The 2014 Winter Olympics Reading Challenge is a personal challenge (but feel free to participate), the purpose of which is to encourage reading books from countries other than our own. I am keeping things simple by limiting the books to countries that won medals in the 2010 Winter Olympics, and the country can either be the setting of the book, the birth-place or country of residence of the author (more details are in the announcement post).

Books for the 2014 Winter Olympics Reading Challenge {Plan}

Below is the "preliminary" list of books I'll be reading for the challenge.

East Asia and The Pacific

• Australia - Graffiti Moon, Cath Crowley
  
• China - Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, Dai Sijie
  
• Japan - The Devotion of Suspect X, Keigo Higashino, Alexander O. Smith (Translator)
  
• South Korea - Lost Souls: Stories, Sunwon Hwang

Europe and Eurasia


• Austria - Beware of Pity by Stefan Zweig, Phyllis Blewitt (Translator), Trevor Blewitt (Translator)
  
• Belarus - Wave of Terror, Theodore Odrach
  
• Croatia - Radiant Days, Michael A. FitzGerald
  
• Czech Republic - Don't Mention the Wars, Tony Connelly
  
• Estonia - Purge, Sofi Oksanen
  
• Finland - Troll: A Love Story, Johanna Sinisalo
  
• France - Before There Was Mozart: The Story of Joseh Boulogne, Chevalier de Saint-George, Lesa Cline-Ransome, James E. Ransome (Illustrator)
  
• Germany - The 13 1/2 Lives of Captain Bluebear, Walter Moers
  
• Great Britain - The Yellow Room Conspiracy, Peter Dickinson
  
• Italy - Mistress of Rome, Kate Quinn
  
• Kazakhstan - Germline, T.C. McCarthy
  
• Latvia - Tales of the Amber Sea: Fairy Tales of the Peoples of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, Irina Zheleznova
  
• Netherlands - Girl with a Pearl Earring, Tracy Chevalier
  
• Norway - Hunger, Knut Hamsun
  
• Poland - The Street of Crocodiles, Bruno Schulz
  
• Russia - Graphite, Varlam Shalamov
  
• Slovakia - Stories of Hope and Spirit, Keding Dan
  
• Slovenia - Once Upon... 1001 Stories, Lila Prap or Forbidden Bread, Erica Johnson Debeljak
  
• Sweden - The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson
  
• Switzerland - Frankenstein, Mary Shelley

The Americas


• Canada - Anna Dressed in Blood, Kendare Blake
  
• United States - The Marriage Plot, Jeffrey Eugenides

If you have any suggestions of books from any of these countries, I would love to hear it, so leave a comment below.

(Photo Credit: leoglenn_g)