See here for methodology. I am back to running through countries in population order, after diverting to right past wrongs for the last four weeks. I generally exclude books not actually set in the specific country, this time Argentina, but I’ve bent that a bit here.
Title | Author | GR raters | LT owners |
Tender Is the Flesh | Agustina Bazterrica | 266,053 | 2,493 |
The Tunnel | Ernesto Sabato | 80,875 | 2,332 |
In Patagonia | Bruce Chatwin | 17,632 | 3,361 |
Fever Dream | Samanta Schweblin | 43,560 | 1,329 |
Things We Lost in the Fire | Mariana Enríquez | 47,865 | 1,038 |
Kiss of the Spider Woman | Manuel Puig | 19,769 | 2,311 |
Our Share of Night | Mariana Enríquez | 44,504 | 905 |
The Dangers of Smoking in Bed | Mariana Enríquez | 49,004 | 732 |
To my dismay, I have nonetheless excluded all of the Jorge Luis Borges short story collections, Ficciones, Labyrinths, the Collected Fiction and The Aleph and Other Stories, because a lot less than 50% of each of them is not clearly set in Argentina, and around half of each of them are in fact clearly set elsewhere.
The majority of Hopscotch, by Julio Cortázar, is set in Paris although there’s a substantial chunk in Argentina at the end. And The Invention of Morel, by Adolfo Bioy Casares, is set on a fictional island which is clearly distinguished from Argentina. Most of these were far far ahead of the rest on LibraryThing, apart from The Invention of Morel (though even that has 2,654 LibraryThing owners).
My winning novel, Tender Is the Flesh, has as many raters on Goodreads as the next four put together but is only second on LibraryThing. It is not explicitly set in Argentina, but none of its many reviewers seem to think that it is set anywhere else, so I am allowing it the top spot. I note with great interest that another Argentinian woman writer, Mariana Enriquez, also shows a big imbalance between the two website, with around fifty times more raters on Goodreads than owners on LibraryThing. (The normal ratio is more like 20:1.) The two Enriquez books that I have not read also appear to be short story collections, but unlike Borges most of them appear to be set in Argentina.
Next up are Afghanistan and Yemen. I don’t think Afghanistan is going to surprise me.