My year reading a book from every country in the world | Ann Morgan

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[NerdingNature]

Fantastic idea! Is anyone else wondering how she had time to track down all these books AND read them all in one hear? I wish I read that quickly.

[adsmorriss]

This should be a University reading course. If there were one, especially if there were an online one, I'd take it. :)

[lclkm]

Novels are a one of the best ways to open your mind about other cultures and understand how they differ from yours. I absolutely love this project! I cannot imagine a world were there is no Russian, Indian, South America, or Middle Eastern literature. Reading is so versatile and beautiful.

[AnnaMaledonPictureBookAuthor]

Fascinating project! When my sisters were in primary school they had a pen pal from Morocco. And we sent him a Polish-English dictionary. As it turned out 20 years later my sisters went to Morocco for a trip. This guy traveled a very long distance just to meet them and could speak some Polish with my sisters. Strange and magnificent things do happen in real life if you search for connections other than among your own people.

[booknerdnova]

I started this same challenge at the end of 2020 too, although I'm taking more time than just one year because I can't read 200 books in just one year. I've read from 12 countries so far, and have collected books from 12 other countries on my bookshelves to read in the coming months. I've already learned so much about the world from those books, I love it.

[ricardopickman]

I've owned a multilingual second-hand bookshop in Berlin, Germany (Pequod Books), for the last 3, 5 years and at the first I was very surprised to realize how separated my 26 languages were. Books coming from very strong cultural industries like UK or USA were easily translated into other languages, but this didn't happen with other languages; as you say on this video, many of those books are not even translated at all. Sometimes countries sharing language and/or borders are completely isolated from each other. I felt very small, so I started learning Dutch and French (my 5th and 6th languages already). Your video really touched me, thank you very much.

[PotionsMaster]

I wanna see the list of books she read

[neaivanova]

People, what is all this criticism for? Of course you can't understand a culture after only reading one book. You can spend years in a country, and there'd still be something you've missed. But I feel like many of those criticising don't realize that a culture is expressed in more than the plot of a given literary work and that the overall attitude towards life, along with the actual story of a piece can broaden your perspective of the world in ways nothing else can. I'm not sure some of you realize how narrow your (and mine, too, actually) own perspective is.

[alittlelifeofmel]

If anyone is interested in watching someone do this in "real" time... there is a youtuber called Portal in the Pages that is going to be reading around the world this year and will be making videos about it all year and has already begun talking about the books she is planning to read, I highly suggest watching if you are interested in something similar.

[vagary]

An incredible story! One book from each country is a fabulous place to start!

[sarahwood]

I should try this, maybe I should start with my own country first. We barely even read South African literature in school.

[monocat]

She didn’t stutter even once! That’s incredible speaking

[dace]

this idea is actually so great! i love reading books from other countries cause the can show a very much different perspective. sadly a lot of good books are not being translated into English or other well-known languages and not a lot of good books are being translated at all due to them not being so popular. last year i started to read few books that have been non-officially translated from Chinese and Thai and i truly love those. some people online take their time to translate them and i respect that so much!

[thalia]

this was amazing...realising your own weakness in the area of cultural knowledge and wanting to change that is quite a feat...props to you Ann

[HarryPotterFreakLena]

I guess I'm lucky enough to be fluent in many languages, so if I ever were to recreate this, I could read books in english, spanish, french, german and dutch. Guess that makes it easier.

[effie]

What a brilliant idea! How wonderful that it also became an opportunity to bring so many people together & that thy were all so willing to go out of their way to make your 'dream' a reality!

[katiekawaii]

Wonderful! The fact is, people just want to be heard, and understood.

[andreassabin]

Great story and a wonderful experience. I experienced something similar, although not as global as Ann Morgan reported. There is a German edition from Süddeutsche Zeitung, they published novels from 20 global cities (like Lagos, LA, Beijing, Johannesburg, etc.) and I really enjoyed reading it. It opened my eyes to differnet cultures and different ways of writing and story-telling. I wished to go beyond these 20 global cities "travelling" to every country of the planet in form of a book. Great inspiration, although I might take a bit more time than just one year to do so.

[carolchen]

This is such an inspiration! A very awesome idea!

[atrujillo]

I suggest that those of us watching this post the books we have enjoyed reading along with the author's name and nationality so as to give ideas to others who may not be sure where to start. Hopefully we can inspire one another.

Master of Saint Petersburg- J.M. Coetzee- South Africa, Half of a Yellow Sun- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie- Nigeria, A Hero of Our Time- Mikhail Lermontov- Russia, The Three Body Problem - Liu Cixin- China, Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone-James Baldwin- United States, The Reluctant Fundamentalist-Mohsin Hamid- Pakistan, The God of Small Things- Arundhati Roy- India, The Kite Runner- Khaled Hosseini- Afghanistan, The Year of the Elephant-Leila Abouzeid- Morocco, And Then There Were None-Agatha Christie- United Kingdom, Killing Commodore- Haruki Murakami- Japan, The Dubliners- James Joyce- Ireland, Mysteries-Knut Hamsun- Norway.