The World Between Two Covers: Reading the Globe
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- $20.99
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
A beguiling exploration of the joys of reading across boundaries, inspired by the author’s year-long journey through a book from every country.
Ann Morgan writes in the opening of this delightful book, "I glanced up at my bookshelves, the proud record of more than twenty years of reading, and found a host of English and North American greats starting down at me…I had barely touched a work by a foreign language author in years…The awful truth dawned. I was a literary xenophobe."
Prompted to read a book translated into English from each of the world's 195 UN-recognized countries (plus Taiwan and one extra), Ann sought out classics, folktales, current favorites and commercial triumphs, novels, short stories, memoirs, and countless mixtures of all these things. The world between two covers, the world to which Ann introduces us with affection and no small measure of wit, is a world rich in the kind of narratives that engage us passionately: we meet an irreverent junk food–obsessed heroine in Kuwait, an explorer from Togo who spent years among the Inuit in Greenland, and a former child circus performer of Roma background seeking sanctuary in Switzerland. Ann's quest explores issues that affect us all: personal, political, national, and global. What is cultural heritage? How do we define national identity? Is it possible to overcome censorship and propaganda? And, above all, why and how should we read from other cultures, languages, and traditions? Illuminating and inspiring, The World Between Two Covers welcomes us into the global community of stories.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
As journalist Morgan relates in this introspective debut, she took it upon herself to learn more about international literature after looking at her shelves and realizing that her reading had been almost exclusively British and North American. Her project (which she turned into a blog, A Year of Reading the World) was to devote a year to reading books from each of the world's 196 countries. Morgan explored cultural differences in storytelling styles while reading the mythology-steeped Telesa YA series by Samoan author Lani Wendt Young. She also learned about propaganda and censorship from Uzbek novelist Hamid Ismailov's The Railway, and she reflected on how the West views totalitarian regimes after reading My Life and Faith, the memoir of North Korean war hero Ri In Mo. The book's themes include the difficulties of getting published in other languages, the imperfection of translation, and the inequities of a global cultural tradition still dominated by Western imperialism. While Morgan briefly touches on the individual books she read (a full list appears in the back), her purpose is to examine publishing and access to books on a global scale, not to summarize her reading experience. For that, readers can go to her blog. The reward for readers of this volume is a greater appreciation of global literature and the inspiration to reexamine one's own reading habits.
