I still remember the first time I read a novel set in a country I’d never visited, written by an author whose name I could barely pronounce. It was a sun-faded paperback of Things Fall Apart, handed to me by a university professor who said, “This will unsettle you in the best way.” She was right. The book didn’t just introduce me to Igbo culture; it made me feel the weight of a colonial encounter I’d only ever understood as a dry historical footnote. That experience planted a seed that’s grown into one of my most stubborn reading dilemmas: how do I, a Swedish book blogger with a deep love for world literature, read across cultures without becoming a literary tourist?
This question has no tidy answer. It lives in the margins of every translated novel I pick up, every work of autofiction from a region I’ve never set foot in. I’m Maren Lindqvist-Berg, and if you’ve spent any time here at In the Pages of a Good Book, you know I believe reading is an act of radical hospitality. But hospitality can curdle into intrusion if we’re not careful. The line between genuine cultural curiosity and a kind of intellectual souvenir-hunting is thinner than most of us want to admit.
The Reader as Guest, Not Sightseer
Let me be blunt: the publishing industry often nudges us into a tourist mindset. You see it in the way certain books are marketed—“A lively journey through the heart of Mumbai,” “An intimate portrait of a Japanese family.” The language frames the reader as a visitor who will be charmed, enlightened, and then returned safely home. There’s an unspoken promise that the foreignness will be manageable, that the cultural differences will be just exotic enough to feel enriching without becoming genuinely destabilizing.
I’ve caught myself in this trap more times than I care to count. A few years ago, I read a celebrated novel about a multigenerational Korean family, and I closed the book feeling oddly satisfied, as though I’d checked a box on some internal diversity list. That feeling made me deeply uncomfortable. I hadn’t sat with the grief in those pages. I hadn’t let the characters’ silences teach me anything about my own. I’d consumed the story like a well-plated dish at a fusion restaurant—enjoyable, but ultimately forgettable.
Real cross-cultural reading demands something harder: the willingness to be confused, to sit in discomfort, to accept that you’ll miss references and metaphors that aren’t meant for you. The Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has spoken beautifully about this, noting that when she reads Western literature, she’s expected to do the work of understanding cultural context, but Western readers often resist doing the same for African stories. That asymmetry is the root of the tourist problem. If we only read books that meet us exactly where we are, we’re not traveling at all—we’re just redecorating our own living rooms.
What Does It Mean to Do the Work?
Doing the work sounds noble, but what does it actually look like on a rainy Tuesday evening when you’re curled up with a novel set in rural Argentina? For me, it starts with humility. I accept that I won’t understand everything. When a character references a historical event I know nothing about, I pause. I look it up. Not obsessively—I don’t want to turn reading into a research seminar—but enough to honor the fact that the author wrote this book for a community that already knows that history. I’m a guest at their table, and guests should learn the basic customs of the house.
It also means resisting the urge to universalize too quickly. There’s a well-meaning impulse, especially among bookish types, to say things like, “At its core, this is a story about family, and family is the same everywhere.” That sentiment erases the very particularity that makes the book worth reading. A grandmother in Tehran is not the same as a grandmother in Uppsala, and pretending otherwise flattens both of them into sentimental clichés. Good cross-cultural reading requires us to hold the tension between the familiar and the strange without rushing to resolve it.
The Translator’s Invisible Labor
We can’t talk about reading across cultures without talking about translation. Every book we read in a language other than its original is a collaboration between the author and a translator who made thousands of tiny, invisible decisions. A good translator isn’t a machine converting words; she’s a cultural mediator, a poet, a diplomat. Yet most readers barely glance at the translator’s name on the title page. I’ve been guilty of this myself, and I’m trying to change.
Now, when I finish a translated novel, I read the translator’s note if there is one. I look up interviews with the translator. I try to understand what choices they made about dialect, formality, rhythm. For example, when I read Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori, I was struck by how the flat, almost robotic voice of the protagonist came through in English. That effect wasn’t accidental; it was the result of painstaking decisions about sentence structure and word choice. Recognizing the translator’s work doesn’t diminish the author’s achievement—it deepens my appreciation for the craft of bringing a story across a linguistic border.
Translation also raises uncomfortable questions about power. Which books get translated, and from which languages? The flow of literary translation is lopsided. English-language publishers translate a tiny fraction of their output, while writers from smaller language communities often must be translated into English to reach a global audience. When I read a novel translated from Swedish—my own mother tongue—into English, I feel a strange dislocation. I’m reading my own culture through a foreign lens, and it reminds me that translation is never neutral. Every translated book carries the fingerprints of its journey.
The Danger of the Single Story
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s famous TED talk warns against the danger of a single story: the risk of knowing only one narrative about a place or people and mistaking it for the whole truth. This danger is acute for cross-cultural readers. If I read only one Nigerian novel, I might unconsciously treat it as the definitive Nigerian story. If I read only one Japanese author, I might start seeing cherry blossoms and honorifics as the essence of Japan. The antidote is to read widely and humbly, to seek out multiple voices from the same region, to let them contradict each other.
I learned this lesson sharply when I read two Indian novels back-to-back: Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things and Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance. Both are set in India, both are devastating, but they inhabit completely different worlds. Roy’s Kerala is lush, intimate, and claustrophobic; Mistry’s Mumbai is sprawling, political, and brutally indifferent. Reading them together shattered any illusion I had that I now “understood” Indian literature. Instead, I understood that I’d barely scratched the surface.
This is why I keep a running list of countries and regions whose literature I’ve only sampled once or twice. The list isn’t a checklist to complete—that would be the tourist mindset again—but a reminder of my own ignorance. It whispers: You’ve read one Kenyan novel. Don’t dare to form an opinion about Kenyan literature. It pushes me to seek out a second, a third, a tenth.
When the Reader Is the Outsider
Some books are not written for me. That’s a hard sentence to write, but it’s true. There are novels where the cultural references, the humor, the rhythm of the prose assume a reader who shares the author’s background. When I read those books, I’m an outsider, and I need to accept that role without resentment or self-pity.
I felt this acutely when I read Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. The novel is, in part, about the experience of being a Nigerian immigrant in America, and it contains long, sharp, hilarious passages about race in the United States. As a white Swedish woman, I wasn’t the intended audience for those passages. I could appreciate the craft, but I knew the laughter in those pages wasn’t for me. That realization was humbling, and it was necessary. It taught me something about my own position in the world that a more “accessible” book might have let me ignore.
This is where the tourist metaphor breaks down in a useful way. A tourist expects to be welcomed, catered to, made comfortable. A guest, in the deeper sense, accepts that some rooms in the house aren’t open to them. Some conversations at the dinner table aren’t meant for their ears. The host sets the boundaries, and the guest respects them. When I read a book that doesn’t explain its cultural references, that doesn’t translate its idioms, that doesn’t pause to make sure I’m keeping up, I’m being reminded of my place. That reminder is a gift, not a slight.
Building a Reading Practice of Humility
So how do we, as readers who care about literature and about the world, build a practice that resists the tourist mindset? I’ve been working on this for years, and I still fail regularly. But here are some habits that have helped me.
Read slowly. Cross-cultural reading isn’t a race. If I’m reading a book set in a culture I know little about, I give myself permission to go at half my usual speed. I pause to look up words, historical events, religious practices. I let the book take the time it needs.
Read multiple books from the same region. I try to read at least two or three books from any country or cultural tradition before I feel I have even a fragment of understanding. Better yet, I read across genres—a novel, a memoir, a collection of poetry. Each genre illuminates different corners of a culture.
Read books by diaspora authors. Diaspora writers often occupy a unique position, navigating between their heritage culture and their adopted one. Their books can serve as bridges, but they also remind us that cultures aren’t static, bounded things. They travel, mix, and transform.
Seek out own-voices reviews. Before or after reading a book from a culture not my own, I look for reviews by readers who share that background. Their insights often reveal layers I missed entirely. This practice has saved me from many embarrassing misinterpretations.
Accept discomfort. Not every book will feel welcoming. Some will challenge my assumptions, offend my sensibilities, or bore me with references I don’t understand. That discomfort is part of the point. If I only read books that make me feel smart and included, I’m not really reading across cultures at all.
The Particular Pleasures of Being a Stranger
For all the difficulty, there’s a strange, luminous pleasure in reading as an outsider. When I don’t understand a ritual or a joke, I’m forced to pay a different kind of attention. I notice the shape of sentences, the weight of silences, the way characters touch or don’t touch. I become, in a sense, a better reader—more observant, less presumptuous.
I remember reading The Vegetarian by Han Kang, translated by Deborah Smith, and being utterly bewildered by the protagonist’s decision to stop eating meat. In my Swedish context, vegetarianism is often a political or environmental choice. But in Han Kang’s novel, it’s something far stranger—a rebellion against the very structure of society, a descent into a kind of holy madness. I didn’t fully understand it, and that not-understanding was the point. The book left a splinter in my mind that I’m still worrying at, years later.
That splinter is, for me, the mark of a truly great cross-cultural reading experience. It’s not the comfortable glow of having “learned something” about another place. It’s the sharp, persistent awareness that my own ways of thinking aren’t universal. That my assumptions about family, food, the body, time, love, and death are culturally shaped. That there are other ways to be human, and I’ve only glimpsed a few of them.
FAQ: Reading Across Cultures
How do I choose books from cultures I know nothing about?
Start with curiosity, not obligation. If a particular country or region intrigues you—because of its history, its food, its music, a news story you can’t shake—follow that thread. Look for award-winning authors from that region, or ask at your local library or independent bookstore. Many literary prizes, such as the International Booker Prize, highlight translated works and can be excellent entry points. Once you find one book you love, use it as a gateway: read other works by that author, then explore their contemporaries.
What if I feel completely lost while reading?
Feeling lost isn’t a sign of failure; it’s a sign that you’re genuinely encountering something unfamiliar. Pause and reflect: what exactly is confusing you? Is it a historical reference, a cultural practice, a narrative style? A quick internet search can often provide enough context to continue without breaking the flow of reading. If the confusion persists, consider reading a nonfiction book about the culture or history of the region before returning to the novel. Sometimes, the best response is simply to keep reading and let the story teach you its own context over time.
Is it okay to read books in translation, or should I only read works originally written in English?
Reading in translation is not only okay—it’s essential if you want to read beyond the Anglosphere. Only about 3% of books published in the United States each year are translations, which means vast literary traditions remain inaccessible to monolingual English readers without translators’ work. A good translation is an art form in itself. Pay attention to the translator’s name, read their notes, and seek out translations that are widely praised for their sensitivity to the original text.
How can I avoid stereotyping a culture based on a single book?
The simplest answer is to read more. One book offers a window, not a panorama. Seek out multiple authors from the same culture, especially those with different backgrounds—different genders, classes, regions, political perspectives. Read across genres: a satirical novel will show you a different side of a culture than a historical epic or a poetry collection. Be wary of books that claim to represent an entire nation or people; the best literature usually resists such totalizing claims. And listen to readers from that culture when they tell you a book isn’t representative.
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