Choosing these books

Some of the books were what we might call "books of necessity" rather than "books of choice." For example, there's not a lot for Palau, so I used a government report (however, I've since found a Palau narrative that I'll read and substitute one of these days). For Comoros, I had to read in French, which took a good long time since I have only a year of high school French. I started with some books I'd already read and admired, though I substituted others for many of those countries once I got started.

I used this group and a couple of similar ones to find recommendations for countries I wasn't familiar with. I also spent many hours searching on Amazon and Wikipedia. Some were books that could overlap with other challenges or topic and genre pursuits--that's why there's a set of "I did time in a foreign prison" memoirs, and also a certain amount of Central American poetry.

WorldCat is helpful for getting books from interlibrary loan. If you have some discretionary cash, here are the bookstores I used:

Amazon
www.amazon.com and Amazon Marketplace
www.amazon.ca
www.amazon.fr
www.amazon.co.uk

Asia Books
www.asiabooks.com

The Book Depository
www.bookdepository.com

Daedalus Books and Music
www.daedalusbooks.com

The Globe Corner Book Stores
http://www.globecorner.com

The Harvard Coop
http://harvardcoopbooks.bncollege.com

IPS Publications
ipsbooks.usp.ac.fj

Monument Books
http://www.monument-books.com

Powell's Books
www.powells.com

Schoenhof's Foreign Books
www.schoenhofs.com

Smith Family Bookstore
http://smithfambooks.qwestoffice.net/...

University Book Centre, University of the South Pacific
www.uspbookcentre.com

International airport book stores, gifts from family and friends, the previous book stores of my life (such as Borders, Brown University Bookstore, College Hill Books, etc.)

I want to praise University Book Centre, University of the South Pacific particularly. They're a great mail order source for Oceania. I was fortunate to have a day in Suva, Fiji on a cruise. Instead of snorkeling or what have you, my partner and I took a long, hot walk from the wharf to this bookstore and spent far too little time perusing their wonderful offerings, including interesting (to me) monographs on topics like domestic violence reduction training in Vanuatu. Monument Books in Cambodia has a good assortment of books for Southeast Asia. There's an increasing number of self-published accounts in English of events like the invasion of Kuwait, or teaching internationally. While they're often not well-written, I enjoy them as unmediated, unedited narratives.

The blog "A Year of Reading the World" at http://ayearofreadingtheworld.com/thelist/ is a good source of ideas. I found it too late, but it was fun to compare our choices.