January 2020: Romania and Zimbabwe
Read: Nostalgia by Mircea Cartarescu (Romania), An Elegy for Easterly by Petina Gappah (Zimbabwe) Over the last few years, I’ve turned my casual reading of whatever book I fancy into some sort of epic challenge. It started with reading the complete works of Charles Dickens, a loose challenge that took a number of years to complete. Then, I did a twelve-book yearly challenge that I found online and lots of my colleagues were doing. I failed that one, not completing the final book before the year was out. I was meant to read a book I’d started before and not finished and I had already stumbled and failed to finish Middlemarch by George Eliot twice before and was determined that it would be third time lucky. Although the New Year rolled around without me finishing it, I did eventually get to the end during the following year’s alphabetical challenge where I read a book by an author with a surname beginning with every letter of the alphabet. Next up was a 100-book a year challenge. I...