How It Began

It is easy to imagine oneself as a man of the world; well-read and well-travelled; accepting of and interested in other cultures. It’s even fairly easy to have this reinforced by those around you, those cut from similar cloth with similar worldviews. Moreover it is possible to believe all this while it being ultimately and fundamentally untrue.

Being able to holiday abroad is a blessing; living and working in a new country can open your eyes to a myriad of new perspectives. I am fortunate that my work has led me to living in four different countries and doubly fortunate that being a teacher means having the time to explore these distant locales. While travelling around I am always mindful to learn about the country I am visiting in addition to making time to relax, including ensuring sufficient time dedicated to reading. And yet there existed a disconnect that went at first unnoticed, but whose presence became more apparent the more I travelled. As the places I had chance to visit became more diverse, there was an obvious chasm between the reading material I chose and the places in which I consumed them.

Holiday is one of the opportunities where it is possible to carve out significant chunks of time dedicated to reading. Long haul flights, overnight trains, mountaintops, riversides, bars and restaurants have all played host to an impressive nose buried in a book, but my preferred venue of choice is the beach. Long happy days have been spent devouring page after page as the sun charts its great circle across the sky. These books, however, rarely have anything to do with the location of the beach being relaxed upon. It is this discrepancy that I noticed: that my travel destinations are broader but my choice of literature has remained decidedly parochial. It is this divide that this project aims to bridge.

And so Books I’ve Been To was born. The aim is simple: to read one new novel from each of the nations that I have travelled to in the chronological order that I first visited them. The purpose is to gain new insight into those nations through the eyes of the novelists and to explore different cultures in a way that visiting for a few weeks can, presumably, only imitate. I have been largely inspired by Ann Morgan, who read a book from every country in the world, and while I cannot match her pace I am grateful to her for the inspiration.

Before beginning I undertook an audit of the nations I have been to and the origins of the authors I have read, represented by the map on this page. Although at a glance it may appear that there are a plethora of nations represented in the Books I’ve Been To category, only the UK and USA can be considered well mined. Other countries, if they appear at all, are represented by two or, more commonly, a single author. Whole literary traditions neglected or perhaps misrepresented, laying bare the subconscious biases in my choice of literature.

And then there are two significant areas with zero representation. The first, and more obvious, being Africa. Although I have read numerous novels set in Africa, not a single one has been from an African author, despite the prevalence of English speaking authors originating there. Although this project was not conceived with the intention of addressing this shortfall, since I have also never visited the continent, if would seem remiss to not do so at some point.

The second, and more criminal, omission is of the nations I have lived in. China, South Korea, Mexico and Hong Kong are each places I have enjoyed becoming deeply acquainted with and yet I have not read a single piece of literature by a native author. Reading novels by British and American authors that choose to set their stories in, to them, far-flung locations can be no substitute for reading accounts from local voices.

Having written all that it may seem absurd to begin the project with a classic of Victorian literature, but there is good reasoning behind starting this project in the United Kingdom.