So I decided to put together this little guide on how to create your own Read the World Challenge. With almost 200 countries out there this seems like a daunting task, but the good news is that we’ll be breaking it apart in regional challenges, like the upcoming Read Latin Authors in 2025.

For the whole world challenge, we have some tips for you on how to get started (more extensive posts coming soon):

1. Pick Your Challenge Format

Reading the world seems pretty straightforward, but there are actually a couple of different ways you can set this challenge up:

– Translations only

This is the most strict type of challenge, in which the book not only needs to be written by an author from that country, but it also has to be published in that country, in one of their official languages. Bonus points if this is a classic work of literature of that nation.

This is the hardest type of challenge to complete, because you need to rely almost exclusively on translations, and the volume of this type of book tends to be low.

– Author origin

This is a variation of the Translations Only format, but now only the author needs to be from the country in question, even if the book was published elsewhere. This is the type of challenge I’m following, and it makes it way easier to find material since you can count on books published in your country.

In my case, I consider the country of origin, but also the author’s relationship with that country that is reflected in their literary work. Read more about defining the author’s nationalities here.

– Set in Country

This challenge is like travelling around the world because in this case the story of the book must be set in a specific country. It can be a novel or non-fiction (memoirs), and the place needs to be part of the story (not only mentioned). In the case of a story that is set in more than one location, there’s some debate about whether the book should be included in more than one country.

Either way you choose, this is a delightful way to “visit” every country of the world without spending all your savings.

2. Pick Your Timeline

After choosing which type of challenge you want to follow, you need to decide if your past readings will also count. In any case, you’ll need to keep track of the books you read.

– Starting Now

If you decide that the only books that count towards the Read the World Challenge are the ones that you read from now on, this will save you the work of cataloging your previous reads. Is like starting with a blank slate, but that also means you’ll have more country entries to complete.

– Counting Previous Reads

This is how I chose to do my challenge. One day out of curiosity I decided to catalog where the authors I read were from, and I was surprised to see that I had already read books from 31 countries, without even trying. You would be surprised too if you start looking into your reads list with that lens.

This gives you a head start, but it also means that you’ll have to research and catalogue every book you remember reading. And it also means that you’ll need to have kept track of those books over the years.

3. Find Book Ideas

Now that you are all set with your country list and your criteria, is time to find out which books to read. That can be a challenge in itself, but the internet offers a lot of help.

– Other Challenges

Some book-tracking websites allow you to create your own challenges. That’s the case with StoryGraph, and I’ve created a challenge there with a prompt for each country. The cool thing is that all the participants can add their suggestions, and we already have more than 3,000 books cataloged there. Don’t know what book to read from Cuba? We have 26 suggestions for you.

– Other Blogs & Pages

Here in the blog, we have a list of all the books read and to be read by country. But there’s also a really cool blog you can check: Ann Morgan’s A Year of Reading the World. She was one of the people who inspired me to do the challenge and, having already completed her own, has a list of all the books here. Her titles might be a little bit harder to find though, since she worked only with translations.

There are also some other book bloggers doing similar challenges, and you can check their progress and reviews below (leave me a comment if you’re doing the same with your blog, I’m compiling a list):

• Thoughts on Papyrus
• Bloggerinthejogger
• The Book Girl’s Guide
• Rosy Librarian Reads

– Reddit

Reddit, the mother of all internet nerds, always has a solution for you. The subreddit r/readingaroundtheworld has a lot of suggestions. Are you stuck in a specific country? Just drop the question there and a lot of people (me included) will be able to help you.

– International Prizes

If you want to read the best of the best, check for international book prizes. The Booker Award (UK) has a specific category for international titles. There is also The Nobel prize, of course, and the Neustadt Prize (US), other than national literary prizes in languages other than English. The good thing about these titles (other than being high quality) is that you have a better chance of finding them in your local bookstore.

4. Find the Books

You can only read the books if you can find them, and getting lesser-known titles is always a challenge.

– Read famous works

I know that part of the challenge is to read less discovered books, but you’ll actually have an easier time finding books that gained some notoriety. Your local bookstore is more likely to sell a book if it has won the International Booker Prize, so maybe that’s a good place to start.

– Buy online

With the advantage of finding almost anything to buy online, the internet will be your friend here. I’m not a big fan of Amazon myself, but I’ll have to admit that I’ve found some of my titles there, especially in digital format.

5. Read, Read and Read!

There’s no mystery here, just do what you do best. But give yourself time to breathe now and then, and don’t feel pressured to finish the whole challenge in one year, that’s for the brave (which I’m not).

6. Keep Track of Your Progress

It’s no use reading all those books if you can’t keep track of how much of the challenge you have completed. Here are some options for you:

– Good old spreadsheet

To me, nothing beats a spreadsheet on Google Sheets or Excel. I’ll be creating a template with all the countries and sharing it here. For now, if you want to create your own table, just use some columns like country, book title, author and date read, and that will be enough to get you started.

– StoryGraph

One of the advantages of StoryGraph over Goodreads (other than the charts) is that you can create your own challenge with the prompts. You can join my challenge there and use the prompts to keep track of your progress. Just add the books to each prompt, and when you mark it as finished, it will automatically register as progress in your challenge.

– Manual entries

If you like a good old notebook or journal you can create your own tracker using some pen and paper. It will give you some work and you can’t exactly delete entries, but depending on your talent (and patience) it might look pretty good.

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And that’s pretty much all there is to it. Over the next weeks and months, I’ll be dropping more “Read the World” content, including sharing my own journey and why I decided to embark on this crazy journey. Stay tuned! =)