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It's often said that you can tell
a lot about a person

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by the looking at what's 
on their bookshelves.

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What do my bookshelves
say about me?

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Well, when I asked myself
this question a few years ago,

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I made an alarming discovery.

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I'd always thought of myself
as a fairly, cultured, cosmopolitan

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sort of person.

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But my bookshelves told 
a rather different story.

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Pretty much all the titles on them

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were by British of North American authors,

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and there was almost nothing
in translation.

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Discovering this massive, 
cultural blind spot


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came as quite a shock.

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And when I thought about it,
it seemed like a real shame.

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I knew there had to be
lots of amazing stories out there

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by writers working in languages
other than English.

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And it seemed really sad to think
that my reading habits

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meant that I would probably
never encounter them.

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So, I decided to prescribe myself


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an intensive course in global reading.

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2012 was set to be a very 
international year for the UK,

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it was the year of the London Olympics.

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And so I decided to use it
as my timeframe

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to try to read a novel, 
short story collection,

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or memoir from every country
in the world.

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And so I did,

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and it was very exciting


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and I learned some remarkable things

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and made some wonderful connections
that I want to share with you today.

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But it started with some 
practical problems.

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After I worked out which of the many
different lists of countries in the world

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to use for my project,

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I ended up going with the list
of UN-recognized nations,

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to which I added Taiwan,

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which gave me a total of 196 countries.

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And after I'd worked out
how to fit reading and blogging

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about, roughly, four books a week

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around working five days a week,

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I then had to face up to the fact
that I might not be able

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to get books in English 
from every country.

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Only around 4.5 percent
of the literary works

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published each year in the UK
are translations,

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and the figures are similar 
for much of the English-speaking world.

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Although, the proportion
of translated books

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published in other countries 
is a lot higher.

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4.5 percent is tiny enough
to start with,

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but what that figure doesn't tell you

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is that many of those books

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will come from countries
with strong publishing networks

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and lots of industry professionals
trying to go out and sell those titles

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to English-language publishers.

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So, for example, although
well over 100 books

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are translated from French
and published in the UK each year,

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most of them will come from countries
like France or Switzerland.

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French-speaking Africa, on the other hand,

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will rarely ever get a look in.

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The upshot is there are actually
quite a lot of nations

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that may have little or even no

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commercially available literature
in English.

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Their books remain invisible
to readers

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of the world's most published language.

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But when it came to reading the world,

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the biggest challenge of all, for me,

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was that fact that I didn't know
where to start.

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Having spent my life reading
almost exclusively

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British and North American books,

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I had no idea how to go about
sourcing and finding stories

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and choosing them from much
of the rest of the world.

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I couldn't tell you how to
source a story from Swaziland,

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I wouldn't know a good novel
from Namibia.

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There was no hiding it,

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I was a clueless 
literary xenophobe.

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So how on earth was I
going to read the world?

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I was going to have to ask for help.

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So in October 2011, 
ayearofreadingtheworld.com,

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and posted a short appeal online.

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I explained who I was,

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how narrow my reading had been,

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and I asked anyone who cared to

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to leave a message suggesting
what I might read

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from other parts of the planet.

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Now, I had no idea whether
anyone would be interested,

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but within a few hours
of posting my appeal online,

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people started to get in touch.

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At first, it was friends and colleagues.

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Then it was friends of friends.

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And pretty soon, it was strangers.

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Four days after I put that appeal online,

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I got a message from a woman
called Rafidah in Kuala Lumpur.

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She said she loved the sound
of my project,

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could she go to her local
English-language bookshop

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and choose my Malaysian book
and post it to me.

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I accepted enthusiastically