My year reading a book from every country in the world

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