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 or North American authors,

and there was almost nothing
in translation.

Discovering this massive,
cultural blind spot in my reading

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 I would probably
never encounter them.

So, I decided to prescribe myself

an intensive course of 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 time frame

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 even 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 many 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
primed 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 that 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, I registered my blog

ayearofreadingtheworld.com,

and I 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 containing
not one, but two books.

Rafidah's choice from Malaysia,

and a book from Singapore
that she had 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 or 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 at 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 read that book in English.

Morgan was by no means the only wordsmith

to share his 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
of some remarkable imaginary 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 Bridget Jones

(Laughter)

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

But perhaps the most amazing example
of the lengths that 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, Portuguese-speaking
African island nation

of São Tomé and Príncipe.

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 scratch.

I was really dubious 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 Margaret Jull Costa,

a leader in her field
who has translated the work

of Nobel Prize winner José Saramago.

With my nine volunteers in place,

I managed to find a book by
a São Toméan author

that I could buy enough copies of online.

Here's one of them.

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

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

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

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

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

my not knowing and being open
about my limitations

had become a big opportunity.

When it came to São Tomé and Príncipe,

it was a chance not only
to learn something new

and discover a new collection of stories,

but also to bring together
a group of people

and facilitate a joint creative endeavour.

My weakness had become
the project's strength.

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

As those who enjoy reading will know,

books have an extraordinary power
to take you out of yourself

and into someone else's mindset,

so that, for a while at least,

you look at the world through
different eyes.

That can be an uncomfortable experience,

particularly if you're reading a book
from a culture

that may have quite different values
to your own.

But it can also be really enlightening.

Wrestling with unfamiliar ideas
can help clarify your own thinking.

And it can also show up blind spots
in the way

you might have been looking at the world.

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

I'd grown up with, for example,

I began to see how narrow a lot of it was

compared to the richness
that the world has to offer.

And, as the pages turned,

something else started to happen, too.

Little by little,
that long list of countries

that I'd started the year with

changed from a rather dry, academic
register of place names

into living, breathing entities.

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

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

But cumulatively, the stories
I read that year

made me more alive than ever before

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

It was as though the world's stories
and the people who'd gone

to such lengths to help me read them

had made it real to me.

These days, when I look at my bookshelves

or consider the works on my e-reader,

they tell a rather different story.

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

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

It's the tale of the potential
human beings have

to work together.

And, it's testament to the
extraordinary times we lives in,

where, thanks to the Internet,
it's easier than ever before

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

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

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

And I hope many more people will join me.

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

for publishers to translate more books,

and we would all be richer for that.

Thank you.

(Applause)