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, although well over 100 books
are translated from French and published in the UK each year,
most of them will come from countries like France or Switzerland.
French-speaking Africa, on the other hand,
will rarely ever get a look in.
The upshot is there are actually quite a lot of nations
that may have little or even no
commercially available literature in English.
Their books remain invisible to readers
of the world's most published language.
But when it came to reading the world,
the biggest challenge of all, for me,
was that fact that I didn't know where to start.
Having spent my life reading almost exclusively
British and North American books,
I had no idea how to go about sourcing and finding stories
and choosing them from much of the rest of the world.
I couldn't tell you how to source a story from Swaziland,
I wouldn't know a good novel from Namibia.
There was no hiding it,
I was a clueless literary xenophobe.
So how on earth was I going to read the world?
I was going to have to ask for help.
So in October 2011, ayearofreadingtheworld.com,
and posted a short appeal online.
I explained who I was,
how narrow my reading had been,
and I asked anyone who cared to
to leave a message suggesting what I might read
from other parts of the planet.
Now, I had no idea whether anyone would be interested,
but within a few hours of posting my appeal online,
people started to get in touch.
At first, it was friends and colleagues.
Then it was friends of friends.
And pretty soon, it was strangers.
Four days after I put that appeal online,
I got a message from a woman called Rafidah in Kuala Lumpur.
She said she loved the sound of my project,
could she go to her local English-language bookshop
and choose my Malaysian book and post it to me.
I accepted enthusiastically