ebaths | The Ridiculous >4-Year Project (Reply)

So my friends may know that I’m a dabbler in the “Booktube” community (Books + Youtube). One creator I watch often is named Jack Edwards. He reads mostly classics and literary fiction and I like his personality and the “click-baity” theme videos he does as well. He also makes a large effort to read fiction in translation.

This leads to a comment that was left on a video of his three months ago which read:

2024 challenge suggestion: reading one book from every country you haven't read a book from yet. You had a poll about video ideas I believe a year ago and I'd actually really love to see something like this. Only if you want to of course!

As a professional hater, I read this and was like “you’re not really thinking about how many countries there are…that would take so long” and scoffed at it. Then I thought about it for 30 seconds and thought that it sounded really fun so maybe I’d try it.

So the challenge as I’ve defined it myself is to read a novel from every sovereign state. This will have to be defined more as I continue, but I’m defining “from” to mean simply that the author is “from” that country (thinking that “born there” is not the best way to define this, but I also don’t think I want to include American expats living in Mauritius as Mauritian lit, for example). I also want the challenge to have as much work that’s in translation as possible. So far I’m operating off the “know it when I see it” rule and will sharpen my focus as I go.

So far I’m treating it like a completionism challenge, so the idea is to read from as many countries as possible. I’m not sure yet whether I’ll keep track of every book I read from each country as part of it (though I do write down every book I read so I could reverse engineer it after).

To start, I went through my reading list that I started back in February 2018 and marked off any country which I had read a book from. This ended up being only eight countries! I was surprised it was that low. This means that I have 197 sovereign states left to read from (assuming I’m able to find a novel from all of these, which will most likely not be the case); if I read one book a week, which is the fastest pace I’ve ever kept as an adult, and only read books from unique countries, it would take me four years to complete the challenge. Wow!

Well, that’s not going to happen, so we’ll see what number I’m at by the end of the year. I’m very excited to share more as I read :)

(During my research for this post, I learned that popular booktuber Emmie has been doing this challenge for a while now! It’s not totally clear to me how many countries she’s read from so far.)