My Challenge

I wanted to challenge myself to read one book from every country. While I did not think this would be easy, I was surprised at how much research went into just finding the books I planned to read.

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I ended up picking 207 books, one from each of the 193 countries fully recognized by the UN, plus Palestine, Kosovo, Kurdistan, and Taiwan. I also included all the U.S. and U.K. territories, Greenland, and Antarctica.

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I found quite a few people online who have also done this challenge, but I was not intrigued by their lists of books. I wanted to do this to widen my world view and to learn. To make sure I was getting accurate information I decided to only count books that were written by someone and have a protagonist who is either native to that country or is documenting their experience as an immigrant or child of immigrants from that country.

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I had no interest in reading about Africa or Asia from the perspective of a random white man and wanted to include as diverse an array of authors as I could. I want to document this experience so others can find this list and learn about other countries and people as accurately as possible.