Well if everyone else has a 2011 Reading Challenge....here's Nic's

As many of my regular customers know (and anyone else could figure out from the rather sporadic 2010 blog entries) my bid to read classics that everyone would have assumed a bookshop owner had already read lost all its momentum in mid-March at the hands of Wuthering Heights. Suffice to say, I was not a fan.

This year I've gone for a reading challenge that has more flexibility in terms of book type, so I'll be able to keep on top of lots of new writing as well as digging out lost gems.

I'm going to gradually read my way around the world starting in Louisiana

- the setting for the book that I've just finished and which I blogged about yesterday Tim Gautreaux's "The Missing". Not too many fixed rules but I'll try and move from one country to the next (and state-to-state in the U.S.) without leapfrogging any. The books should either be about a given country, set there or by an author from there.

Here's my first chunk of reading map.

I'll fill the states in as I go. I might pootle around in the U.S. a bit to begin with because "small-town American" fiction and travel writing is my big thing and I have spent the last few years purposefully diversifying ... and I'm in the mood to go back to it. I might also throw in a few broader travelogues in between specific locations...to inspire me on my reading trip.

I'm headed West..any great Texan recommendations?