European Reading Challenge 2024

I sign up for this Challenge at the level of Five Star (Deluxe Entourage),but may go to six or seven. I won't compete for the Jet Setter Prize.

1/ The Desirable Alien at Home in Germany - Violet Hunt (1862 - 1942)

This is a fictionalized travel book from 1913, just before Wes Civ tried to take its own life. Hunt was later fictionalized herself by Ford Madox Ford, who based on her the characters of Florence Hurlbird Dowell in The Good Soldier and Sylvia Tietjens in the Parades End Tetralogy. Unstable, strange, and manipulative, both wives were less than faithful to their husbands John and Christopher. 

2/ Malaria: A Neglected Factor in the History of Greece and Rome - William Henry Samuel Jones (1876 - 1963)

Because I’ve been a long-time infectious disease buff, reading Defoe long before this blog and In the Wake of Plague in 2014.

3/ How the "Mastiffs" Went to Iceland - Anthony Trollope (1815 - 1882)

You'd think the author of 47 novels would have no time for travel but he took trips to the Mediterranean and the Middle East, to the West Indies and Central America, to North America, to Australia and New Zealand, to South Africa and, we see from this title, Iceland.

4/ Eothen, or Impressions of Travel brought Home from the East - Alexander William Kinglake (1809 - 1893)

Critics regard this as a classic of Victorian travel writing. Kinglake made his way through Turkey and then to Cairo in time of plague.   

5/ Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark - Mary Wollstonecraft (1759 - 1797)

Regency folks didn't often travel to these places, far away, cold, dark, impoverished.