I still remember the first time a novel carried me somewhere I’d never been, written by someone whose name I could barely wrap my mouth around. It was Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, and I was seventeen, draped over a sagging sofa in a damp Swedish summer house. The heat of Kerala bled right through the pages—I could feel the sticky sweat of the monsoon even as rain tapped against my own window. That book didn’t just hand me a story. It rearranged my whole idea of what fiction could do. But it also planted a question that’s followed me through every passport-stamped page since: how do I read across cultures without turning into a literary tourist, snapping mental photos of the exotic and moving on unchanged?
There’s no tidy answer. It’s a tension I carry into every book I open that comes from a place, a people, or a perspective far from my own. And if you’ve found your way here, to this fledgling blog about books and the worlds tucked inside them, I suspect you carry it too.
The Reader as Guest, Not Tourist
There’s a difference between visiting a place and just sightseeing. A tourist shows up with a checklist: the famous monument, the local dish, the photo that proves they were there. A thoughtful guest arrives knowing they’re ignorant. They understand they’re stepping into a space that existed long before them and will keep on existing long after. They don’t expect to be catered to. They listen more than they talk.
When I read a novel from a culture outside my own, I try to take the posture of a guest. That means I don’t demand the story explain itself on my terms. I don’t expect footnotes for every unfamiliar word, a glossary of customs, or a protagonist who mirrors my own sensibilities. I accept that some things will stay opaque—and that this opacity isn’t a failure of the writing. It’s a feature of my own position. The book isn’t a tour guide; it’s a home, and I’ve been invited in.
This is harder than it sounds. The urge to understand everything, to flatten the unfamiliar into the familiar, is strong. I’ve caught myself, more than once, mentally translating a ritual or a relationship dynamic into something that fits my Swedish, middle-class framework. But that translation is a form of violence, however gentle. It erases what’s specific, what’s untranslatable, what makes the story that story and not some universal parable.
The Danger of the Single Story
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie warned us about the danger of a single story, and her warning applies as much to readers as to writers. If I read one Nigerian novel and then believe I understand Nigeria, I haven’t read well. I’ve collected a souvenir. Same goes for reading a novel about the partition of India and thinking I now grasp the subcontinent’s history. A single book is a window, not a panorama. It shows a view, framed by a particular author, at a particular time, with particular intentions. Mistaking that view for the whole landscape isn’t just lazy—it’s a kind of erasure.
So I read in clusters. After I finished The God of Small Things, I sought out other Indian writers, not to compare them to Roy but to let them complicate her vision. I read Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance, which showed me an India of urban desperation and political violence that Roy’s lush Kerala barely hinted at. I read Perumal Murugan’s One Part Woman, translated from Tamil, and found a rural world governed by codes I couldn’t have imagined from either Roy or Mistry. Each book didn’t complete the picture; it fractured it further, and that fracturing was the point. The more I read, the less I knew, and the less I knew, the more I understood how little any single story can hold.
The Problem of Translation and the Gift of Discomfort
Reading across cultures almost always means reading in translation, unless you’re one of those enviable polyglots who can switch between languages as easily as I switch between tea blends. Translation is a miracle and a compromise. It makes a text available to me, but it also filters it through another consciousness. The translator makes choices, and every choice is a small betrayal in service of a larger fidelity. I’ve learned to pay attention to translators’ names, to read their notes when they exist, to understand that the voice I’m hearing is a collaboration, not a solo performance.
Sometimes the discomfort of reading in translation is the point. When I read Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, translated from Korean by Deborah Smith, I felt a persistent unease I couldn’t pin solely on the novel’s disturbing content. The sentences moved in ways that felt unfamiliar to my English-reading brain. The silences between characters stretched longer, the violence arrived more suddenly, the symbolism drew from a well I couldn’t see the bottom of. I could have blamed the translation, but I chose instead to sit in that unease. I let it teach me that my expectations of narrative pacing, of psychological motivation, of what a novel should do, are culturally specific. They’re not universal. They’re not even particularly good; they’re just mine.
When the Book Resists You
Some books don’t want to be easy for outsiders. That’s not a flaw; it’s a boundary. I think of Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police, a novel that feels, on the surface, like a quiet dystopian fable. But its emotional logic, its relationship to loss and memory, is deeply Japanese. It doesn’t explain the cultural weight of objects disappearing, the collective resignation, the way grief is carried silently. As a Swedish reader, I’m accustomed to a certain emotional directness in literature—a legacy of Strindberg’s rages and Lagerlöf’s moral clarity. Ogawa’s novel asked me to set that aside, to accept that I wouldn’t fully understand why her characters acted as they did, and to find the story’s power in that very mystery.
This isn’t the same as exoticizing the text, treating it as a beautiful enigma that exists for my aesthetic pleasure. That’s the tourist’s trap: to revel in the strangeness without respecting the logic behind it. The guest’s approach is to acknowledge the boundary, to recognize that the book wasn’t written for me, and to be grateful for what it offers anyway.
Reading with Humility: What I Do Not Know
I have a shelf in my study that I think of as my humility shelf. It holds books I’ve read and loved but know I didn’t fully understand. There’s a copy of Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo, a novel so steeped in Mexican folklore and Catholic mysticism that I felt, on first reading, like I was wandering through a house where all the doors were locked. I could hear voices behind them, but I couldn’t make out the words. I finished it anyway, and I’ve returned to it twice since. Each time, a door creaks open. I don’t expect them all to open. I don’t need them to. The act of standing in the hallway, listening, is its own kind of reading.
This humility extends to what I choose to read and why. I try to be honest with myself about my motivations. Am I picking up this novel because I genuinely want to encounter another way of seeing the world, or because I want to feel virtuous about my diverse reading list? The latter is a form of literary tourism, a collecting of cultural capital. I’ve done it. I suspect many of us have. The antidote isn’t to stop reading across cultures but to read with more attention, more patience, and more willingness to be confused.
The Limits of Empathy
We often say that reading fiction builds empathy, and I believe it does. But empathy has limits, and pretending otherwise is another form of tourism. I can read a novel about the Rwandan genocide, about the Cultural Revolution in China, about the displacement of Palestinians, and I can feel moved, horrified, heartbroken. But I cannot know what those experiences were like. My empathy is an imaginative act, not a lived one. It’s a bridge, but a bridge that doesn’t quite reach the other shore. Recognizing that gap is, I think, essential to reading well. It prevents me from claiming an understanding I haven’t earned. It keeps me humble before the text and the lives it represents.
This isn’t to say that reading across cultures is futile. Far from it. The gap itself is instructive. It reminds me of my own particularity, my own embeddedness in a specific time and place and set of assumptions. A novel from another culture can make my own culture visible to me in ways that a domestic novel cannot. When I read a story in which family obligations operate differently, or shame attaches to different actions, or the boundary between the living and the dead is porous, I’m forced to see the contours of my own world. That’s a gift, even if it comes wrapped in discomfort.
Practical Ways to Read Across Cultures Without Tourism
Over the years, I’ve developed a few habits that help me read across cultures with more care and less presumption. They’re not rules, just practices that have served me well.
Read multiple books from the same region or tradition. One book is a snapshot; five books is a conversation. I try to read at least three authors from a country or cultural tradition before I feel I’ve even begun to listen properly. This doesn’t mean I become an expert; it means I become aware of my lack of expertise.
Seek out own-voices narratives, but don’t stop there. Own-voices literature is essential, but it’s not monolithic. Within any culture, there are dissenters, experimentalists, traditionalists, and iconoclasts. Reading only the most celebrated or most accessible voices can create a new kind of single story. I try to read across genres, across generations, across political and aesthetic divides.
Read the translator’s note. If the book is translated, the translator’s preface or afterword is often a masterclass in the cultural and linguistic challenges of bringing the text to a new audience. It can illuminate what I missed and why I missed it. I’ve learned as much about Korean literature from Deborah Smith’s translator’s notes as from the novels themselves.
Sit with your confusion. When a passage baffles me, I try not to rush to Google for an explanation. I let the confusion sit. I reread. I let the context do its slow work. Sometimes understanding comes; sometimes it doesn’t. Both outcomes are valuable.
Ask what the book expects of its reader. Every book is written with an implied reader in mind. A novel by a Nigerian author writing in English may be addressing a Nigerian audience, a global Anglophone audience, or both at once. A novel translated from Arabic may assume knowledge I don’t have. Asking who the book expects me to be helps me recognize when I’m an outsider and adjust my expectations accordingly.
The Joy of Being Lost
There’s a particular pleasure in reading a book that doesn’t cater to you. It’s the pleasure of being a guest in a home where the customs are unfamiliar, where you must watch others to know when to sit and when to stand, where the jokes fly over your head but the laughter is infectious anyway. I felt this most intensely reading Kalpa Imperial by Angélica Gorodischer, translated from Spanish by Ursula K. Le Guin. The book is a collection of stories about an imaginary empire, but its imagination is so thoroughly Argentine, so shaped by a history and a literary tradition I barely knew, that I felt perpetually off-balance. I loved it. I loved not knowing what was allegory and what was whimsy, what was political commentary and what was pure invention. I loved being lost.
That feeling of being lost is, I think, the opposite of tourism. A tourist never wants to be lost. A tourist wants a map, a guide, a clear path from attraction to attraction. A guest, a real guest, accepts that getting lost is part of the journey. It’s how you stumble into the back streets, the quiet corners, the places that aren’t in the guidebook. It’s how you meet the culture on its own terms, not yours.
FAQ: Reading Across Cultures with Respect
Is it okay to read books from cultures I know nothing about?
Absolutely. In fact, that’s often where the most transformative reading begins. The key is to approach the book with humility, not entitlement. Acknowledge your ignorance. Don’t expect the book to educate you fully or to represent an entire culture. Read it as one voice among many, and let it lead you to other voices. Ignorance isn’t a sin; refusing to recognize it is.
How do I know if I’m reading like a tourist?
You might be reading like a tourist if you find yourself focusing on the exotic details, if you’re collecting cultural facts rather than engaging with the story, or if you finish the book feeling like you’ve “conquered” a new culture. Another sign: you read one book from a country and feel qualified to make generalizations about it. The tourist reader consumes; the guest reader listens. Ask yourself which verb describes your reading.
Should I only read books from my own culture to avoid appropriation?
No. Reading across cultures isn’t appropriation; it’s engagement. Appropriation happens when someone takes stories that aren’t theirs and uses them carelessly, without respect for their origins. As a reader, you’re not taking anything; you’re receiving what the author has chosen to share. The ethical responsibility lies in how you receive it: with openness, with humility, and with a willingness to be changed rather than to collect.
What if I don’t enjoy a book from another culture? Does that make me a bad reader?
Not necessarily. Not every book is for every reader, and that’s true within cultures as well as across them. But before you decide you don’t enjoy a book, ask yourself why. Is it because the book is poorly written, or because it’s asking you to read in a way that feels unfamiliar? If it’s the latter, you might try sitting with the discomfort a little longer. Some of my most beloved books are ones I didn’t enjoy on first reading. They required me to grow into them.
Reading across cultures isn’t a checklist or a virtue signal. It’s a practice, a discipline, a way of opening yourself to the vastness of human experience without pretending you can hold it all. It’s learning to be a good guest in stories that weren’t written for you. And that, I’ve found, is one of the deepest pleasures a reading life can offer.
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