2022 Theme Reads Planning

ConversazioniReading Globally

Iscriviti a LibraryThing per pubblicare un messaggio.

2022 Theme Reads Planning

1thorold
Modificato: Nov 5, 2021, 3:15 pm

Sorry, folks, but it's that time of the year again, and we need your input to decide what we're going to do for theme reads in 2022...

If we stick to what we've done in previous years, we need to pick four quarterly theme reads, and/or possibly a looser topic for the whole year. If we feel that that wasn't working optimally for us, then we need concrete suggestions for other structures. Everything should be open for discussion, but it's most productive if we think in terms of "could we try...?" rather than "I don't like ..."

As in other years, topic suggestions are needed for both themes and geographic regions. Mixtures of the two could be good as well, like the 2020 “Russians write revolutions” theme.

Obviously not all suggestions will be of interest to all readers, but by selecting both regions and themes, it is more likely that at least one topic will get you reading during the year.

Here is a list of previous topics: https://www.librarything.com/groups/readinggloballyficti

Readers wander in and out of this group. If you're fairly new to the group, perhaps there are topics from previous years you may have missed and would like to see revisited. If so, I would suggest going back five years or more, but a revisit is always worthwhile.

Start posting your ideas below, and we will vote on them in due course.

I'd like to open the ballot somewhere around the first week of December, that seems to have worked well in the past, and gives the person running the Q1 thread time to prepare.

2thorold
Modificato: Nov 5, 2021, 3:21 pm

For background, the 2021 nominations thread was here: https://www.librarything.com/topic/326147

The final list of proposed topics was this, in case anyone wants to revive one or more of them. The crossed out ones were withdrawn before the ballot by the person who proposed them, but that doesn't necessarily mean there was anything wrong with them:

Regional:
— Writing from small countries (Q1 2021)
— Writing from countries beginning with “B” (withdrawn )
— The Lusophone world: writing from countries where Portuguese is or was an important language (from "Brazil" ) (Q3 2021)
— reads from newly-independent countries (or countries that claimed themselves independent)

Thematic:
— “Orientalism”: the classical Arabic and Persian traditions and their modern echoes
— Banned books around the world
— Childhood: Books for or about children in different cultures around the world (Q2 2021)
— Books published or published in translation during 2020 or 2021
— Regionally Focused Publishers
— Translation Prize Winners (Q4 2021)
— Crime and Mysteries from around the world
— Anthologies
— Ancient Literature (BCE)
— Writing based on Oral and Epic traditions
— Fakes, forgeries, fictional manuscripts and factitious fictions
— 20th & 21st century Genocides
— Prison writing
— Women and time (or various alternatives )

Last year's votes:

3AnnieMod
Nov 5, 2021, 3:54 pm

A few topics I had been thinking on:

- Ancient Literature - The World Without Latin - Latin literature emerges officially in 240 BC with the first adaptation of a Greek play by Livius Andronicus. We can use that as cut-off or just keep going for a bit longer (through the 5th-6th century?) and just exclude Latin. Plus I have nice Akkadian, Sumerian and Egyptian collections I really want to read on my shelves.

In case you wonder what is in that category: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_literature has a pretty good timeline with lists of works that still exist.

- Wars, Revolutions and Uprisings - should be self-explanatory and it is wide enough to allow a lot of variety.

- Prize winners in their own language (both books and lifetime awards) - Prix Goncourt, Kurd-Laßwitz-Preis, Icelandic Literary Prize, Best Swedish Crime Novel Award, Seiun Award and so on.

4thorold
Nov 5, 2021, 4:34 pm

>3 AnnieMod: Prize winners in their own language — I was wondering about something like that as well, especially with Mohamed Mbougar Sarr being announced as Goncourt winner the other day.

An idea for a regional thread I’ve had floating around for a while is Around the Indian Ocean. There’s the long tradition of trade between Arabia, India and East Africa to tie it together, but plenty of scope for going off on tangents as well.

5AnnieMod
Nov 5, 2021, 4:40 pm

>4 thorold: It came up in the current quarterly thread as well - and I had been waiting for you to open the thread to propose it - not all regional award winners get recognition in the global awards (the numbers do not allow it and sometimes the book is just too... local to make it a good international one) and as flawed as awards can be, they tend to show something about the host nation.

"Around the Indian Ocean" sounds interesting. I wonder if we cannot make it a series of 3, in 3 subsequent years - covering the 3 major oceans (I am thinking in series these days for some reason). :)

6thorold
Nov 5, 2021, 5:15 pm

>5 AnnieMod: Yes, I think we might have to work up to the Pacific gradually… We have done the Caribbean and the Mediterranean in the past, so there’s a kind of progression there.

7MissWatson
Nov 6, 2021, 10:36 am

>3 AnnieMod: Prize winners in their own language sounds promising. And "Around the Indian Ocean" too.

8thorold
Nov 9, 2021, 4:00 pm

Maybe it’s a bit too close to current events, but I wonder if there would be any mileage in Plagues and pestilence around the world? Would we get any further than Camus?

9SassyLassy
Nov 10, 2021, 1:43 pm

>8 thorold: Interesting idea. I'm sure we would get further than Camus. Blindness comes to mind right away. There must be others. A Chinese novel is nagging in the back of my mind, but not getting any further.

10librorumamans
Nov 11, 2021, 12:50 am

>8 thorold:

Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year.

Boccaccio's Decameron.

Mary Shelley's The Last Man.

Jack London's The Scarlet Plague.

For non-fiction there's The Power of Plagues, and somewhere along the way a viewing of Bergman's The Seventh Seal.

11thorold
Nov 11, 2021, 1:43 am

>10 librorumamans: Technically, I don’t think any of those except Boccaccio are within the remit of Reading Globally! This list also seems pretty focussed on US or UK writers: https://www.librarything.com/list/938/all/Best-Books-About-Plagues-and-Epidemics

But there must be some interesting books about AIDS in Africa, surely.

12cindydavid4
Nov 11, 2021, 2:51 am

>8 thorold: yeah personally, I don't want to read anymore about that topic, not for a while now. Tho I might change my mind closer we get

13librorumamans
Nov 11, 2021, 10:25 am

>11 thorold:

Oops! I momentarily forgot about the Reading Globally bit.

14spiphany
Nov 12, 2021, 4:09 am

>8 thorold: Well, there's Death in Venice, of course. And possibly Love in the Time of Cholera, though I'm not sure how much of a role actual outbreaks of cholera play in the novel. I imagine a lot of fiction set in the Middle Ages is going to feature the Black Death one way or another, even if not necessarily as a central component of the story.

Plagues-as-punishment-from-the-gods are also important plot elements in a number of works of ancient literature, for example, the Iliad and Oedipus Rex.

In more contemporary literature, Ludmila Ulitskaya has a recently published book (not, strictly speaking, a COVID novel, as it was written several decades ago) about a plague outbreak in 1930s Russia: Just the Plague. And Vladimir Sorokin's The Blizzard also seems to be about some kind of epidemic.

I don't know if I would want to spend an entire quarter reading about pandemics, but I've been fairly bad lately about keeping up with the quarterly reads in general, so...

15AnnieMod
Nov 12, 2021, 4:58 am

>8 thorold: Way too early if you ask me :)

16thorold
Nov 22, 2021, 8:30 am

(Bump!)

There’s about a week left to suggest interesting new topics, get your thinking caps on!

We could do with at least one more regional topic.

It might be worth bearing in mind that there’s an Asian theme planned for 2022 in the 75 Books group, and a Victorian Britain theme in Club Read — as there’s quite a bit of overlap between the membership of the groups, we might want to avoid overlapping our themes as well.

If we don’t have enough new topics to make a plausible ballot, I’m reserving the right to revive some of the runners-up from last year.

17AnnieMod
Nov 22, 2021, 9:21 am

"When alphabets collide - books written in the Slavic languages"? :)

The Slavic languages (only the ones in which it is likely to have books in):
East: Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian
South Eastern: Bulgarian and Macedonian
South Western: Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, Montenegrin and Slovene
West: Czech, Slovak and Polish

Or a subset of these - although keeping them together should allow for a better variety...

PS:The Alphabet part is because some of these use the Latin script (uh... a version of it anyway), some use Cyrillic, some use a weird mix of both and some use both officially.

19AnnieMod
Nov 22, 2021, 10:44 am

>18 cindydavid4: Does not count in this group being an English author :)

20cindydavid4
Modificato: Nov 22, 2021, 10:50 am

>13 librorumamans: >19 AnnieMod: oops me too. still a really good book .

21raton-liseur
Nov 22, 2021, 12:40 pm

>9 SassyLassy: A great Chinese novel on the Plague: Neige et corbeaux by Chi Zijian. It's about a Plague epidemy in Harbin, in the North of China, in 1910.
I do not know if there is a translation to English, though.

>8 thorold: I am mainly lurking in this group, so my voice does not have a lot of weight, but a Plagues and pestilence around the world theme would actually appeal to me!!!

There is also En compagnie des hommes, by Véronique Tadjo. I think she is from Ivory Coast, and the book is about Ebola in Western Africa in 2014. And there is an English translation: In the Company of Men!

22SassyLassy
Nov 22, 2021, 4:03 pm

>17 AnnieMod: I was thinking somewhat along the same lines as your south east and south west groups with the addition of Albania, whose language seems to have difficulty fitting into any group.

>21 raton-liseur: Thanks for the reference. If I can't find it in English, I could try the French.

23AnnieMod
Nov 22, 2021, 6:25 pm

>22 SassyLassy: We can always adopt Albanian (and probably Greek because they are also just there and have a similar problem with fitting anywhere linguistically) if we want to. Or go for the whole peninsula and add Turkish and Romanian as well and cover them all.

I was just throwing a regional idea (similar to the Lusophone World of this year - but as noone in the region ever colonized anything (in modern times and the Ottomans don't count), it needed to be somewhat modified. :)

24thorold
Modificato: Nov 26, 2021, 4:01 am

>17 AnnieMod: Thanks — sounds interesting!

OK, to summarise what we have so far:

— Ancient Literature - The World Without Latin >3 AnnieMod:
— Wars, Revolutions and Uprisings >3 AnnieMod:
— Prize winners in their own language >3 AnnieMod:
— Around the Indian Ocean >4 thorold:
— Plagues and pestilence around the world >8 thorold:
— "When alphabets collide" - books written in the Slavic languages (... & friends) >17 AnnieMod:

I think we have a few there that should provide interesting mileage for discussion.
Does anyone — preferably not Annie or myself — want to nominate any more topics (including past runners-up)?

25EMS_24
Modificato: Nov 26, 2021, 7:12 am

>8 thorold: I think there are several SF novels and dystopias with this theme. But these are probably not everyone's genres of interest in this global group.

26Trifolia
Nov 26, 2021, 7:13 am

>24 thorold: - No nominations from me because I think the list you've put together looks very interesting. I will try to participate no matter which one you/we ultimately choose. Thanks in advance, AnnieMod and Thorold.

27cindydavid4
Nov 29, 2021, 7:27 pm

Just thought of this, how about outcasts and castaways?

28thorold
Nov 30, 2021, 1:09 am

>27 cindydavid4: Yes, that could work — there are plenty of books that centre on people who are excluded from their communities for one reason or another, and there are a few reworking of the Robinson Crusoe idea, like Coetzee’s Foe

Thanks!

29cindydavid4
Nov 30, 2021, 9:55 am

someone mentioned a book about a woman during WWII who was ostrasized because she had a baby with a german soldier. Thats what made me think about it. I suspect there are alot similar. but yes Robinson Cruseo, and love the idea of Foe.

30thorold
Dic 4, 2021, 7:09 am

The voting thread is up! Come along to do our democratic duty here:
https://www.librarything.com/topic/337255

31thorold
Modificato: Dic 11, 2021, 8:11 am

OK, the polls are now closed. Many thanks to all who voted! Here are the results:



As you can see, we have three clear winners with nine votes each:
— Prize winners in their own language
— Around the Indian Ocean
— "When alphabets collide" - books written in the Slavic languages (... & friends)

In fourth place there is a tie, so it has to be decided on the "no" votes:

— Outcasts and castaways (7 yes, 3 no — chosen)
— Wars, Revolutions and Uprisings (7 yes, 4 no — not chosen)

(If anyone wants to protest this decision with armed force, we will maroon them on an uninhabited island with eight gramophone records.)

Also falling outside the boat this time are:
— Plagues and pestilence around the world (5 votes)
— Ancient Literature - The World Without Latin? (4 votes)

I think that should give us an interesting set of topics to think about over the coming year.

Now we come to the real challenge, finding volunteers to host the threads! Please post below — or send me a private message if you prefer — if you would like to have a go. Please say whether you have a preference for any particular quarter of the year as well.

I'm happy to volunteer for Around the Indian Ocean, since that was one of my nominations and I have a few ideas in mind already.

32cindydavid4
Dic 11, 2021, 9:04 am

I can do 0utcasts and Castaways, prefer 2nd quarter

33thorold
Dic 11, 2021, 11:15 am

>32 cindydavid4: Thank you! We’ll promise not to call you “Mrs Robinson”!

34AnnieMod
Dic 11, 2021, 1:28 pm

I can do the a Slavic languages one :)

35CurrerBell
Dic 11, 2021, 1:30 pm

>31 thorold: Instead of marooning with gramophone records, it might be more sadistic to maroon with cd's of PGA tournament reruns.

36cindydavid4
Dic 11, 2021, 6:35 pm

>33 thorold: um, I know who that is but my pea brain isn't makng the connection. explain pls :)

37thorold
Dic 16, 2021, 9:24 am

>34 AnnieMod: Thanks!
>35 CurrerBell: Yes, but if we did that we'd have to give them a means of playing the CDs. The beauty of the gramophone records is that they don't realise that they will have no gramophone (unless they can improvise one)
>36 cindydavid4: Sorry, probably doesn't make all that much sense in English, where Robinson is just a common name. In other cultures a "Robinson" is a castaway, thanks to Defoe.

Do we have a volunteer for "Prize Winners in their own language"? Don't all shout at once...

How about this for a provisional scheme?

Q1 — Around the Indian Ocean (thorold)
Q2 — Outcasts and Castaways (cindydavid4)
Q3 — "When alphabets collide" - books written in the Slavic languages (AnnieMod)
Q4 — Prize winners in their own language (mystery guest)

38cindydavid4
Dic 16, 2021, 9:48 am

>37 thorold: ha! but you said mrs robinson which is a character in the movie The Graduate. :) I would have figured it out if you just said Robinson :) (just teasing, because I soooo admire anyone whose second langague is English. What a mine field! )

39cindydavid4
Dic 16, 2021, 9:49 am

fine with me!

40CurrerBell
Dic 16, 2021, 1:06 pm

>37 thorold: Mrs. Robinson? And here I thought it was some kind of obscure reference (that I couldn't figure out) to Anne Bancroft's character in The Graduate....
And here's to you, Mrs. Robinson
Jesus loves you more than you will know
Whoa, whoa, whoa
God bless you, please, Mrs. Robinson
Heaven holds a place for those who pray
Hey, hey, hey
Hey, hey, hey

41thorold
Mag 29, 2022, 3:29 am

It’s almost the end of Q2: there’s just about time to read another book for the Outcasts and Castaways theme whilst AnnieMod puts the finishing touches to the Q3 Slavic languages theme.

——

Meanwhile, I’m starting to think about Q4 (Prize winners in their own language)

We don’t have a volunteer to co-ordinate this one yet: how would it be if we make it a team effort, with anyone who wants to writing a short introduction to one or two prizes from a country or region they are particularly interested in?

Obviously there are crazy numbers of prizes around the world (see e.g. here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_literary_awards ) so we’re never going to be able to cover more than a handful of the most interesting and/or prestigious ones. The title of the theme perhaps implies that we should focus on prizes for non-English writing, but we have a bit of leeway there. Beyond that, I think basically anything would be eligible, provided it is awarded mainly for writing from areas we cover in Reading Globally. We should exclude translation prizes (covered last year) and the Nobel (covered a few years ago), though.

Do you think that would work? If there are enough people interested we can put up a “scratchpad” topic where we can claim our prizes (!) and draft short intros to them ready for Q4.

42AnnieMod
Mag 29, 2022, 8:42 pm

>41 thorold: Technically there is a whole month left from Q2 so enough time for people to read a few more books :) But the Q3 thread will be up in the next couple of weeks so people can start preparing. :)

43thorold
Mag 30, 2022, 3:13 am

>42 AnnieMod: Yes, you’re quite right. I’ve obviously been doing too much rescheduling of things that were meant to happen in May and added one that wasn’t. Sorry for any confusion!

But my feeler about Q4 is still relevant…

44SassyLassy
Mag 30, 2022, 3:44 pm

>41 thorold: I like the collective idea for a topic this huge. I could give a stab at some of the prizes for Chinese language books and some from South America.