I used to think of myself as a fairly open person, but my bookshelves told a different story. Apart from a few Indian novels and the Australian and South African book, my literature collection consisted of British and American titles. Worse still, I hardly ever read anything in translation. My reading was limited to stories by English-speaking authors. So, at the start of 2012, I set myself the challenge of trying to read a book from every country in a year to find out what I was missing. As I was unlikely to find publications from nearly 200 nations on the shelves of my local bookshop, I decided to ask the planet's readers for help. I created a blog called A Year of Reading the World and put out an appeal for suggestions of titles that I could read in English. The response was amazing. Before I knew it, people all over the planet were getting in touch with ideas and offers of help. Some posted me books from their home countries. Others did hours of research on my behalf. In addition, several writers sent me unpublished translations of their novels, giving me a rare opportunity to read works otherwise unavailable to the 62% of the British who only speak English. Even so, selecting books was no easy task. With translations making up only around 4.5 percent of literary works published in the UK and Ireland, getting English versions  of stories was difficult. But the effort was worth it. I found I was visiting the mental space of the storytellers. These stories not only opened my mind to the real life in other places, but opened my heart to the way people there might feel. And that in turn changed my thinking. Through reading the stories shared with me by bookish strangers around the globe, I realised I was not alone, but part of a network that spread all over the planet. Which of the following might be found on the blog A Year of Reading the World?
Lists of English version books. Research on English literature. Unfinished novels by British writers. Comments on English literature.