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It's often said that you can tell
a lot about a person
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by the 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, cosmopolitan
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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 of North American authors,
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and there was almost nothing
in translation.
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Discovering this massive,
cultural blind spot
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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
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meant that I would probably
never encounter them.
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So, I decided to prescribe myself
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an intensive course in 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 timeframe
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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
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 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 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
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published 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
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published in 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
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will come from countries
with strong publishing networks
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and lots of industry professionals
trying 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
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are translated from French
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 there are actually
quite a lot of nations
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that may have little or even no
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commercially available literature
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
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British 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,
ayearofreadingtheworld.com,
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and 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 posting my 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 that contained
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'd
also picked out for me.
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Now, at the time, I was amazed that
a stranger,
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more than 6,000 miles away,
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would go through to such lengths
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to help someone that 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 with
little to no
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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
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a conversation 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 to it
about my project
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it suggested that I might
want like to try
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to get hold of the work 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 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 of his novel "The Golden Horse".
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He emailed this to me allowing me
to become one of the first people ever
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to have read that book in English.
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Morgan was by no means the first wordsmith
to share their work with me in this way.
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From Sweden to Palau, writers
and translators
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sent me self-published books
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and unpublished manuscripts of books
that hadn't been picked up
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by Anglophone publishers
or that were no longer available,
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giving me privileged glimpses
into some remarkable literary worlds.
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I read, for example, about
the Southern African king
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Ngungunhane who led the resistance
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
Bridgette Jones.
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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
of the lengths
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people were prepared to go to
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
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from the tiny African island nation
of Sao Tome and Principe.
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Now, having spent several months
trying everything I could think of
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to find 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 was to see
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if I could get something
translated for me from scartch.
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I was really dubious about whether
anyone was going to want
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to help me with this 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, I had more
people than I could involve
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in the project,
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including