In my first year of uni, I came across a reading challenge called Read The World. It was simple: you read one book from every country in the world (although the creator had forgotten about a couple, like Micronesia). The challenge was on a website called StoryGraph, which is like Goodreads but for people who are a bit more snobbish. There were all sorts of challenges there and on similar reading platforms on the internet, designed to coax people into reading a bit more and to make them step outside their comfort zone. I took it up because I read a lot and cannot resist a challenge. I started ticking off the countries from which I’d read books, and found that there were barely more than a dozen.
As someone who works in a bookshop, and who purports to be well-read, this seemed to me like an unforgivable personal failure. It wasn’t from a deliberate avoidance of international literature that I’d managed to remain so insulated. I hadn’t made any concerted effort to breach the bubble of western literature that surrounded me, to go beyond the books that lay face-out at the library. I had been unduly influenced — especially as a young teenager — by sappy and old-fashioned romance novels that told me more about a culture, usually American, I already knew than about what I didn’t know. The proportion of American literature in my reading prior to 2023 was so great that it revolted me. To this day, I consciously avoid American literature as a reminder of the shroud of ignorance that I had inadvertently created by reading it.
At once, I made up my mind to rectify this. The challenge was completely voluntary, created by a random user with about eight hundred participants. Similar challenges set up by the website administrators featured a selection of ten countries that would change every year — the 2024 version of this had about 12,000 participants. I dismissed the proffered system quickly; what good could it do to read a single book from China and another from the Vatican City?
So I set up a ratio proportional to the country, and contingent on that country having published books in English (or in other languages that I could read). For countries with populations of less than a million, I’d read at least one book, and for those of more than a billion, I’d read at least ten. For the rest, I would read about three. I set out to complete this over a decade, although it took about a year to complete more than a quarter of it. I admit, this was well before I became an editor, when I had so much free time on my hands that I could read over two dozen books in a month.
Attempting this challenge forced me to seek out books from countries with very small publishing industries, often very small populations, and nearly always filtered through a language barrier. I had never stopped to consider how much of global literature is perceived by Western audiences and privileged by publishing houses, such as the Big Five (Hachette, Pan Macmillan, Penguin Random House, Allen & Unwin and HarperCollins). But these publishing houses have a very careful marketing strategy that largely depends on big sellers by American, English, and Western European authors.
Languages are crucial when it comes to making books accessible, because you have to have a translator for every single title, and sometimes there just aren’t many translators available for languages that are less widely-spoken. For indigenous languages in particular there are significant concerns about preserving languages that are at risk of extinction, and translating books across those indigenous languages and lingua francas like English or Spanish.
In Australia, we have the Indigenous Literacy Foundation, a charity organisation that aims to address the linguistic inequality of English compared with First Nations languages by translating childrens’ books into First Nations languages. The ILF works alongside First Nations communities to translate, produce, and publish books, as well as supply them to remote communities and support young children to learn in a mother tongue that is in danger. This goes some way to addressing the overwhelming linguistic authority given to English novels, with tangible benefits for First Nations communities. To have some version of the ILF present in former colonies whose indigenous languages are under threat would be ideal, but as yet Australia seems to be the only country to have such an organisation.
But when it comes to the books that we buy, and the books that are most frequently marketed to us, we rely in large part upon books that are widely credited as ‘good’ because these are the ones that publishers put the most effort into promoting. International literary prizes play a large part in addressing reading imbalances in the global book markets. The Booker Prize is the most notable of these. Gone are the years when every person in the Booker Prize shortlist was a white man. Of course, it is not faultless: the Booker attracted considerable controversy in 2019 when the first Black woman to win the prize, Bernadine Evaristo, was also the first to share it — with none other than Margaret Atwood, a white Canadian woman who had already won it. (Which, if you ask me, was one of the worst decisions a Booker judging panel has ever made.) Nevertheless, it has led to sharp spikes in sales for all of its winners, which often allows titles more limelight than they likely would have gained otherwise.
The countries that were most fascinating to me were those whose literature was not available, whether that be in Sydney, in English, or in the world. Mongolia, for example, has a population density of 2.24 per square kilometre, and a nomadic culture which does not correspond with the consumerist demands of a publishing industry. This is a country whose history is either passed down orally or recorded by foreigners. Consequently, when we read books about Mongolia, they are written by historians, travel writers, and naturalists.
If literature is our means of accessing a country without actually visiting, of surpassing the fickle impressions that social media provides so we can actually immerse ourselves in a culture, what can we do when that literature is unavailable? Books craft a crucial part of our impression of the world, and seep into our cultural imagination. It takes a split second to identify a dozen English novels which have directly shaped your understanding of English culture, like Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice, Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist, or Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. These are not books that you need to have read; they are books that are so well-known that it is impossible not to know them. This is, unfortunately, a pervasive literary power that most countries lack. These are what shape our understanding of the West, and create a self-perpetuating myth that is so deeply entrenched into our cultural psyche that we hardly notice it.
However, some countries have a markedly different circumstance: they don’t lack a national literary corpus, but that body is hindered by a political situation that places the chain of censorship upon every book in the public domain. In China, for example, there is a vast array of literature, and indeed of film, television, and art, but these forms of art published within the last three-quarters of a century are necessarily inhibited in their expression, by what is and is not tolerable to the Chinese Communist Party. This has seen an extraordinary surge in literary and televisual works that focus on Ancient China, on a pre-CCP age, with a storyline catered to audiences who are discouraged from directly discussing modern politics. With stories that often centre around an everyman hero or a swoon-worthy romance, Chinese novels can get away with peppering in subversive ideas implied in the context of a romance novel that politicians do not consider worthy of serious attention.
Where our attention is frequently driven is to the novels that the internet tells us are good: to BookTok, to Goodreads and to influencers on YouTube and Instagram who sometimes spend more time filming than reading. BookTok is becoming such a significant influence that publishers are now using tags on covers like “As featured on BookTok” as a marketing tactic. Getting recommendations from social media has, to some extent, become a substitute for getting recommendations from people whose job it is to sell books. This feeds into the idea that physical libraries or bookshops can be replaced with an entirely virtual experience where books are sourced entirely through the internet.
Even within the optimistic outlook that our reading is not influenced by BookTok or Goodreads (which I like to think mine isn’t), we are never completely in control when it comes to our own reading choices. We are guided by bookshops, publishers, and marketing schemes that decide which books to pour money into for covers and promotion, and which books are not profitable enough to be printed by a major publishing house. This must, then, reflect the biases of both the executives of those publishing houses and of the audience whom they mass-market to. When audiences buy books by Western authors in great quantities, publishers don’t see a need to market more diverse titles, thus creating a cycle of artificially insular demand. So, when we collectively decide to read American or English literature because it is less of a cultural stretch to place ourselves in Manhattan than Baghdad, we contribute to a broader trend of reducing the profitability of books from other countries.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a Nigerian author whose 2006 novel Half of a Yellow Sun became one of the most well-known African novels in the world, a fictional historical reckoning with the Biafran War. The Biafran War isa central part of Nigerian history, but like so many wars in non-Western countries, it had not remained in public consciousness for very long and was entirely unknown to much of its audience when it was published. During her childhood Adichie read British and American books, because she could not access books written by Nigerian writers, in fact there hardly were any at all. In a TED Talk in 2009, she described how she would write stories where “all my characters were white and blue-eyed. They ate apples and played in the snow. They drank ginger beer… never mind that I had no idea what ginger beer was.”
Adichie said “We must seek the higher ground of multiple stories, many stories, as a way of reminding ourselves of our common humanity. We are unfamiliar with one another… because we are unfamiliar with the stories of one another.” Her novel, and her subsequent novels, were partly an effort to reclaim a narrative which had been erased, lost, or never published: that of Nigerian women who experienced the Biafran war.
The New York Times, a widely-respected American publication with significant global influence, recently released its rankings of its top 10 fiction books of 2024. In this list, everything published in the world is purportedly eligible for a mention, and the results are drawn purely on literary merit. Although American literature features widely in the reading lists of most English-speaking countries, I was surprised by the number of non-American authors — four out of ten! (One of whom was British.) Admittedly, some of the American authors had biracial backgrounds, like the Belgian-American Lucy Sante, and the Iranian-American Kaveh Akbar, but by and large, it does not reflect a reading public that is striving to read beyond its own borders. Nor can it reflect a thorough scope of literary talent, for we cannot give credibility to the claim that six-tenths of the world’s best books of 2024 emerged from the same country.
The argument could be made that American literature is so heavily featured in bookshops, reading lists, and literary prizes simply because it is better. If that were the case, why? Does America invest in literature in a way that the rest of the world doesn’t? Do they treat their writers with respect and accord them high status culturally? Different cultures will perceive writers in different ways, and there are varied working rights for authors across the world. In America, there seems to be a culture of almost fetishising writers, with figures like Edgar Allen Poe, James Baldwin, or Emily Dickinson known perhaps just as much for their personal lives as they are for their creative lives.
As for other countries where writing is embedded into their culture, Ireland comes to mind as one where writers are given a notably elevated status. Seamus Heaney, an Irish poet, is a key example of an individual whose writing was enormously influential and far-reaching. During his lifetime, Heaney was appointed national poet laureate in Ireland and won a Nobel Prize in 1995, writing often on aspects of his personal life that were intimately connected with Irish culture and identity, especially the way The Troubles affected himself and his community. One such poem, The Strand at Lough Beg, is an obituary of his cousin who was killed by accident during this conflict. After his death, his funeral was attended by members of Sinn Fein, as well as Bono. Memorial events were held across the U.K. and the U.S., and The Independent called him “probably the best-known poet in the world.” It is not a coincidence that this world-famous poet was Irish. Literature and culture are deeply intertwined, and Heaney came of age in a community that treasured poetry and treated poets like rockstars. Even so, I would argue that it necessitated the respect that Heaney accumulated in Ireland and the U.K. for his work to be widely read and recognised overseas.
The rest of the world, however, has a far greater cultural barrier to overcome in order to become part of ‘mainstream’ literature. For countries that have small quantities of published titles, due to a lack of local publishing houses, a smaller amount of state funding, or a bevy of obstacles besides, every title that emerges into the international literary consciousness is a rare, sparkling jewel. So are internet challenges really that bad?
In reducing the literary world to a challenge that we take in order to enrich ourselves and our ‘cultural awareness’, we make each country a box to be ticked. This is not fundamentally terrible; if it makes people read, it makes people read. But we must be wary of the implications that lie within. There are plenty of countries with microscopic populations and vanishingly little novels (does anyone have a recommendation for Belize?). There are plenty more with towering national corpuses. Taiwan, for example, publishes around 40,000 books a year across 5,000 publishing houses, compared to Australia’s 22,000. This places it at the second-highest in the world for books published per capita. Nonetheless, Taiwanese authors are generally not household names, and their work is not easy to find.
The issue here is threefold: we see what publishers want us to see, which is what is most profitable.
We read what we are able to read, which is books published in English. We often don’t make much effort to read books belonging to countries or cultures with which we are unfamiliar. Sometimes people tell me that there is not enough time in a lifetime to read all of the books that they want to read, but is there ever enough time in a lifetime to do all of the things we want to do? If any of us tried to read every book in a single bookshop, it would take decades to pull off. But we can make an effort to read about people and places who are unfamiliar to us, translated from languages that we do not speak, born from literary traditions that are not our own. We must not read in order to tick off a box, but rather to learn about ourselves and about the world, and it takes more than an internet challenge to do this. The best kind of book is the one you find on your own: one where, as you open the pages, it opens a world to you. However, if you need somewhere to start…
Recommended reading:
Afghanistan: A Thousand Splendid Suns, Khaled Hosseini
Brazil: Agua Viva, Clarice Lispector
China: Golden Age, Wang Xiaobo
Czech Republic: A Gardener’s Year, Karel Capek
Egypt: The Republic of False Truths, Alaa Al Aswany
Ethiopia: Woman At Point Zero, Nawal El Saadawi
Iran: Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi
Laos: How to Pronounce Knife & Other Stories, Souvankham Thammavongsa
Mexico: Mexican Gothic, Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Netherlands: The Safekeep, Yael Van Der Wouden
North Korea: In Order to be Free, Yeonmi Park
