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 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'd 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 me posting that 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 to such lengths to help someone

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 like to try
and 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.

Now, I was really dubious

whether anyone was going
to want to help 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 a 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 live
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)