2019 Theme Reads Planning

Time to get on with planning what to read in 2019. It will be here far more quickly than we think.

As in other years, topic suggestions are needed for both themes and geographic regions. Sometimes it's difficult to keep them manageable in scope, so an idea may need edited down somewhat. As an example, instead of a topic like "Revolution" it could be "Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century" or some such focus.

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.

Are there any changes you would like made to this quarterly structure?

Here is a list of previous topics: http://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

>1 SassyLassy: Thanks for kicking this off!

I've been tossing a few ideas around in my head, but haven't got anywhere very definite yet. To start with, here are three or four rough ideas:

- I'd like to see another European theme - if we want to take a country/region we haven't done yet, it looks as though it would have to be either Italy or "Mitteleuropa" (Poland/Hungary/Czech Republic and Slovakia). Both potentially very interesting.
- Alternatively, we could think about a pan-European theme with a specific subject - I'd be interested in something like "1989 and all that - Europe after the iron curtain", but there are lots of other possibilities.
- It's possibly going back over old ground a bit, but I think it might be fun to have a look at what writers from postcolonial countries have to say about their former colonisers - Latin American writers on Spain and the US, North African writers on France, South Asian and Caribbean writers on the UK, etc.
- We've only had one "women's writing" theme since we started these theme reads - maybe it's time for another?

Additionally, SassyLassy mentioned the possibility of reviving the "Classics in their own countries" idea at one point - I'd be quite interested in trying that again too. It gives the opportunity to share ideas about some older books that maybe aren't so well known outside their particular countries. (Some examples in this recent Guardian article: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/nov/26/tales-of-the-unexpected-10-literar...
We could do that either as an additional theme throughout the year, as we did last time, or as one of the quarterly themes.

>2 thorold: Feeling terribly poorly read, I must confess I have not read any of those books! I'm now contemplating correcting that. Thanks for the link and the suggestions.

>3 SassyLassy: I’ve only read Kater Murr (every bit as much fun as it sounds) and parts of the Sarashina diary (which I couldn’t really get the hang of).

I know these have been done, but the Caribbean, Iberian peninsula, and war zones are all interesting to me, and I have plenty of things on my shelves.

I like all of Thorold's suggestions, especially his and SassyLassy's "Classics in their own countries" theme. I'd also be interested in BLBera's "War zone" theme.
How about speculative fiction (SF, fantasy, dystopic fiction, etc.) originally written in a language other than English? Or if that's too restrictive, genre fiction (spec fic, mysteries, horror, etc.) originally written in a language other than English?
Also, 2019 is the UN International Year of Indigenous Languages: https://en.iyil2019.org/. There might be a theme in there, but I don't know how to frame it constructively. There isn't a lot of literature available in dying, indigenous languages, but it might be possible to widen the scope slightly?

>6 Dilara86: Another excellent link. Widening the scope slightly might include dead languages. Not all are necessarily indigenous, but at least the idea of dying languages would be preserved.

From another part of the forest, other current work being done on dead languages: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as-it-happens-thursday-edition-1.4925497/a-...

>5 BLBera: Just checked the dates for those previous themes. The Caribbean was quite recent, 2016 first quarter, the Iberian Peninsula was 2015, second quarter, and War and Regions in Conflict was one of the first themes, in 2011, second quarter. It might be too soon to repeat the first two, but War was certainly some time ago. They could certainly go into the voting mix though.

Just a reminder that any previous theme or topic thread can be added to at any time, even if the book in question is there already. The more discussion there is, the better an idea it gives of that theme or part of the world. It also makes the thread work as a great suggestion list for others.

>7 SassyLassy: Widening the scope slightly might include dead languages
Great idea and I loved the link! I never thought I'd see an academic's sweded film shot in Ancient Babylonian... The world is a wondrous place!

Bumping this thread to encourage others to chime in!

Rebump!

Perhaps we need to explore the zero option as well - a year-long "follow your nose around the world" theme-read? :-)

>10 thorold: Ooh, that gave me an idea. Could we take a group, like the Romans for example, and follow their paths through the world? And it would work for any migratory group.

>11 BLBera: Hmm...
Maybe not Romans, because if you take it literally they didn’t really go anywhere much after the middle of the first millennium, and if you don’t take it quite literally you could mean Greeks, or Germans, or non-Muslims, or Catholics, or Gypsies, or Romanians... or any of the thousand and one other groups that have been called “Romans” by themselves or by someone else.

But I can see some sort of large-scale diaspora theme working. There are plenty of candidates: People from South Asia, Jews, the Irish, the Scots, West Africans, Armenians, Cantonese, ... - loads of possibilities.

>9 Dilara86: and >10 thorold: Thanks for the bump-up. That is an interesting idea of "diaspora" reading.

I like the suggestion of doing a woman-related theme again. Also genre fiction of some kind; I suspect that to keep it from being too broad and to lend a bit more coherence to the discussion that it might be useful to limit this to one genre cluster (SFF, mystery/thriller, historical fiction).

I would also be interested in a topic like "aging".

For regional themes, perhaps something like "the Mediterranean world"; this would provide an interesting mix of European countries (Spain, Italy, Greece) and northern African/Middle-Eastern (Tunisia, Morocco, Libya, Egypt, Turkey). There has been some recent historical scholarship arguing for the relevance of thinking about the sea not as a boundary between regions, but as a space connecting peoples, e.g. David Abulafia, The Great Sea.

Exclaves/non-contiguous territories might offer another intriguing topic. There are a surprising number of these that still exist today (French Guiana, Kaliningrad, Gibralter, Ceuta, the Azores, Falkland Islands, Puerto Rico...) and some historically significant ones (East Prussia), although I suspect there might be practical difficulties in terms of finding books that apply, since most of these are tiny island nations.

>14 spiphany: All of those sound good! I can think of a whole bunch of interesting books for East Prussia and quite a few for the Faroes, just for a start... And I’m probably just about the only active RG member who’s not a science fiction reader, so I’m sure there would be traction in that, even though it wouldn’t appeal much to me.

The voting thread is now up here: https://www.librarything.com/topic/301039

Please note it is a voting thread only. If you have comments, please post them on this thread.

I'm not sure I understood this theme: "Your own Journey through Foreign Lands?", does that just mean discussing whatever we happen to be reading that's not from our native country?

>17 alvaret: It may be my poor naming of it, but basically as I understand the suggestion, it is deciding where you would like to go, and reading from that country, then the next and the next. For instance, I would really like to go to Norway, so Norwegian authors would be part of my trip around the world. However, when I read a book from a part of the world that isn't on my imaginary journey, I would post it on the page relating to that country - see below.

For reading from other countries than your own, you can still post on past threads. The list is here on the group home page: https://www.librarything.com/groups/readinggloballyficti

Hope this helps

>18 SassyLassy: Ah, that makes sense, I thought that the idea as I interpreted it sounded way too broad considering all those other options.

In response to cindydavid4 and I am sure others who have wondered, this could be set up as a series of different participants' individual threads, so we could see where each of us is travelling, and with any luck, why those destinations were chosen. Others could then add to the thread as a conversation, the same way as is done in many other groups. Nothing would be lost in terms of conversations, and there could be more opportunities to explore our reading outside the quarterly themes.

Thanks - it would be fun to see what everyone chooses!