Theme: broadening your horizon

There is a huge number of books on the market that we will never be able to read, simply because we don’t understand the language they were written in. Luckily, translated books exist, allowing us to discover some of the hidden gems that were published in other countries. While nowadays there is a wide variety of books present on social media and in bookstores, those were mainly written by authors from the English speaking world and there are so many perspectives and topics that are not featured in those books.

This month’s task aims to help you (and me…) discover those perspeectives and topics we have yet to encounter.

Task: This month, read at least one translated book, preferably one that is less popular.

If you are able to, you could also try to read a book written in a foreign language in its original version. That way you can avoid certain meanings or jokes being lost in translation. Of course, this is only possible if you can speak another language but if you do, it is well worth it. For me, it is one of the main reasons I read in English because most of the books I read were originally written in English and the original language is always better than the translation, even if the translation is a good one. Some phrases simply cannot be translated.

Some suggestions:

I have searched Google for some YA novels that have been translated into the English language and that you might want to check out for this challenge. So far, I haven’t read any of those yet, so I can’t tell you which I would recommend but they all sound amazing.

Disclaimer: The descriptions are the blurbs of the books. Since I haven’t read those books (yet), I couldn’t write my own summary. The genre of the books are based on the content of the blurb, I cannot guarantee that these are accurate. In case you notice any false information, please tell me so I can correct it!

My goals for this month:

I am actually very intrigued by all of the books I have found during my research for this challenge and my TBR is not thankful for it… But seeing as I still have plenty of unread books at home, I have decided to only tackle one of those books this month and keep the others on my TBR for the months to come. So far, I haven’t quite decided which one it is going to be but I am leaning towards either “Abigail” or “Wondrous Journeys in Strange Lands” since those two are the ones that interest me the most. I am so glad that I took the time to find some new books for this challenge (I did have some more popular books in mind when creating this challenge, such as the Mirror Visitor series, which was translated from French) because I had never heard about any of the books on this list before and I am so glad I discovered them! Hopefully they are just as good as they seem to be.

I will definitely tell you my thoughts on the books as soon as I have read them!

I hope you enjoy this challenge! I would love to hear which books you want to tackle, so feel free to comment below. Recommendations that fit the challenge are also always welcome!