A woman spends a year reading a book from every country in the world

[shadowkat]

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What touched me or rather has stuck with me since reading the article and listening to the Ted Talk is :

In the fall of 2012, Ann Morgan was wrestling with a problem few of us can identify with. No matter how hard she tried, she simply could not find a book to read in English from the tiny African nation of Sao Tome and Principe. At a loss, she appealed for help on Facebook and Twitter, only to be deluged with offers from around the world to translate whatever work she chose from the Portuguese-speaking island. A small army of volunteers in Europe and the United States ultimately came to her rescue, translating chunks of Olinda Beja's 140-page The Shepherd's House into English.

The internet provides us with access to millions of minds around the globe, like-minded and otherwise. If we run into a fact-checking issue, we can ask if anyone knows or can verify an answer. If we are attempting to create our own language for a sci-fi novel, we can go online and a friend from miles away - can within a few hours, provide us with a way of doing it. If we want something edited? Go online and ask. And if we need something translated? We can go online and find translators.

People love to help one another in various ways, they just can't always find the right avenue.
The internet and correspondence/social media sites such as this one pave the way for that to happen.

I can't begin to list the number of times people on my correspondence list helped me out. Or the number of times, we helped each other out.

And I was thinking just the other night, how much I love reading journals and corresponding with people from around the globe. That I like being part of a "global" community. I love the diversity.
As a child, I used to have pen pals from various sections of the world. Every time an opportunity arose to write letters to someone from another country, I grabbed it. I had French pen pals (I was supposed to be writing in French to them...but sucked at it, so wrote in English, since they spoke and wrote English. They didn't mind -- it aided their English. But I learned all about the French educational system and judicial system from one pen pal, Natalie Regis, who was a Parisian and going on to law school to become a judge. ) Also had a pen pal from Turkey, who I adored. It's why I made an effort to visit Turkey in 2000, because I wanted to see the land and world that I'd read about as a teen.

The internet's gift is that now we can talk to people across space and time, with little effort. Share our stories, our travels, our picture, and our thoughts. Just the other night, I was flipping through an Englishman's photos of Dresden, Germany. A town that I knew two things about, outside of it being located in Germany. 1) It's the setting of Kurt Vonnegurt's novel Slaughter-House 5, and 2)it was the most bombed town in Germany during WWII. (OR so I've been told.)

And, we can learn not to mention access books, movies, television shows, and music from around the world without having to wait for someone to decide to distribute it. Without the internet, I'd have never self-published my book or gotten it distributed...it was far harder to do prior, and far more expensive. Nor would it have gotten to as large a readership.

Oh, almost forgot - HERE's THE BOOK LIST OF BOOKS IN EVERY COUNTRY IN THE WORLD THAT SHE READ

Comments

[petzipellepingo.livejournal.com]

Now that is just neat. Thanks for that.