Second Monthly Review

A slow second month. I've only managed to read four books (I finished Achebe's today and will be posting on it tomorrow, so I've included it). I'm not really sure quite what happened this month; I suppose I've just been preoccupied with other things recently and reading has taken a back seat. I'm still pretty shocked I've only read four books...one a week! I've never read so little in my life! Here they are:

Journey In Blue by Stig Dalager (Denmark)
Reunion by Fred Uhlman (Germany)
Home And Exile by Chinua Achebe (Nigeria)
As The Crow Flies by Véronique Tadjo (Côte d'Ivoire)

It may have been slow but it's been a good month for quality reading. I honestly enjoyed all the books up there - Reunion had the most fantastic twist at the end, Journey In Blue was stylistically amazing, Home and Exile started me thinking about Africa and analysing visions of Africa, and As The Crow Flies was simply prose poetry. As you can see, I decided to move on from Europe after Uhlman and started reading African authors instead. I haven't really got into my African reading properly yet, perhaps because I've devoted less time to it. I'll make more time for reading from now on and I hope I'll enjoy African literature as much as I enjoyed my sampling of European literature. I got a real sense of some of the history of Europe from my reading last month, so it'll be interesting to see how my own vision and understanding of Africa develops. One book I tried to read and couldn't get into was The Book Of Disquiet by Fernando Passoa (Portugal). I think I had 'reader's block' or something, which was disappointing because I'd been looking forward to reading it for a while. On the plus side, it means that for Portugal I can read Sarramago's Blindness, which has been added to my TBR list after reading about it on another blog.