Bibliofreakblog

My First Weekly Geeks: A Paltry 18% of the World

I’m not one for memes.  But I do like Weekly Geeks, and was sufficiently intrigued by everyones posts this week to do my own.  And after I created my own map, well, how could I not post it up?

This week Weekly Geeks asked the blogging community to create a map logging all of the countries they’ve visited, literarily, not literally.

Now, I have two theories on why I got the result I did on the above map, of which, you may have guessed the red portions represent the countries I have *visited*.  These two theories are diametrically opposed, because I can’t make up my mind if 44 countries is a lot or a little

So.  If it’s a little, which judging by some of of my fellow bloggers’ maps, is pretty average.  So, if only reading 18% of the world is what 18% sounds like–a small amount–I propose it is because there are not a lot of translations of books published from other parts of the world.  And the ones that there are?  Well, many of them are lost in the sea of English novels.  I’m not saying that there’s a reason for this.  Just a thought.

But, if that’s a lot, I propose it is because of the class I took when I studied abroad in college called International Women’s Short Stories, in which we used the Penguin anthology by the same name.  Also, my studies in Comparative Religion and Anthropology mean that I’m naturally curious about other places.  

Whether or not this is a lot or a little, I’m still not sure.

Shit.  I just forgot that Saving Fish From Drowning takes place in Myanmar.  And Tales of a Female Nomad is mostly in Indonesia.  I knew I wasn’t going to remember all of them.

And part of The Corrections takes place in Latvia.  Or was it Lithuania?  Damn.  Now I can’t remember.