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,