This is such a cook, different book challenge I had to sign up. Click on the button above to join! 

7 Angles and Books to explore the world 

The challenge: to select and read seven books, each belonging to one of the following categories:
- the 7 countries with the most population

Challenge Guidelines: 

• This challenge will run from Jan 1, 2013 – Dec 31, 2013.
• Books can be any format (novel, non-fiction, poetry or story collection, anthology, as well as any phyisal format: print, ebook, audio)
• You are welcome to count these books towards any other challenges as well
• The sorting of the 7 lists is just a suggestion.
• When picking a country, the idea is to also pick an author from that country. If that turns out to be difficult, try to find an expat author who lived in the country for a while.
• In the next weeks, I will add some additional resources: links to book and author lists at Goodreads and Wikipedia, etc.
• I will put together an info / introduction blog post to each of the 7 lists, and also update it with the books read during the challenge, and suggested reads and links etc.
• Update: the first info post is now online global reading challenge -the 7 countries with the most population + more at the bottom of this post

Resources, lists, links: 
Here are the 7 country categories, with links to the global lists, and with the top 7 countries listed already. For each category, pick a country from the top 7 list, and then pick a book from that country. As reference, i mostly linked to the wiki-lists, as those often offer addditional search options.

1) The starting point:
A book from one of the 7 countries with the most population

• Link: List of countries by population
• Top 7: China, India, USA, Indonesia, Brazil, Pakistan, Nigeria

3) From high to old:
A book from one of the 7 oldest countries of the world

• It’s an own challenge to create a definite ranking of the oldest countries of the world, which makes this question interesting in its own way. Some references:About/Geography and here: Wiki-answers.
• Some of the oldest countries: Japan, China, San Marino, Egypt

4) From old to new:
 A book from one of the megacities of the world 

• Link: Megacity + list of megacities
• Top 7: Tokyo, Guangzhou, Jakarta, Seoul, Shanghai, Mexico City, Delhi

5) From megacity to migration:
 A book from one of the 7 countries with the most immigrants 

• Link: List of countries by foreign-born population
• Top 7: USA, Russia, Germany, Ukraine, France, Saudi Arabia, Canada