WEBVTT

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

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by 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,

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cosmopolitan 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 or North American authors,

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and there was almost
nothing in translation.

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Discovering this massive,
cultural blind spot in my reading

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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 meant

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I would probably never encounter them.

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So, I decided to prescribe myself

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an intensive course of 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 time frame

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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

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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'd 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 even 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 published

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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 published

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in many 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
will come from countries

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with strong publishing networks

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and lots of industry professionals
primed 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 are translated from French

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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 that there are
actually quite a lot of nations

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that may have little or even no
commercially available literature

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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 British

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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, I registered my blog,

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ayearofreadingtheworld.com,

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and I 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 me posting that 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,

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and a few weeks later,

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a package arrived containing
not one, but two books --

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Rafidah's choice from Malaysia,

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and a book from Singapore
that she had also picked out for me.

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Now, at the time, I was amazed

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that a stranger more than 6,000 miles away

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would go to such lengths to help someone

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she would probably never meet.

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But Rafidah's kindness proved
to be the pattern for that year.

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Time and again, people went
out of their way to help me.

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Some took on research on my behalf,

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and others made detours
on holidays and business trips

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to go to bookshops for me.

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It turns out, if you want
to read the world,

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if you want to encounter it
with an open mind,

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the world will help you.

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When it came to countries

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with little or no commercially
available literature in English,

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people went further still.

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Books often came from surprising sources.

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My Panamanian read, for example,
came through a conversation

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I had with the Panama Canal on Twitter.

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Yes, the Panama Canal
has a Twitter account.

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And when I tweeted at it about my project,

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it suggested that I might like to try
and get hold of the work

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of the Panamanian author
Juan David Morgan.

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I found Morgan's website
and I sent him a message,

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asking if any of his
Spanish-language novels

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had been translated into English.

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And he said that nothing
had been published,

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but he did have an unpublished translation

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of his novel "The Golden Horse."

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He emailed this to me,

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allowing me to become
one of the first people ever

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to read that book in English.

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Morgan was by no means the only wordsmith

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to share his work with me in this way.

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From Sweden to Palau,

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writers and translators
sent me self-published books

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and unpublished manuscripts of books

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that hadn't been picked
up by Anglophone publishers

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or that were no longer available,

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giving me privileged glimpses
of some remarkable imaginary worlds.

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I read, for example,

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about the Southern African king
Ngungunhane, who led the resistance

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against the Portuguese
in the 19th century;

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and about marriage rituals
in a remote village

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on the shores of the Caspian sea
in Turkmenistan.

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I met Kuwait's answer to Bridget Jones.

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(Laughter)

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And I read about an orgy
in a tree in Angola.

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But perhaps the most amazing example

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of the lengths that people
were prepared to go to

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to help me read the world,

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came towards the end of my quest,

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when I tried to get hold of a book
from the tiny, Portuguese-speaking

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African island nation
of São Tomé and Príncipe.

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Now, having spent several months
trying everything I could think of to find

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a book that had been translated
into English from the nation,

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it seemed as though
the only option left to me

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was to see if I could get something
translated for me from scratch.

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Now, I was really dubious

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whether anyone was going
to want to help with this,

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and give up their time
for something like that.

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But, within a week of me putting
a call out on Twitter and Facebook

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for Portuguese speakers,

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I had more people than I could
involve in the project,

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including Margaret Jull Costa,
a leader in her field,

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who has translated the work
of Nobel Prize winner José Saramago.

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With my nine volunteers in place,

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I managed to find a book
by a São Toméan author

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that I could buy enough copies of online.

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Here's one of them.

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And I sent a copy out
to each of my volunteers.

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They all took on a couple
of short stories from this collection,

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stuck to their word, sent
their translations back to me,

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and within six weeks,
I had the entire book to read.

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In that case, as I found so often
during my year of reading the world,

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my not knowing and being open
about my limitations

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had become a big opportunity.

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When it came to São Tomé and Príncipe,

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it was a chance not only
to learn something new

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and discover a new collection of stories,

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but also to bring together
a group of people

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and facilitate a joint creative endeavor.

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My weakness had become
the project's strength.

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The books I read that year
opened my eyes to many things.

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As those who enjoy reading will know,

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books have an extraordinary power
to take you out of yourself

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and into someone else's mindset,

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so that, for a while at least,

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you look at the world
through different eyes.

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That can be an uncomfortable experience,

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particularly if you're reading a book

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from a culture that may have quite
different values to your own.

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But it can also be really enlightening.

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Wrestling with unfamiliar ideas
can help clarify your own thinking.

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And it can also show up blind spots

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in the way you might have
been looking at the world.

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When I looked back at much
of the English-language literature

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I'd grown up with, for example,

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I began to see how narrow a lot of it was,

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compared to the richness
that the world has to offer.

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And as the pages turned,

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something else started to happen, too.

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Little by little,

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that long list of countries that
I'd started the year with, changed

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from a rather dry, academic
register of place names

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into living, breathing entities.

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Now, I don't want to suggest
that it's at all possible

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to get a rounded picture of a country
simply by reading one book.

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But cumulatively, the stories
I read that year

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made me more alive than ever before

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to the richness, diversity and complexity
of our remarkable planet.

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It was as though the world's stories

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and the people who'd gone
to such lengths to help me read them

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had made it real to me.

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These days, when I look at my bookshelves

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or consider the works on my e-reader,

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they tell a rather different story.

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It's the story of the power
books have to connect us

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across political, geographical,
cultural, social, religious divides.

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It's the tale of the potential
human beings have to work together.

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And, it's testament

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to the extraordinary times we live
in, where, thanks to the Internet,

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it's easier than ever before

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for a stranger to share a story,
a worldview, a book

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with someone she may never meet,
on the other side of the planet.

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I hope it's a story I'm reading
for many years to come.

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And I hope many more people will join me.

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If we all read more widely,
there'd be more incentive

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for publishers to translate more books,

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and we would all be richer for that.

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Thank you.

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(Applause)