Bookmark Planet
A Round-the-World Reading Odyssey
This is a project born of love and frustration in equal measure.
I love books. More accurately, I love stories. I consume them compulsively, any way I can get them—books, movies, eavesdropping on the couple at the table behind me at the pizza joint. I also love traveling. At least in theory, I love traveling. In practice, it’s nearly impossible to see more than a tiny sliver of this big old world when time just keeps on slipping into the future and there’s a family to take care of and a mortgage to pay in a shaky economy.
Bookmark Planet is an attempt to see the whole world through the eyes of writers from all over the globe. The idea is to read a book from every country, a daunting proposition that will take quite some time given my reading pace, real life, and other interests. There are, after all, 195 countries in the world, give or take depending on who you ask and how we define a country, and it’s possible there will be more by the time I’m finished. This will, after all, take years. But let’s just focus on reading, not on doing the math.
I’ll be putting my reading list together totally on the fly. Here’s how I’m choosing the books:
The books must be written by a native of the country. Obviously, I’ll be reading a lot of books in translation. Audiobooks count!
I’m choosing mostly novels or short story collections, though exceptions might be made for non-fiction if novels are difficult to obtain due to political censorship, lack of written literature in translation, etc.
In the case of countries with colonial baggage, I’ll make an effort defer to indigenous voices in many cases.
Stories should be set primarily in the country of origin. Exceptions for fantasy or sci-fi settings are welcome if the book is culturally relevant to the country of origin in some way.
Books can be examples of contemporary genre literature from the country of origin, new-to-me canonical classics, or anywhere in between. Choices will be driven by my own fickle tastes.
I’ll be doing the list of countries in no particular order, filling in this map and writing about the experience along the way.
I’m not the first person to attempt something like this. A quick look around the internet will show you that readers from all over the world have taken on similar challenges, something I find heartening. One of the first things I found when I looked to see what others had done with similar reading projects was a lovely blog by Ann Morgan, a UK-based writer and editor. I’ll be reading her book The World Between Two Covers, which she wrote about her own reading journey, as I begin this project of my own, though I won’t count it as my book from Great Britain (or should I count all the British nations separately as we do in international football?).
It seems fitting to start this project with a prescient topic and a book about a journey, so I’m beginning in Morocco with Laila Lalami’s Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, which follows a group of migrants attempting to reach Europe in an inflatable boat. Lalami is a writer I’ve had on my to-read radar for a while, so I’m looking forward to this one.
If anyone from anywhere around the globe has a suggestion for what I should read from your country, please feel free to pass them along in the comments.
Until next time, happy travels.
Easy choice would've been El Quijote instead – but I haven't read the whole thing. Poeta en NY was my second choice, but that's a list of poems about Lorca's experiences in NY and that wouldn't suit the criteria required.
I choose Los Santos Inocentes by Miguel Delibes. I've read this when I was 17 or so. One of the most iconic novels from Spain's great list of writers.
The story narrates the dramatic existence of a marginal person who lives in a cortijo of Extremadura in the 60's (during Franco's dictatorship) and whose subjugation to the master of the house determines his miserable life.