Published by Vintage / Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2022, 388 pages. First published in 2015. US title: The World Between Two Covers: Reading the Globe

“Reading is a solitary act, but one that demands connection to the world.”
—Lewis Buzbee, The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop: A Memoir, A History

“The world was changing. And its books were changing me.”

In 2012, Anne Morgan set herself a formidable challenge: to read a book from every country in the world. In a year, she read 196 books and blogged about them, while holding down a full-time job. Her blog has become the go-to place for people wanting to follow her example (including me).

Reading the World is Morgan’s account of that year. But instead of being a series of reviews, Morgan uses the challenge as a springboard to tackle questions about what we read and how we read. (This book was first published in 2015 and was updated in 2022.)

How do you begin to find books from around the world, especially in English? Finding books from some countries is not a problem: either the language of publication is English or translations are easily available. But there are countries where the language is not English and translations are rare—or, in some cases, do not exist. In others, the literature is not available outside their borders or is hard to find. South Sudan is a case in point, but Morgan acknowledges that the new country probably has more pressing issues to deal with than setting up a publishing industry.

When Morgan needed help finding or identifying books, she turned to the online community. Book lovers swung into action, not only suggesting books she could read, but sending her books, and in a couple of cases, actually translating short pieces for her. (You can say what you like about social media, but the virtual bibliophile world is full of passionate and helpful people.)

“From the decade-old translation of a novel by the Comoro Islands’ first published novelist, Mohamed Toihiri, buried in the hard drive of an academic in Vermont, to the self-funded rendering of Panamanian novelist Juan David Morgan’s The Golden Horse, sent by the author himself, I repeatedly found myself reliant on the kindness of strangers for access to areas of the globe the English-language publishing industry doesn’t reach.”

The number of books translated into English—and the readership for these books—has gone up between 2015, when this book was first published, and now, but there is still a long way to go. Translation is vital in accessing books that would otherwise be beyond our reach. We are reliant on publishers to make the choice not only of whose books are published but also who gets translated, and which books are disseminated outside the country’s borders: in other words, whose voices we get to hear. As Morgan puts it, “the partiality that underpins the global publishing scene can be damaging, especially for authors in regions that have historically been excluded from the literary world”.

Of course, there are writers all over the world who have been excluded and whose voices are supressed by regimes in power, their books banned in their own countries, they themselves imprisoned or exiled, or facing death threats. And this is just one aspect of exclusion. Today, as Morgan points out, there is nowhere entirely free from censorship, with cancel culture, algorithms and fake news dictating—or at least, attempting to dictate—what we read.

Setting out on this challenge, the first thing Morgan had to do was draw up a list of countries. This would seem fairly straightforward. According to several sources she consulted, there were 196 sovereign states (that is, United Nations members plus Taiwan). But it was not that simple. What about Palestine? Readers told her she could not ignore Palestinian literature if she wanted to know about the Arab world. (Palestine has observer status at the United Nations, which meant Morgan could include it.)

Once she decided on the list, she had to select a writer and a book for each country. Could a single book possibly represent an entire country? (Think of Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting, Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary or George Eliot’s Middlemarch, all representing the UK.) Even if a single book does not tell you everything about a country, it can give you insights into another culture and try to make something unknown a little more familiar. “Rather than simply filling our minds’ eyes with marvellous and strange images, it’s possible that the mere act of concocting the images themselves increases our brains’ capacities to imagine things that would otherwise be alien and unknowable to us. Stories, it seems, truly can be life-changing.”

This is a book for people who love reading and read widely. Morgan combines personal anecdotes with research into the issues she raises, only some of which have been mentioned in this review. She writes about national identities, language (including oral traditions), and the unconscious biases we carry within us. Reading the World is a rich book that will make you reflect on what you read and why.

I think what Ann Morgan has done is admirable. The challenge she set herself and shared with readers around the world has led to people broadening the scope of their own reading, including more literature in translation, and from countries that have often been neglected.  

If you are contemplating a similar challenge or trying to spread your net wider, there is a list of books for you at the end.

Happy travels and happy reading!

Read the Talking About Books interview with Ann Morgan.