0:00:01.000,0:00:03.903
It's often said that you can tell[br]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[br]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[br]as a fairly cultured,

0:00:20.159,0:00:22.584
cosmopolitan sort of person.

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But my bookshelves told[br]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[br]nothing in translation.

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Discovering this massive,[br]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,[br]it seemed like a real shame.

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I knew there had to be lots[br]of amazing stories out there

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by writers working in languages[br]other than English.

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And it seemed really sad to think[br]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

0:00:59.325,0:01:01.943
an intensive course of global reading.

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2012 was set to be a very[br]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[br]as my time frame

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to try to read a novel,[br]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[br]practical problems.

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After I'd worked out which of the many[br]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[br]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[br]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[br]that I might even not be able

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to get books in English[br]from every country.

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Only around 4.5 percent[br]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[br]of the English-speaking world.

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Although, the proportion[br]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[br]will come from countries

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with strong publishing networks

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and lots of industry professionals[br]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[br]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[br]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[br]actually quite a lot of nations

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that may have little or even no[br]commercially available literature

0:03:01.286,0:03:02.439
in English.

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Their books remain invisible to readers

0:03:06.164,0:03:09.002
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[br]know where to start.

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Having spent my life reading[br]almost exclusively British

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and North American books,

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

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and choosing them from much[br]of the rest of the world.

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I couldn't tell you how to source[br]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 --

0:03:36.742,0:03:40.065
I was a clueless literary xenophobe.

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So how on earth was I[br]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[br]what I might read

0:04:01.618,0:04:03.302
from other parts of the planet.

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Now, I had no idea whether[br]anyone would be interested,

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but within a few hours[br]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[br]called Rafidah in Kuala Lumpur.

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She said she loved[br]the sound of my project,

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could she go to her local[br]English-language bookshop

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and choose my Malaysian book[br]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[br]not one, but two books --

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Rafidah's choice from Malaysia,

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and a book from Singapore[br]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

0:05:02.489,0:05:04.414
would go to such lengths to help someone

0:05:04.438,0:05:06.497
she would probably never meet.

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

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Time and again, people went[br]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[br]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[br]to read the world,

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if you want to encounter it[br]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[br]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,[br]came through a conversation

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I had with the Panama Canal on Twitter.

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Yes, the Panama Canal[br]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[br]and get hold of the work

0:06:01.532,0:06:04.111
of the Panamanian author[br]Juan David Morgan.

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

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asking if any of his[br]Spanish-language novels

0:06:09.948,0:06:11.938
had been translated into English.

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And he said that nothing[br]had been published,

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but he did have an unpublished translation

0:06:17.341,0:06:19.325
of his novel "The Golden Horse."

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He emailed this to me,

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allowing me to become[br]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

0:06:29.603,0:06:31.593
to share his work with me in this way.

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From Sweden to Palau,

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writers and translators[br]sent me self-published books

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and unpublished manuscripts of books

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that hadn't been picked[br]up by Anglophone publishers

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or that were no longer available,

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giving me privileged glimpses[br]of some remarkable imaginary worlds.

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I read, for example,

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about the Southern African king[br]Ngungunhane, who led the resistance

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against the Portuguese[br]in the 19th century;

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and about marriage rituals[br]in a remote village

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on the shores of the Caspian sea[br]in Turkmenistan.

0:07:06.524,0:07:10.133
I met Kuwait's answer to Bridget Jones.

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(Laughter)

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And I read about an orgy[br]in a tree in Angola.

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But perhaps the most amazing example

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of the lengths that people[br]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[br]from the tiny, Portuguese-speaking

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African island nation[br]of São Tomé and Príncipe.

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

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

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it seemed as though[br]the only option left to me

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

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Now, I was really dubious

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whether anyone was going[br]to want to help with this,

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and give up their time[br]for something like that.

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

0:08:01.812,0:08:03.766
for Portuguese speakers,

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I had more people than I could[br]involve in the project,

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including Margaret Jull Costa,[br]a leader in her field,

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who has translated the work[br]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[br]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[br]to each of my volunteers.

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

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stuck to their word, sent[br]their translations back to me,

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

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

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my not knowing and being open[br]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[br]to learn something new

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and discover a new collection of stories,

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but also to bring together[br]a group of people

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and facilitate a joint creative endeavor.

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My weakness had become[br]the project's strength.

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

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As those who enjoy reading will know,

0:09:19.720,0:09:23.500
books have an extraordinary power[br]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,

0:09:27.558,0:09:29.783
you look at the world[br]through different eyes.

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That can be an uncomfortable experience,

0:09:32.877,0:09:34.649
particularly if you're reading a book

0:09:34.673,0:09:38.097
from a culture that may have quite[br]different values to your own.

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But it can also be really enlightening.

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Wrestling with unfamiliar ideas[br]can help clarify your own thinking.

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And it can also show up blind spots

0:09:47.933,0:09:50.575
in the way you might have[br]been looking at the world.

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

0:09:53.978,0:09:55.664
I'd grown up with, for example,

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

0:09:58.749,0:10:01.561
compared to the richness[br]that the world has to offer.

0:10:02.886,0:10:05.048
And as the pages turned,

0:10:05.072,0:10:07.538
something else started to happen, too.

0:10:08.150,0:10:09.301
Little by little,

0:10:09.325,0:10:13.610
that long list of countries that[br]I'd started the year with, changed

0:10:13.634,0:10:17.993
from a rather dry, academic[br]register of place names

0:10:18.017,0:10:20.698
into living, breathing entities.

0:10:21.475,0:10:24.198
Now, I don't want to suggest[br]that it's at all possible

0:10:24.222,0:10:28.428
to get a rounded picture of a country[br]simply by reading one book.

0:10:29.010,0:10:32.599
But cumulatively, the stories[br]I read that year

0:10:32.623,0:10:35.683
made me more alive than ever before

0:10:35.707,0:10:41.781
to the richness, diversity and complexity[br]of our remarkable planet.

0:10:42.654,0:10:44.647
It was as though the world's stories

0:10:44.671,0:10:48.571
and the people who'd gone[br]to such lengths to help me read them

0:10:48.595,0:10:50.500
had made it real to me.

0:10:52.086,0:10:54.621
These days, when I look at my bookshelves

0:10:54.645,0:10:57.770
or consider the works on my e-reader,

0:10:57.794,0:10:59.909
they tell a rather different story.

0:11:00.649,0:11:03.995
It's the story of the power[br]books have to connect us

0:11:04.019,0:11:08.764
across political, geographical,[br]cultural, social, religious divides.

0:11:09.422,0:11:13.564
It's the tale of the potential[br]human beings have to work together.

0:11:14.320,0:11:15.662
And, it's testament

0:11:15.686,0:11:20.309
to the extraordinary times we live[br]in, where, thanks to the Internet,

0:11:20.333,0:11:22.250
it's easier than ever before

0:11:22.274,0:11:26.703
for a stranger to share a story,[br]a worldview, a book

0:11:26.727,0:11:30.520
with someone she may never meet,[br]on the other side of the planet.

0:11:31.595,0:11:34.693
I hope it's a story I'm reading[br]for many years to come.

0:11:35.074,0:11:37.923
And I hope many more people will join me.

0:11:37.947,0:11:40.561
If we all read more widely,[br]there'd be more incentive

0:11:40.585,0:11:43.132
for publishers to translate more books,

0:11:43.156,0:11:45.095
and we would all be richer for that.

0:11:45.713,0:11:46.870
Thank you.

0:11:46.894,0:11:50.628
(Applause)