The Beginning

On holiday is one of the best time to read. There's little more relaxing than sitting on a beach, slowly baking in the hot sun, sipping a beer and getting acquainted with a good book. In this manner days can pass, or at least as long as it takes until the wife gets restless.

I've never given much thought to the context of my reading material; just reading whatever interested me in any moment. This is a good overall philosophy - the reading of books inevitably suffers if it is done for some purpose. The leading principal is to pick what you enjoy and enjoy what you pick. It's also useful to master the art of discarding a book that is not enjoyable, a decision that still leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth.

This laisez-faire attitude to the choice of novel lead to some incongruous discord. I would be reading Our Man in Havana one month, only to find myself in Cuba months later with a copy of Steven Fry's autobiography Moab is my Washpot and the Egyptian set Alexandria Quartet. Or working my way through The Long Earth, with its Madison, Wisconsin backdrop, while living in China on the other side of the globe. The realisation of this left me slightly uncomfortable.

This project is an attempt to redress the inevitable and subconscious bias I have displayed in my reading: towards my home nation and home language. Being a native English speaker and heralding from an island with the rich literary history of Shakespeare, Dickens, Pratchett and McEwan has meant that many other countries, presumably with rich literary traditions of their own, have been neglected. Here is the attempt to redress that neglect.

The map on this page shows my starting point. A documentation of over thirty years of reading and travelling. In performing the audit for this project I was surprised by the number of countries that ended up being represented, although many by just a single contribution. More noticable are the omissions, most obviously in Africa. A continent I have neither visited nor read a single solitary novel from. More criminal is the lack of representation from the four countries I have lived in as an immigrant: Mexico, South Korea, China and Hong Kong. The final imbalance to address is the lack of women represented in my reading habits.

With all this in mind, I devised this project. Partly inspired by the stoic Ann Morgan who read a book from every nation in a year. I will not be able to match that pace! Instead I plan to read a book from each country that I have been to in the chronological order that I visited them. The aim is to use this experience to have a deeper understanding of the myriad of cultures that I have travelled through and hopefully gain some new insight. Such an attempt will ineivtably lead to some missteps in my clumsy attempts to develop understanding, for which I can only apologise in advance.

The rules (more like guidelines) for the choice of books is as follows:

  • The novelist should herald from the nation in question.
  • Nations include any country represented in the UN, as well as Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau and the Vatican.
  • The aim should be to read as many women as possible, attempting to maintain a 50-50 split.
  • Novels set in periods of historical significance, especially those well documented by my visits to the country, will be eschewed in favour of other works that cover perspectives and time periods that I am less likely to have encountered.
  • Any, all or none of the rules can be ignored at any time. The aim is not to be beholden to this project, but to enjoy it.

    • And with that I begin, with a novel to represent the United Kingdom.