Remember after September ended when I said that eventually I would have a month where I managed to read more than three books for the Project Read the World Challenge?
Well, I still haven't succeeded in that. It turns out that in both October and November, I only read one book for this project each month.
That's ok though. I have read plenty of other books. I've already reached my goal to read 100 books in 2020, so I can't complain.
November books for Project RW: 1
Total books: 13/195
The Books
North Korea - In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl's Journey to Freedom by Yeonmi Park
This book spent two months sitting on my desk. I checked it out from the library with good intentions, but I was afraid that the book would be too difficult emotionally for me to read. Yeonmi Park's story is a nonfiction account of the events that happened when she and her mother fled North Korea. There were parts of the story that were difficult to read, but it was worth reading.
It's so easy to get caught up in the relatively safe bubble of my own world. It's hard to imagine a society where most of the people are trapped in the way described in Park's account. On the one hand, I'd like to brush aside this knowledge because there isn't anything that I can do personally about it, but on the other hand, I don't want to be the kind of person who ignores things just because the facts make me feel uncomfortable or sad.
Sometimes you just have to sit with those uncomfortable things, so that's what I'm doing.
Slovenia - Alamut by Vladimir Bartol
I read this book in November, and it was another hard story to read. This time the story is fiction. Set during the 11th century in Persia, this book tells about "prophet" who controls a fortress and creates a fake paradise that he uses to show his followers what awaits them if they die fighting for his cause.
This novel is an allegory that was written about Italy under Mussolini's rule. I know very little about that period, so I was unable to understand the parallels. More recently people have compared the way that the prophet controls his followers to Osama bin Laden.
However, for me the novel stood out as showing the dangers that occur when those who are not religious use religion to manipulate others in order to gain power for themselves.
This is not a book that I plan on revisiting. It was sometimes hard to follow the shifts in narration, and I frequently had a difficult time figuring out what was happening. I keep running into the problem of just not having enough background knowledge while reading books from outside of my normal range, but I think that the only thing to do is just keep on reading.
What's Next
I do currently have two books check out of the library to read for December. Those two books are Miss Iceland by Audur Ava Olafsdottir and Willful Disregard by Lena Andersson. I also have two books waiting for me to pick them up from the library - Memoirs of Polar Bear by Yoko Tawanda and Moomin, Volume One by Tove Jansson.
I'd like to get all four of those books read by the end of December so that I can end 2020 well for this challenge. I know that I am not in a race to finish reading all 195 books by a particular date, but I'd like to feel like I am making a little more progress than I did in the previous few months.
Potentially, I might decide to choose one month in 2021 to read only books for this challenge to see how much that helps me move along, but then I might also run the risk of just not reading at all if I got stuck on a particular book.
Like always, if you have suggestions for what I should read next, leave a comment below or on Instagram.
Feel free to follow along on Instagram or on Goodreads for more frequent updates. If I start to get overwhelmed with updating here, I'm more likely to still keep updating on those two sites.
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