Reading the World - 100 Online Stories

One of my early posts on this blogs was about reading lists and my plan to make a list of (and read) online stories from as many countries as possible. This was inspired by this blogger's project A Year of Reading the World where she read one book from each of the 196 countries in one year.

I recently got as far with this as I think I can. I stopped when I'd collected and read 100 stories, and I thought I'd share.

Below is a list of one hundred different stories from 100 different countries that are available online (for free), written or translated into English. The bias is about a half science fiction, fantasy, speculative fiction etc. This reflects my tastes but also what was easiest to find. The gender balance is deliberately 50 male and 50 female authors.

There are many arguments in the definition of "from a country" (country of author's birth, country(s) of birth of author's parents, country where author lives etc.) but I've pretty much gone for self-identification. Where the author says they're from.

There's also some arguments to be had about what is a country. I've used the same list/definition as described here

My definition of story is suspect as some of these are excerpts from books. I haven't dare identify which genre (if any) I think the story belongs to as that's another set of arguments and I'd rather read than argue. Gender was determined by common pronoun use (he or she).

This exercise feels a little bit like stamp collecting but my main aim was to increase the diversity of my reading. The collection was mostly made in a magpie fashion (that one there fits my criteria - I'll grab it) with no time spent looking for the best (whatever that might mean) story or a representative story. I read at least 120 stories and choose 100 to meet the gender balance and excluded any stories I didn't finish. As I read each story I made a short comment in a notebook to keep track of my choices and have included those comments for other's amusement. Don't take the comments too seriously or too literally.

Use this as a resource to explore other works on the same web sites. Hopefully it inspires others to read outside their normal haunts.

Support the authors and the sites publishing these stories. They're a great resource. Many sites have subscriptions or donations. Use them. If you like an authors work seek out their publications and buy them.

Here is a list to the front of the sites where I've linked to more than a couple of stories.

More useful sites

• Free Speculative Fiction Online a list of links to online science fiction and fantasy stories published in professional venues.
• Asian speculative fiction authors
• Wikipedia Science fiction writers by nationality
• Wikipedia Speculative fiction by people of color
• List of African authors

100 Countries - 100 Online Stories

If you would like an offline epub of these stories for your own use have a look at the grabmybooks add on for Firefox or Chrome. Select the table then use the "Grab Selected Links" from the right click menu and it will download them into an ebook.

Please note any errors you spot in the comments. Also feel free to add links in the comments to a story from any of the 96 countries I've missed.