So, I’m attempting to read one book from every country in the world. Let me tell you how that started . . .
A couple of years ago for my birthday, my husband foolishly agreed to accompany me into central London to go book shopping. I think he’s now wisely learned that such an affair usually involves either following me around a bookshop for thirty minutes up to multiple hours (depending on the size of the shop) or finding somewhere comfortable out of the way to perch for that time. I now know to leave him at a coffee shop in the event that we happen to be out together and I cannot resist the magnetic pull of thousands of printed pages.
During that particular outing, we went to Daunt Books, which I had found on a list of independent bookshops in London, and is often crowned “the most beautiful bookshop in London.”
“It’s a travel bookshop,” my husband told me. “I’m not sure if they’ll have anything you want.”
Whatever, I thought. It looked big, so surely the place could not be entirely full of Lonely Planet guides? Besides, Marylebone is cute and not far from Regent’s Park, so at the very least it would be a nice walk.
When we reached the shop, we found much more than Lonely Planet guides and Instragrammable old-bookshop beauty. Daunt Books has sections at the front for general fiction and non-fiction as well as a children’s section. Through a short tunnel and in the gallery that is usually featured in pictures of the shop (as well as down the stairs in the middle of the gallery) are shelves divided by country and region featuring both fiction and non-fiction titles from or about the designated countries.
European countries largely feature on the ground floor with the rest of the world down the stairs. As I wandered among the shelves of country-segregated books, I found titles that I didn’t usually see at more traditional (or even a lot of independent) bookshops. Some of the books were quite niche or older, and some (as indicated by the price currency denominations on the back) were clearly imported from the US or other parts of the world.
There were so many that I wanted to read. Being there was like being presented with little windows to all these places in multiple time periods. So much of the world was right there in front of me, and yet it represented only a minuscule fraction of history and human experience.
I wanted to learn about all of these different places. And while I won’t claim that reading a book about a country is a substitute for going there (and we can talk about how state borders are an artificial human construct that may or may not represent any sort of shared human experience for the people who live within those lines), I, like most people, have limited time and money for international travel. I’m not someone who has the means (or the willpower, for that matter) to try to travel all over the world, but I was keen to explore many of them from the comfort of my yellow reading chair.
So I set a goal to attempt to read one book from or about every country in the world. I started with Germany (because I happened to have a book about Germany already) and decided to go semi-geographically, attempting to read the next book about a country that borders (or shares waters with) the country I read about the previous month. So far I’ve gone through some of Eastern Europe, across Russia and down into East and Southeast Asia and I’m not working my way back through South Asia and heading towards the Middle East.
If I manage to keep this up and find a book for every country in the world, of which there are over 200 depending on how you count (independent nation-states vs dependencies, Antarctica, tiny islands, and, of course, separatist regions whose independence is internationally contested), this will only take me about sixteen years at the rate of one book per month. And that’s if I limit myself to one book per a country (which I’ve already exceeded) and only read books that I can attribute to specific countries (which I also haven’t done).
But I’m also not going to be too hard on myself or force myself to read books that I’m not interested in just because of limited options. I’ve already accepted that I’m unlikely to find a book for every single country, and I quite enjoy filling in some of the gaps with books that cover wider areas like War in the Blood or From the Ruins of Empire, which cover topics in Southeast Asia and Asia respectively.
That being said, my only criteria for attributing books to countries are:
1.) For non-fiction books, the book needs to primarily concentrate on an event, person, setting or issue in that country.
2.) For fiction books, the book needs to be set in and focus primarily on characters in that country for most of the story. Additionally, for fiction books, I’d like to read from authors who are from and have lived most of their lives in the place in question.
Also, for the purposes of this project, I’ll define “countries” by modern state borders but will also read books set in the approximate area if the current nation-state didn’t exist at the time the book was set. I’m also interested in reading about contested areas where I can find books on them.
If you’d like to see some of the books I’ve read so far and my thoughts on them, you can follow along here. I’ve had a really good time with this project so far, and I’m looking forward to exploring the rest of the world.
The Kat Bite 