Books

I read a lot of books. 100+ a year. You can see all my reviews on Goodreads – and my ten latest reads at the buttom of this page.

Reading the World

I decided to broaden my reading horizons, I plotted on a map, Africa was all unread lands, one thing led to another, and well… Here is my world reading so far:

I know a lot of people are Reading the World in a year, but that just seems stressfull to me, boring duty and leaves you with reading the one book from a country that you can get your hands on – and the one everybody else read (which is sometimes some white guys travel memoirs of the place). That is not for me, I detest reading books because I have to, but otherwise enjoy my reading, so I am doing it at any speed it may or may not happen.
I read Africa from 2016 to 2025 – it is 55 nations, so more than a forth of the world’s states and definitely more than a third if we agree that there are some very small island nations and territories with very spares amounts of books on the full list.
I am currently catching up on South America and those last few Eurpean countries I am missing

Latest reads & reviews

Anetq’s bookshelf: read

Wife of the Gods

by Kwei Quartey

Crime Fiction in Ghana – from the Modern city of Accra to the bush town of his mother’s family, Darko is hunting the murderer of AIDS-activist and doctor-to-be Grace. It is an interesting setup and has the local spice of our detective an…

Svaner bliver ikke skilt

by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir

En sær historie ligesom hendes andre. Ikke helt så fængende som de andre to jeg har læst (Ar & Stiklingen) måske fordi jeg savner mere plot og det drive en tur gennem Europa giver. Her er heltinden efterladt alene i hjemmet med små tvill…

Ivalu

by Morten Dürr

Grønland er flot. Og fucked up. Og hvad så. Tja det er der i hvert fald ingen svar på. Det savner jeg nok.

The Blind Kingdom

by Véronique Tadjo

This is a tough book to get into – composed of prose pieces that are related but often not connected. There is an allegory in the Kingdom of the Blind – the blind obviously being privileged over the slum-dwellers (in a style that reminds…

Hver morgen kryber jeg op fra havet

by Frøydis Sollid Simonsen

Charmerende skæv og rigtig. Og jeg har det fx. hver morgen som første side: Om morgenen – tidligt, stadig i mørke – vågner jeg og er en amøbe. Forsvinder i søvnen igen til vækkeuret ringer. Jeg går gennem alle udviklingens stadier, hver…

Men of the South

by Zukiswa Wanner

I wanted to take a peek at the beginning of this, and ended up just reading it all… An interesting story of three men and the woman in their lives – of being a real man in today’s South Africa and how options are limited by society, fe…

Stiklingen

by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir

I am really enjoying the equal humor and depth of Olafdóttirs novels. This is my second (I really enjoyed the Nordic Council Prize winner: Ar (scars?) as well) and there are similarities: we kick off with a person in crisis, going on the…

The Thing Around Your Neck

by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

An amazing collection of stories – and they are just that: Proper stories, not those odd unsatisfying half-stories that are sometimes the hallmark of short story collections. All of these could be expanded into novels, but function well …

California Dreamin’: Cass Elliot Before the Mamas & the Papas

by Pénélope Bagieu

How Ellen turned into Mama Cass…

Distant View of a Minaret and Other Stories

by Alifa Rifaat

Stories of women, their lives and deaths – punctuated by the calls to prayer by the muezzin. Sharing the lives of a variety of muslim women, with a traditional mindset. Many of these the stories of older to elderly women – so not much of…