See here for methodology, though now I am restricting the table to books actually set in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Title | Author | Goodreads raters | LibraryThing owners |
The Poisonwood Bible | Barbara Kingsolver | 752,109 | 26,582 |
Heart of Darkness | Joseph Conrad | 519,316 | 23,867 |
Congo | Michael Crichton | 172,448 | 8,107 |
King Leopold’s Ghost | Adam Hochschild | 60,858 | 4841 |
A Bend in the River | V.S. Naipaul | 17,845 | 3218 |
Tintin in the Congo | Hergé | 10,964 | 1333 |
Blood River: A Journey to Africa’s Broken Heart | Tim Butcher | 11,489 | 952 |
A Burnt-Out Case | Graham Greene | 5,049 | 1,904 |
I was surprised by the fact that I had read half of these, though much less surprised that six of the top eight are by white men. Disqualified due to not being sufficiently set in the DR Congo are The Leopard, by Jo Nesbo; The Mission Song, by John le Carré; and The Dream of the Celt, by Mario Vargas Llosa. I was interested that books by two former colleagues, Gerard Prunier and Jason Stearns, were both bubbling under. The top book by an author who is actually from Congo is How Dare the Sun Rise: Memoirs of a War Child, by Sandra Uwiringiyimana.
Next up: Vietnam.
India | China | USA | Indonesia | Pakistan | Nigeria | Brazil (revisited) | Bangladesh (revisited) | Russia | Mexico | Japan | Philippines (revisited) | Ethiopia (revisited) | Egypt | DR Congo | Vietnam | Iran | Türkiye | Germany | France | Thailand | UK | Tanzania | South Africa | Italy | Myanmar | Kenya | Colombia | South Korea | Sudan | Uganda | Spain | Algeria | Iraq | Argentina | Afghanistan