World Book Day: my mission to read a book from every country

As the planet celebrates World Book Day, I'm midway through a plan to read a book from every single one of the 196 UN-recognised countries. Have I gone too far?
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Book on the beach
Paradise lost ... sourcing translations of books from every corner of the globe is not that easy. Photograph: Corbis

Global literature events never used to mean much to me. World Book Day – which we in the UK and Ireland mark in early March but most of the rest of the planet celebrates today to coincide with the anniversaries of the deaths of Cervantes, Shakespeare and Garcilaso de la Vega – always swept by in a blur.

Unesco World Book and Copyright Day, to give it its full title, wasn't the only aspect of international literature I used to ignore. In fact, when I started to think about the geography of my reading late last year, I realised how anglocentric my literary habits were. Of the small number of translations released in the UK each year – commonly claimed to be 3% of books published, although English PEN fears it may be less – I would read, well, next to nothing.

With the world coming to London this summer for the Olympics, it seemed like a good time to redress the balance. And so I decided to make it my mission to read and blog about a book from every UN-recognised country in 2012.

With no idea how to go about it beyond a suspicion that I was unlikely to find a novel, short story collection or memoir from each of the 196 states in my local WHSmith, I decided to ask book-lovers around the world to tell me what I should be reading. The responses flooded in and soon the A Year of Reading the World list boasted hundreds of recommendations. Many people went further than simply suggesting titles, and volunteered to do research for the project, share contacts and go to bookshops in far-flung corners of the globe. One blog visitor even picked out and posted me two volumes from a bookshop in Kuala Lumpur.

However, even with a growing network of book folk on the case, getting stories from all the countries on the list is tricky.

Translation is a large part of the challenge. I was expecting this when it came to small countries with rare national languages. Andorra, for example, was always going to be a challenge. I wasn't sure what to do about it until a local literary journal editor put me in touch with author Albert Salvadó who self-published a translation of his novel, The Teacher of Cheops, after it sold more than 100,000 copies in Catalan and Spanish.

I was less prepared for the difficulties I would have sourcing literature from countries with commonly spoken languages. When a blog visitor challenged me to choose a writer other than the ubiquitous Mia Couto for Mozambique, where Portuguese is the lingua franca, I struggled. It wasn't until a translator sent me an unpublished manuscript of Ungulani Ba Ka Khosa's Ualalapi, which was named one of Africa's 100 Best Books of the 20th Century by an African jury in 2002, that I had a contender. Having the privilege to be one of the few people ever to read this extraordinary and disturbing novel – filled with events that the term magical realist doesn't even begin to cover – in English brought home to me how much we must miss in our language bubble, cut off from so much of what the rest of the world has to say.

Even when texts exist in English, there's no guarantee they'll be available. My Burundian novel, the out-of-print Weep Not, Refugee by Marie-Thérèse Toyi, which I heard about through someone who was at school with the writer, was couriered to me from Africa complete with a greeting from the author written on the flyleaf. She is now thinking of publishing the novel to ebook after several blog visitors expressed an interest in it.

Nearly four months into the project, there's still a long way to go and lots of gaps on the list. From tiny Pacific Island nations like Nauru and Tuvalu, each with approximately 10,000 citizens and no tradition of publishing, to desert states such as Chad, there are plenty of conundrums yet to tackle. And if anyone's got any thoughts on the Maldives, Monaco, Mauritania or the Federated States of Micronesia, I'd love to hear them.

I don't know what the next eight months will bring or whether I'll succeed in my quest. But if the first 60 books are anything to go by it should be quite an adventure.

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