full transcript

From the Ted Talk by Ann Morgan: My year reading a book from every country in the world

Unscramble the Blue Letters

The uohpst is that there are actually quite a lot of nations that may have little or even no cerolmaimcly available literature in English. Their books remain isnivbile to readers of the world's most published language. But when it came to reading the wlord, the biggest challenge of all for me was that fact that I didn't know where to start. Having spent my life reading almost exclusively brtisih and North American books, I had no idea how to go about sourcing and fnnidig stories and choosing them from much of the rest of the world. I couldn't tell you how to source a story from Swaziland. I wouldn't know a good novel from Namibia. There was no hiding it — I was a clueless literary xobpnohee. So how on earth was I going to read the world?

Open Cloze

The ______ is that there are actually quite a lot of nations that may have little or even no ____________ available literature in English. Their books remain _________ to readers of the world's most published language. But when it came to reading the _____, the biggest challenge of all for me was that fact that I didn't know where to start. Having spent my life reading almost exclusively _______ and North American books, I had no idea how to go about sourcing and _______ stories and choosing them from much of the rest of the world. I couldn't tell you how to source a story from Swaziland. I wouldn't know a good novel from Namibia. There was no hiding it — I was a clueless literary _________. So how on earth was I going to read the world?

Solution

  1. world
  2. commercially
  3. finding
  4. xenophobe
  5. british
  6. upshot
  7. invisible

Original Text

The upshot is that there are actually quite a lot of nations that may have little or even no commercially available literature in English. Their books remain invisible to readers of the world's most published language. But when it came to reading the world, the biggest challenge of all for me was that fact that I didn't know where to start. Having spent my life reading almost exclusively British and North American books, I had no idea how to go about sourcing and finding stories and choosing them from much of the rest of the world. I couldn't tell you how to source a story from Swaziland. I wouldn't know a good novel from Namibia. There was no hiding it — I was a clueless literary xenophobe. So how on earth was I going to read the world?

Frequently Occurring Word Combinations

ngrams of length 2

collocation frequency
north american 2
panama canal 2
são tomé 2

Important Words

  1. american
  2. biggest
  3. books
  4. british
  5. challenge
  6. choosing
  7. clueless
  8. commercially
  9. earth
  10. english
  11. exclusively
  12. fact
  13. finding
  14. good
  15. hiding
  16. idea
  17. invisible
  18. language
  19. life
  20. literary
  21. literature
  22. lot
  23. namibia
  24. nations
  25. north
  26. published
  27. read
  28. readers
  29. reading
  30. remain
  31. rest
  32. source
  33. sourcing
  34. spent
  35. start
  36. stories
  37. story
  38. swaziland
  39. upshot
  40. world
  41. xenophobe