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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.