It's often said that you can tell a lot about a person
by the looking at what's on their bookshelves.
What do my bookshelves say about me?
Well, when I asked myself this question a few years ago,
I made an alarming discovery.
I'd always thought of myself as a fairly, cultured, cosmopolitan
sort of person.
But my bookshelves told a rather different story.
Pretty much all the titles on them
were by British of North American authors,
and there was almost nothing in translation.
Discovering this massive, cultural blind spot
came as quite a shock.
And when I thought about it, it seemed like a real shame.
I knew there had to be lots of amazing stories out there
by writers working in languages other than English.
And it seemed really sad to think that my reading habits
meant that I would probably never encounter them.
So, I decided to prescribe myself
an intensive course in global reading.
2012 was set to be a very international year for the UK,
it was the year of the London Olympics.
And so I decided to use it as my timeframe
to try to read a novel, short story collection,
or memoir from every country in the world.
And so I did,
and it was very exciting
and I learned some remarkable things
and made some wonderful connections that I want to share with you today.
But it started with some practical problems.
After I worked out which of the many different lists of countries in the world
to use for my project,
I ended up going with the list of UN-recognized nations,
to which I added Taiwan,
which gave me a total of 196 countries.
And after I'd worked out how to fit reading and blogging
about, roughly, four books a week
around working five days a week,
I then had to face up to the fact that I might not be able
to get books in English from every country.
Only around 4.5 percent of the literary works
published each year in the UK are translations,
and the figures are similar for much of the English-speaking world.
Although, the proportion of translated books
published in other countries is a lot higher.
4.5 percent is tiny enough to start with,
but what that figure doesn't tell you
is that many of those books
will come from countries with strong publishing networks
and lots of industry professionals trying to go out and sell those titles
to English-language publishers.
So, for example,