Read Around the World!

Right, so this was an idea I had a while ago, in my previous bit of gap-time between my last two jobs, and while working 40 hours a week and commuting 15 hours a week and so on, it didn't happen. I got several books in, but I didn't get the blog up, and I didn't plan to do it all in a year. But even if it had, Ann Morgan would have beaten me to it. So credit where due: her TED talk is below; associated recommended works are here.


But the fact that she already did it is not going to stop me. (Which, of course, is not her goal at all!) I'm going to charge ahead, but I plan to do several things differently. First, I have a reading knowledge of Spanish, so I plan to read as much as possible in the original. Her point about the poverty of offerings in non-North American and -European works offered in English translation is well taken, though. It's a good point, how existing power structures and market structures essentially dictate the literature available to us.

A few other points of expansion: I would be inclined to include more territories, rather than necessarily limiting myself to sovereign nations recognized by the UN. This makes it messier, of course, but also more comprehensive, bringing more voices to the table. In the same vein, I'd like to be as inclusive as possible, in terms of divisions within the country. Of course, you can't get total representation, but at least some of the broad lines--indigenous literatures and immigrant literatures will both provide interesting insights. My anthropology studies dealt mostly with Native Alaska, specifically in the Southeast, so--spoiler alert!--expect the Dauenhauers and some missionary literature to both show up here.

Hopefully eventually I'll get a mashup going for this project, but for now, we start with tagged reviews. Don't be too surprised if ethnographies and children's and young adult literature show up, too.

And a point of contraction from Ms. Morgan's project: she clearly got lots of recommendations and assistance from her social network. I'm not doing an appeal like she did, although if anyone out there is reading and has an appropriate recommendation, I'd be excited to hear it! I will certainly end up piggybacking on her suggestions for those countries with few-to-no works available in English. And in this regard, being later to the party may help me, in that more works may have been translated (if applicable) and/or distributed more widely.

And (last paragraph starting with "and," promise) if anyone is reading this and wants to beat me to it, one resource I know I'll use (aside from Wikipedia) is Longitude Books, which has a useful clickable map for recommended reading "about" many countries. Clearly not all are written by people from these countries, so some sifting will have to be done if that was all you were interested in. I have found both good literary works and good natural history works through them, so it's certainly been a good place to start my search.