If you have been exploring this blog, by now you know a lot about how to start your Read the World challenge and my own challenge status. Now it’s time to learn why on earth I decided to go on this crazy adventure. Sit back and enjoy the story.

I always enjoyed reading, but my book consumption was significantly reduced for some years – in the pandemic year of 2020 I read only one book, for instance – it seems like I had lost the joy of reading for a while.

In the meantime, my passion for data was at an all-time high. The year was 2022, and it was when I decided to become a professional Data Analyst. To get to know more about the industry, I created an Instagram account to share the work of small data viz online creators. It was then that I got exposed to lots of very cool data work that some bookstagramers are doing online, such as @bookographic, @busybusyreading and @ana_lyzer_reads.

This got me excited to look into my lists of books from a data perspective, so I set myself to work. The first thing I did was consolidate my reads list on Notion. Then I started to move the data to Tableau and play with different ways to visualize my literary journey.

I was exploring the map features of Tableau when it occurred to me: what if I start cataloging authors by place of birth?

So I started the painstaking task of researching all the 130+ authors I had on my catalog to see where they came from.

I made two important discoveries then:

1. Without even knowing, I had read a lot of authors from different countries. The first book that I remember loving, for instance (The Little Vampire), was written by Angela Sommer-Bodenburg, a German author.

2. The second discovery was that my most-read continent was not South America, where I come from, and not North America where I live. It was Europe. If you look at my favourite authors it becomes easier to understand: I consumed a lot of Agatha Christie (UK), J. K. Rowling (UK), Italo Calvino (Italy) and José Saramago (Portugal) when I was younger.

When you group books by country, the picture doesn’t get much prettier. Brazil was in first, with 67 books, but after that came the United States (43) and the UK (38). I had been living in Canada for almost seven years but had read only 3 authors from this country, and one of them in my childhood.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that reading European or American literature is bad. But reading mostly other literature to the detriment of the authors from my home country and the country that I call home, I think that’s a mistake. Reading what people from your country write over the years is a wonderful way to be in touch with your culture.

So I committed myself to reading more Brazilian and Canadian books from then on. Nice.

But then I kept looking at all those empty spaces on the map. I had barely touched Africa and there were still large portions of Asia undiscovered. Not to mention that I had only touched 4 countries in the whole of Latin America. I, who considered myself a connoisseur of Latin American Literature, had very little to show for.

That’s when I started researching how to find books from other countries and came across Ann Morgan’s blog. I’m sure her name is familiar by now, she was the inspiration behind many Read the World Challenges.

And that was how I started my challenge. I made several views for my Notion databases, some more Tableau dashboards and even drew charts on grid paper. And the more I tracked, the more excited I got about reading new authors.

It hasn’t been as hard as I thought. In 2023 I read books from 11 new countries. This year I’ll probably land on 10. Of course, as time goes by, it will get more and more difficult to find literature for the countries left – I haven’t worried about countries like Djibouti or Mauritania yet. But I’m sure by then more and more people will have joined the challenge, and it will be easier to find more sources.

What about you? What motivated you to read more divisively?