This Woman Read One Book From Every Country in the World: Here Are Her Favorites - Uri Friedman - the Atlantic
In the fall of 2012, Ann Morgan was wrestling with a problem few of us can identify with. No matter how hard she tried, she simply could not find a book to read in English from the tiny African nation of Sao Tome and Principe. At a loss, she appealed for help on Facebook and Twitter, only to be deluged with offers from around the world to translate whatever work she chose from the Portuguese-speaking island. A small army of volunteers in Europe and the United States ultimately came to her rescue, translating chunks of Olinda Beja’s 140-page The Shepherd’s House into English.
The crowdsourcing experiment was just one memorable moment in Morgan’s quest to read one book from every country in the world in one year—a goal she accomplished just around this time last year, as New Year’s Day approached. The London-based freelance writer defined her universe of countries as “all UN-recognised countries plus Palestine and Taiwan,” and added one additional territory—Kurdistan—based on a vote by readers of the blog she maintained for the project. That meant reading a grand total of 197 books, at a pace of four books per week and a cost of several thousand British pounds. (While Morgan bought many of the books, reading some on her Kindle and others in print, she obtained others by more unconventional means; the first book she read, from South Sudan, was written specially for her blog.)
“Can a person in London access all of world literature?”
“I only read American and British writers, and occasionally an Indian or South African or Australian writer. I never ever read books that were translated from other languages,” Morgan, who can read books in French and German “very slowly with a very big dictionary,” told me. “And when I thought about that it seemed like a weird thing: Why would you limit yourself in that way?” Living in a country where only 3 percent of books published each year are translations, Morgan set out to answer one question in particular: “Can a person in London access all of world literature?”