196本书带你读懂196个国家

If that wasn’t enough, politics threw me the odd curveball too. The foundation of South Sudan on 9 July 2011 – although a joyful event for its citizens, who had lived through decades of civil war to get there – posed something of a challenge. Lacking roads, hospitals, schools or basic infrastructure, the six-month-old country seemed unlikely to have published any books since its creation. If it hadn’t been for a local contact putting me in touch with writer Julia Duany, who penned me a bespoke short story, I might have had to catch a plane to Juba and try to get someone to tell me a tale face to face.
如果这还不够，政治因素更是给我出了个大难题。2011年7月9日南苏丹的建立，对于经历了数十年内战的国民来说可能是一件值的欢庆的事，某种意义上说却给我带来了一个挑战。没有公路、医院、学校或其它基础设施，这个六个月大的国家自建立以来便没有出版过任何的书。如果不是一个当地人帮助我联系上了作家茱莉亚?端妮，请她为我写下一个故事，我可能不得不飞到朱巴去找人面对面给我讲述一个故事。

All in all, tracking down stories like these took as much time as the reading and blogging. It was a tall order to fit it all in around work and many were the nights when I sat bleary-eyed into the small hours to make sure I stuck to my target of reading one book every 1.87 days.
总而言之，如此追索这些故事可能花费了和我看书、写博客差不多的时间。有时候很难找时间来完成所有的任务。有多少个夜晚我都是睡眼朦胧地看到凌晨，以确保达到平均每1.87天一本书的目标。

Head space
头脑空间

But the effort was worth it. As I made my way through the planet’s literary landscapes, extraordinary things started to happen. Far from simply armchair travelling, I found I was inhabiting the mental space of the storytellers. In the company of Bhutanese writer Kunzang Choden, I wasn’t simply visiting exotic temples, but seeing them as a local Buddhist would. Transported by the imagination of Galsan Tschinag, I wandered through the preoccupations of a shepherd boy in Mongolia’s Altai Mountains. With Nu Nu Yi as my guide, I experienced a religious festival in Myanmar from a transgender medium’s perspective.
然而所有的努力都是值得的。当我走过世界文学不同的地理风貌，不同寻常的事发生了。和那些坐在扶手椅上的旅行不同，我发现自己入住了故事讲述者们的心理世界。 在不丹作家昆赞?秋殿的陪伴下，我不仅仅是简单地参观了别具异域风情的寺庙，而是以一个当地佛教徒的身份进行了拜访。乘着格尔森?契那歌德想像的翅膀，我游走在蒙古阿尔泰山牧童的思想里。以努努依为向导，我从一个变性人的视角体验了缅甸的宗教盛典。

In the hands of gifted writers, I discovered, bookpacking offered something a physical traveller could hope to experience only rarely: it took me inside the thoughts of individuals living far away and showed me the world through their eyes. More powerful than a thousand news reports, these stories not only opened my mind to the nuts and bolts of life in other places, but opened my heart to the way people there might feel.
在这些天才作家掌握中，我发现，书带给了我一种外出旅行少有的经历：它把我带入了那些远方人们的思想当中，并且给我展示他们的双眼所观察到的世界。比成千上万新闻报道更有感染力的是，这些故事不仅让我看到了其它地区生活的点点滴滴，也让我与当地人感同身受。

And that in turn changed my thinking. Through reading the stories shared with me by bookish strangers around the globe, I realised I was not an isolated person, but part of a network that stretched all over the planet.
而这反过来改变了我原有的想法。通过读那些世界各地爱书人给我分享的书籍，我意识到我并不是一个孤立的人，而是属于一个覆盖全球的网络的一部分。

One by one, the country names on the list that had begun as an intellectual exercise at the start of the year transformed into vital, vibrant places filled with laughter, love, anger, hope and fear. Lands that had once seemed exotic and remote became close and familiar to me – places I could identify with. At its best, I learned, fiction makes the world real.
渐渐地，年初被当成智力训练而列下的国名，变成一个个充满欢笑、爱、愤怒、希望和恐惧的地方，活灵活现、意义非凡。曾经被我认为奇异和遥远的地方变得接近和熟悉---成了一个个我能清晰辨别的地方。最难能可贵的是，我学到：小说让世界变得真实。