Alright – Now that we’ve got the background out of the way, it’s time to read around the world. Passports and IDs out and ready everyone, shoes off, laptops in a bin…just kidding.

Here is an Instagram post I made on December 30, 2018.

The caption reads: “For 2019 (2020, 2021…) I am going to read a couple books from every country in the world. Let me know if you know any that are absolutely fantastic.” I got a few recommendations including The Alchemist by Paolo Coelho, In a Sunburned Country by Bill Bryson for Australia, Costa Rica: A Traveler’s Literary Companion by several Costa Rican authors, the book about how Singapore transitioned from a pre-industrial to a developed country, and Ghosts of Spain: Travels Through Spain and Its Silent Past by Giles Tremlett. I haven’t read any of those yet. So um, keep the recommendations coming. I wanted to start with books I already had, or books I had been meaning to knock out for a while.

So the obvious question is, how do I pick the books? I have a couple different methods. First, I’m not limiting myself to one book from each country. That means this project will take longer to complete, but, for example, I wanted to be able to finish up Les Miserables for France and also read a fun novel by a current author. Secondly, some books are particularly famous and associated with a certain country, like for example, Jane Eyre and England, or Anna Karenina and Russia. So I wanted to give myself the flexibility to read one of those and maybe also, again, a fun book by a current author. The main thing in choosing these books is that the author was born in the country, or has lived there for a significant period of their life, and the book mostly takes place in that country. So for example, while Aminitta Forna, the author of A Memory of Love currently lives in the UK, she spent much of her childhood in Sierra Leone and the book mostly takes place in Sierra Leone, so A Memory of Love counts for Sierra Leone.

The English major in me is sort of “triggered” by this project; after all, how could you possibly narrow down an entire country into one book? Is it possible to do this project without “essentializing”; that is, without unintentionally boiling down say, the experience of being British into one novel like Jane Eyre. Furthermore, is it possible to do this project without “Othering”; that is, without reading a novel of a country that is not my own and walking away with the distinct thought of “wow, people in this country are very different from me.” And finally, I am limited to those works which have been translated into English. I speak very limited Spanish, German, French, and I can read some Russian, but there’s no way I could read a book in another language. Maybe I could get through Harry Potter in Spanish. Maybe. While I acknowledge that reading a book in its original language is a much richer experience than reading one in translation, I do commend the work of translators who put so much work into staying faithful to the original.

So in short, I’ve decided to approach this project with some set intentions and most importantly, to recognize that I’m human and have limited time and resources to dedicate to this project. As much as I would love to spend the majority of my time sitting on my couch reading novels and learning languages, and the rest of it travelling the world, I cannot. So as I embark on this project, I want to acknowledge that every single country in the world has more than one person in it and therefore, has more than one story to tell. There are always going to be some experiences and lives of which I am unaware. Please, do this project yourself, and choose different books than I did.

Okay, enough navel gazing about the limitations of being a human in the world. Let’s move on to Project Structure.

Here is the first page of my Excel spreadsheet.

I started by going to Wikipedia and getting a list of sovereign states in 2018. I suppose now that that was six years ago and it will probably be another six years before I finish this project, I may need to update that. I have one sheet for each continent and I keep the list of countries on the right and the “official pages” on the left. I usually start by reading the Wikipedia page for the country and literature and honestly just googling “Literature in X country”. There are several websites which do a good job of collating popular books or “literature” from individual countries, such as the culture trip or fivebooks.com. I’m finding that sometimes there are web sites for individual countries which bring together translators, writers, etc., such as latvianliterature.lv, which, obviously discusses Latvian literature. So basically, I try to keep track roughly of which websites I look at and just kind of…look around…until I find a couple that I would like to read. Then I check to make sure the chosen books are available and reasonably priced, buy them, and get to reading.

The spreadsheet right now just notes the books and the dates I finished reading them, and the authors. I also list the books on this website. I have a space for comments on the spreadsheet, but I didn’t find myself making many comments, which is part of the reason why I’ve decided to bother with this series of blog posts. I found that it was sort of difficult to cram any sort of long thoughts into this small Excel block, but I didn’t want to write a formal essay because that’s boring…anyways here we are.

The first country I read was France. Looking back at the original page from 2019, I chose France because “Since I read a bunch of British and American Literature, or pieces of it, rather, while studying for the literature GRE and also just in general, and I’m partway through the French tree on DuoLingo, I’m going to start with France.”. So that is where I began. My original plan was to start working through Continental Europe and then up through Scandinavia, across to Russia…back down again, and around the world, but I found that going “next country to next country” like that was too rigid of a structure. Sometimes when it was 100 degrees outside where I live, I found myself thinking about cold snowy days, so I skipped to the Aland Islands. And last December I was thinking about somewhere warm, so I skipped to India. I borrowed a book from my sister for a couple years and wanted to give it back to her, so I skipped to South Africa. So while my “default next country” is still somewhere in Continental Europe, I’m flexible. Books are cheaper than plane tickets and I’m under no obligation to choose an “efficient path.” This is a journey of many years and many words.

Okay, so lets see, I think we’ve got everything now. The Instagram post that started it all, how I choose the books, and how I choose the country. Again I’d like to reiterate, this is a fun project, I’ve already learned so much and I’m really enjoying this exploration. You should definitely try it too. This study is broad and the purpose is to open doors, broaden my horizons, and create questions for me about living in our ~global society~ today.

Okay. That’s enough for today. Thanks for reading with me :).