The smart response to a set of made-up rules is to tweak them before anyone knows you will break them. We do it with diets. Treasurers do it with budgets. I did it with books.

About a year ago, I was nearing certain failure in my attempt to read my way around the world. I was supposed to be on the latest leg of a journey that began during the travel bans of the pandemic, when I aimed to read 52 books from 52 countries in 52 weeks.

Some of the books read by David Crowe. Credit: Jamie Brown

My daughter set me the challenge, and it was almost effortless in the first two years, when I escaped Australia with every turn of a title page, and wrote about it here.

By the end of 2024, I was stuck. Sometimes it took me weeks to get through a book. Then it took me forever to choose the next one. That’s why this column is about reading 52 books from 52 countries in 52 fortnights.

If this was reality television, I would have been voted off the island. Luckily, this challenge had no jury and only one judge. So I bent the rules.

It wasn’t that all the books were bad. It’s just that I was slow, like an exhausted traveller missing a flight.

I loved my time in Tokyo with a strange narrator in Convenience Store Woman, by Sayaka Murata. And in colonial Malaysia during a visit by Somerset Maugham in The House of Doors, by Tan Twan Eng. I was immersed in Santo Domingo and New Jersey in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Díaz. I was moved by the tale of a young boy in Libya thanks to Hisham Matar and his novel, In The Country of Men.

The thing about the arbitrary list, however, is that I could land in a place I was desperate to leave. I regretted stopping in North Korea to read about Kim Jong-un and his family in The Sister, by Sung-Yoon Lee. This took an academic approach to what should be an engrossing story of dynastic politics and totalitarian cruelty.

Thank goodness for great writers such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Her collection, The Thing Around Your Neck, landed me in short stories from Nigeria, but many will know her as a powerhouse who roams across national borders. One story, about an arranged marriage, was even better on a second reading. The recent news about the death of her son is heartbreaking.

I experimented with stories from worlds that were invented or no longer existed. One was The Wizard of Earthsea, by Ursula Le Guin. The other was The Radetzky March, by Joseph Roth, set during the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Another book from a different world was Orbital, by Samantha Harvey, set on the international space station. This was light on plot and heavy on description, more like a long........

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