving and a vanishing cat, Toru Okada’s life of cooking, reading, listening to jazz and opera and drinking beer at the kitchen table is about to be turned upside down as he is guided through a bizarre journey by a series of characters each with a tale to tell.
Banana Yoshimoto – Asleep
Three novellas that follow the stories of three women, all bewitched into a spiritual sleep. One, mourning a lost lover, one who has embarked on a relationship with a man whose wife is in a coma, and the third who finds her sleep haunted by another woman whom she was once pitted against in a love triangle. Hauntingly beautiful, Yoshimoto displays a magical ability to animate the lives of her young characters in this enchanting book.
Mitsuyo Kakuta – Mama’s Boy
A short story; 32-year-old Kubota’s wife Sayuri has declared him a “mama’s boy,” even though she is the one who is way closer to her mother than an adult should be. Despite their falsity, her comments strike a nerve and Kubota ends up re-examining his childhood and his relationship with his mother and the woman herself, discovering in the process that she may not have been who he thought she was.
Natsuo Kirino – Out
Burdened with chores and heavy debts and isolated from husbands and children, four women secretly dream of a way out of their dead-end lives. Eventually one of them snaps and strangles her philandering husband, confessing her deed to the eldest of the group the two conspire to dispose of the body in this psychologically taut and unflinching foray into the darkest recesses of the human soul.
Ryu Murakami – In The Miso Soup
It’s just before New Year, and Frank, an overweight American tourist, has hired Kenji to take him on a guided tour of Tokyo’s nightlife. But, Frank’s behaviour is so odd that Kenji begins to entertain a horrible suspicion: his client may in fact have murderous desires. Described as one of the creepiest novels ever written this is a book that demands to be read with the light on.
Hopefully our reading challenge for 2017 will introduce you to authors you’ve never heard of and writing styles you’ve never encountered previously. We have kept the challenge as simple as possible and hopefully, each month you will be able find at least one book that you will enjoy reading.
For Reading Addicts Reading Challenge 2024
For Reading Addicts Reading Challenge 2023 – Read a Rainbow – October
Does this challenge have a hashtag?
Not yet! We’ll work on something., Check our Twitter feed for the Feb challenge tomorrow!
When will you post the list for February?
In the next 24 hrs 🙂