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March 8, 2016 9:50 AM

The woman who read one book from every country in the world

Read globally — Where to next? Add a global touch to your reading list.
Seth Wenig | AP file

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Every week, The Thread tackles your book questions, big and small. Ask a question now.

This week's question: Where can I find good global reading recommendations?

Four years ago, Ann Morgan took a look at her shelves and saw a lot of books — a lot of books — from authors in the English-speaking world. Despite being well-traveled, her reading list did not reflect her global interests.

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"I was a literary xenophobe," she writes.

So she set herself a lofty goal: Read one book from every country in the world in one year. That worked out to be 196 books, working from the list of U.N.-recognized countries.

But how do you know what to read from Lesotho? Or Turkmenistan? Or Suriname? Morgan put out a call for recommendations on her blog, and global readers shared their favorites from around the world.

It was a wordy year, filled with memoirs, classics, folk tales, short stories and unknown gems.

After checking all 196 countries off her list, Morgan wrote a book about the experience: "The World Between Two Covers." She describes the narratives from Kuwait, Togo and Greenland that entranced her, and the perspectives from Switzerland, Taiwan and Romania that she'd never read before.

Her goal highlighted the lack of books in translation available in the U.S. According to a 2012 article from The Economist:

When it comes to international literature, English readers are the worst-served in the Western world. Only 3% of the books published annually in America and Britain are translated from another language; fiction's slice is less than 1%.

If you are looking to expand your reading list, take a recommendation (or 100) from Morgan.

Reading around the world: A book for every country

The map below, from TED, shows Morgan's year-long reading list.