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

and a few weeks later,

a package arrived that contained
not one, but two books.

Rafidah's choice from Malaysia

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

Now, at the time, I was amazed that
a stranger,

more than 6,000 miles away,

would go through to such lengths

to help someone that she
would probably never meet.

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

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

Some took on research on my behalf,

and others made detours on holidays
and business trips

to go to bookshops for me.

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

if you want to encounter it
with an open mind,

the world will help you.

When it came to countries with 
little to no

commercially available 
literature in English,

people went further still.

Books often came from surprising sources.

My Panamanian read, for example,
came through

a conversation I had with 
the Panama Canal on Twitter.

Yes, the Panama Canal
has a twitter account.

And when I tweeted to it 
about my project

it suggested that I might
want like to try

to get hold of the work of the 
Panamanian author Juan David Morgan.

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

asking if any of his Spanish-language
novels had been translated into English,

and he said that nothing
had been published,

but he did have an unpublished
translation of his novel "The Golden Horse".

He emailed this to me allowing me
to become one of the first people ever

to have read that book in English.

Morgan was by no means the first wordsmith
to share their work with me in this way.

From Sweden to Palau, writers
and translators

sent me self-published books

and unpublished manuscripts of books
that hadn't been picked up

by Anglophone publishers
or that were no longer available,

giving me privileged glimpses
into some remarkable literary worlds.

I read, for example, about
the Southern African king

Ngungunhane who led the resistance
against the Portuguese in the 19th century.

And about marriage rituals
in a remote village

on the shores of the Caspian sea
in Turkmenistan.

I met Kuwait's answer to 
Bridgette Jones.

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

But perhaps the most amazing example
of the lengths

people were prepared to go to
to help me read the world

came towards the end of my quest

when I tried to get hold of a book

from the tiny African island nation 
of Sao Tome and Principe.

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

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

it seemed as though the only option 
left to me was to see

if I could get something
translated for me from scartch.

I was really dubious about whether
anyone was going to want

to help me with this and give 
up their time for something like that.

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

for Portuguese speakers, I had more
people than I could involve

in the project,

including