^^We wish you all the best in getting better BelleZora. Take care.
@sun surfer: I am aware of how many countries there are and how long a journey that is. I've only gotten through 77 so far. I think most of my annoyance is Japan having its own category, Mexico not being part of North America and how little we look at African authors given that it is in only two categories with one including Western Asia. All that said, there really is no ideal for dividing this up.
Here is the list of countries so far which currently stands at a pretty respectable twenty and a
Map in Google Maps
Australia - 2
Kate Grenville
Geraldine Brooks
Austria - 1
Stefan Zweig
Canada - 2
Anne Michaels
John Hemming
China - 1
Jung Chang
Colombia - 1
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Egypt - 1
Naguib Mahfouz Egypt
France - 1
Henri Barbusse France
Germany - 1
Buddenbooks Germany
Ireland - 3
Colm Toibin
Frank O'Connor
George Bernard Shaw
Israel - 1
Amos Oz
Italy - 2
Alessandro Baricco
Dante
Japan - 2
Haruki Murakami
Yukio Mishima
Nigeria - 1
Chinua Achebe
Norway - 1
Henrik Ibsen
Philippines - 1
Jose Rizal
Poland - 1
Joseph Conrad
Russia - 3
Yevgeny Zamyatin
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Mikhail Bulgakov
Turkey - 1
Orhan Pamuk
United Kingdom - 14
Evelyn Waugh
G K Chesterton
Vera Brittain
Patrick Leigh Fermor
Lytton Strachey
Anthony Trollope
Siegfried Sassoon
David Mitchell
Jane Austen
George Eliot
Kazuo Ishiguro
Saki
E M Forster
Charles Dickens
United States - 9
E L Doctorow
T S Eliot
Willa Cather
James Welch
Ernest Hemingway
Dawn Powell
Walt Whitman
Laura Hillebrand
Vladimir Nabokov
And the breakdown reinforces what I think in that having the following very tiny groupings is pointless to us discovering anything else about the world:
United Kingdom and Ireland
United States and Canada (although the fact I choose Canada for my month helped Canada)
Japan
I also think lumping Northern Africa in with Western Europe is unjust to Africa. But that is me.
And obviously some authors are difficult to categorize. I put Nabokov in the United States despite the fact he spent all of his formative years in Russia and Europe (to me he is not a North American writer even if he wrote in English) and I put Conrad in Poland, but he could very well be United Kingdom. If anyone objects I can move them around.