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Ep. 36. Ann Morgan, Relearning to Read: Adventures in Not Knowing
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In today's episode I talk to Ann Morgan about her book Relearning to Read: Adventures in Not Knowing (2025)
Ann Morgan is an author and speaker based in Folkestone. Her first book, Reading the World, came out of a 2012 project to read a book from every country in a year (ayearofreadingtheworld.com). This sees Ann continuing to blog about international literature, and corresponding and collaborating with writers, readers and literary organisations around the world to champion the sharing of stories underrepresented in mainstream anglophone publishing. Ann is also the author of two novels, international bestseller Beside Myself and Crossing Over. Her latest non-fiction book, Relearning to Read: Adventures in Not-Knowing (Renard Press, 2025), explores the unlearning that armchair travel requires, and celebrates how embracing incomprehension can help us read ourselves and our world better.
Book recs:
- Tété-Michel Kpomassie, Michel the Giant: An African in Greenland (trans. James Kirkup and Ross Schwartz)
- Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume (trans. Barbara J. Haveland)
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Follow Ann on Instagram (@ayearofreadingtheworld), bluesky (@annmorgan.bsky.social) or at https://ayearofreadingtheworld.com.
Produced, hosted, and edited by Chris Lloyd.
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Background
00:00:02
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Books Up Close. I'm Chris Lloyd. This is a close reading show for readers, writers and anyone interested in how texts get made. In today's episode, I talk to Anne Morgan about her book Re-Learning to Read Adventures in Not Knowing.
00:00:17
Speaker
This is one of the episodes about the practice of close reading. Anne is an author and speaker based in Folkestone. Her first book, Reading the World, came out of 2012 project to read a book from every country in a year.
00:00:29
Speaker
Anne is also the author of two novels, the international bestseller Beside Myself and Crossing Over.
Book Organization and Genre Challenges
00:00:34
Speaker
Her latest nonfiction book, Relearning to Read, explores the unlearning that armchair travel requires and celebrates how embracing and comprehension can help us read ourselves and our world better.
00:00:44
Speaker
Anne, so nice to see you. Thank you. It's lovely to be here. Before we started even recording, we were talking about my bookshelves because I finally got good bookshelves behind me. Dan was talking about and I can see her books too.
00:00:57
Speaker
And we were talking about organization of books. And now I actually want to ask you about your organization even because I said I split mine into fiction, nonfiction and poetry. But as soon as I said that to you,
00:01:09
Speaker
there are some of those books that kind of in between, right? Like that become difficult to categorize. I've got my Claudia Rankine books are, you know, some of them are definitively poetry. Some are more essay, you know, it opens up a lot of questions about genre, right? Which yeah you do talk about in this book. Do you know when Ella Frears' Good Lord? i mean, it's marketed by the publisher as a novel, but it's actually a narrative poem. So it's kind of, yeah, well, it's a long email written as a poem. So how does, you know, how, where would that sit on your shelves?
Fiction vs Nonfiction Debate
00:01:42
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. Does the publisher's kind of designation make a difference, right, versus what the author wanted and thought about? i Yeah, got kind of a america it's kind of interesting. In America, if you get books published in America, they will always put a novel under. So my first novel beside myself in America it was beside myself, a novel. So that needs to be made clear. Whereas in the UK, we don't have that convention. it's It's interesting. But yeah, no, I think...
00:02:09
Speaker
This idea that there's a clear line between fiction and nonfiction is is problematic, to say the least. And particularly when you start to venture around the world, that definitely doesn't
Personal Reading and Engagement
00:02:20
Speaker
necessarily hold true. And in in many traditions, the idea that stories would be all made up or all factual doesn't really hold water at all. So, yeah, it's an interesting one. Maybe maybe I'm going to have to abandon these shelves and start again.
00:02:35
Speaker
Well, it's your shelves. You can do what you like. That's the thing. A reading quest, organisation is personal. And that's part of the joy of it, isn't it? You have dominion over it. And, you know, my reading quest, when I read The World, I always say to people, um you know, I set out to read a book from every country in the world in a year in 2012. And that was reading, it was my world, someone else would read a different world. There are lots of people who use my website, follow, look at the list and we'll kind of take recommendations from it And that's great. I hope that they enjoy them. But I always say, do you kind of, you know, look further, do do your own research, follow your own interests.
00:03:11
Speaker
Something that I chose may not be what you would choose. And that's, that's as it should be. Yeah, it's a very personal thing, even when you think like, oh, I'm just making a very ah specific decision with how I'm arranging these books. But actually, maybe says a lot about how I go to those shelves, right? or what I want from those shelves as I move towards them.
00:03:28
Speaker
Exactly. I mean, you know, my organisation of books is nowhere near as as neatly defined as yours. um it's It's more to do with what I need the books to do. So I do have all the books you can probably sort of behind me on my on my right, your left screen.
00:03:44
Speaker
That shelf there, it has a huge number of different things on, but it has all the books, all the hard copies from my 2012 quest arranged roughly in country order so that I know where to go to get them. But then there's another funny little bookcase behind me here. And there are a couple of shelves on that that have all my books of the month, recent books of the month, so that I can go and get those if I need to refer to them. And then over here where you can't see... there are two bookshelves that have all the books that people have pressed into my hands yeah that I'm supposed to read at some point. But they're not books that I have to read. So I have books that I read for work. So I do quite a lot of interviews at literary festivals and things and events with other writers. And so i would those are books that I have to read for work. But these are other things that people have... would like me to read and maybe I'll be able to read. um like for trouble is And you probably get this too, Chris.
00:04:35
Speaker
People tend to imagine that if you do professional things with books, that you'll somehow have this magic power where you sort of spend 20 minutes with a book and you've internalised the whole thing.
Balancing Professional and Personal Reading
00:04:46
Speaker
and Yeah.
00:04:47
Speaker
Inhaled it sort of. And i I suppose I'm not the slowest reader in the world. Certainly when I read a book from every country back in 2012, I was pretty quick by the end of it. But I'm definitely not, you know, a speed reader. And um it is several hours to read books.
00:05:04
Speaker
ah a short book yeah for me yeah um so there's no way that I can and sometimes I mean some of the books people give me for presents you know i' like these fat tomes and I think what when when am I actually when do you imagine I'm going to get the time for that but lovely though I'm sure it would be to read it yeah maybe one day Maybe one day. I mean, i just saw as I was like doing some rearranging that I've got a book proof that, you know, someone sent me like the paperback is already out. And I i didn't even i haven't even started reading the proof yet. i'm i Oh, well, I did get that one quite a long time ago. so just do we have to magic the time to make these to the reading happen.
Close Reading Practices
00:05:42
Speaker
So today we're going to talk about your book, Re-Learning to Read. But before that, the question I ask everyone on this show is how you feel about close reading. This is a show about close reading. We're not going to close read your book, but your book to me is about close reading in very particular ways.
00:05:57
Speaker
But I'll ask you more about that in a minute. But how do you feel about close reading generally as an activity or a practice? I think it's a really wonderful, interesting thing. I have mixed feelings about it. So at the moment, I'm reading Robert Douglas Fairhurst's and Look Closer, which is obviously a sort of Bible of close reading and a beautiful book and beautiful description of how he approaches text and the attention, the close attention he pays to reading and and the extraordinary insights that he
00:06:29
Speaker
gleans through that and I think that's that's incredibly, know it's really inspiring and and enjoyable. And as an a student of English literature, I very much enjoyed what we call practical criticism, um where you're you know perhaps presented with a poem that you might have an hour to and pick and um write your responses to you and and it's incredibly satisfying.
00:06:51
Speaker
i I suppose that the slight maverick in me, the slight rebel, which um I think is a thread that runs through all my work, makes me slightly wary of anything that feels and prescriptive or that demanding a particular approach of people. And I know that for some people, the idea of you know being forced to sit for ages mulling over a little bit of text would feel like a kind of punishment.
00:07:16
Speaker
And really what I think reading should be about should is about personal engagement with the text. So for some people that may be close reading and that may be the beautiful, almost spiritual engagement that someone like Robert Douglas Fairhurst has with with books in that way. and But for other people, they may read differently and they may not necessarily read in that way. And I don't know that that's always a bad thing.
00:07:39
Speaker
We do you have an episode with Robert just just to draw the link
Personal Engagement and Interpretation
00:07:42
Speaker
between the... Fantastic. How could I not with a book title like that? But yeah, I think one of the joys for me in teaching close reading is saying like, there's not one way to do this, which which is not always the way it's taught necessarily or the way it's talked about. But with students, it's kind of exciting to be like, no, no, I just... Like, what do you see?
00:08:01
Speaker
You know, and there's something ah that you you're quite attentive to in this book about... the kind of personal response to reading, right? Like how you're finding the book, how you, A, how you come across the book, how it makes its way to you, what you then do with it, how you respond to it. so there's a real sense of like the individual and the text. Yeah. I think for me, it's about reading, reading yourself, perhaps through the book, using the book almost as a mirror.
00:08:28
Speaker
to read your own responses, to read your own tendencies, to learn things about yourself that may surprise you or may trouble you perhaps, or or may inspire you to do you further research or make some changes in your approach to certain things.
00:08:44
Speaker
And that's interesting. So i that's a kind of close reading of yourself. and And with that in parallel, a kind of close reading of the world in in a more kind of a broader sense than simply reading a book, but reading situations, reading people, reading dynamics, reading how different situations play out, which interests me. But I think that can all that all circles around what we do with books.
Books as Tools for Understanding the World
00:09:10
Speaker
Yeah, in the first episode of this new season, I talked to Elaine Castillo, whose book How to Read Now, she talks about reading as like, that books are waypoint to reading, like the world, not the other way around, right? It's like we don't learn to read to read books. She said we learn to read books that we can read everything, you know, how how we're situated. And it's such an interesting turnaround from what we might be used to. So that definitely speaks to what you're saying there. Definitely, absolutely. Absolutely.
00:09:35
Speaker
So this book, Relearning to Read Adventures in Not Knowing, this was one of those books that got handed to me by someone being like, hey, you'll like this. And I did and I read it and, you know, I flew through it and that's this book is quite heavily marked. I've got another episode coming up about annotation. So ah there'll be interesting to know about that. There's lots of pages folded over where I had thoughts and there's lots of question marks and exclamation marks in mind. But could you just tell listeners there's a little bit about the book, what it's about or how you conceive of it?
Re-Learning to Read: Anne's Book
00:10:04
Speaker
Yeah, so relearning to read um links back to my original Reading the World, Year of Reading the World project. um And it deals with something that took me some years to unpick that came out of that project, which was that I realised when I was going to set out to read one book from every country in, you know, 365 days, the way that I had learnt to read or the way that I had assumed I should read wasn't going to work because I had... grown up reading and been educated to read by bringing knowledge to the texts that I read, bringing context to them, trying to unpick all the nuances and resonances of the words, in a way perhaps similar to some of the close reading techniques we've just described.
00:10:48
Speaker
And so, you know, thinking about, a well, in Shakespeare's day, corn was threshed in this way, and this means that this metaphor has This potential implication, but it could also demonstrate that the character is feeling sad and it could do all these extraordinary things that you can tease out and are really enriching and really wonderful. And nothing that I say in the book and nothing that I teach or talk about in my reading practice is to undermine academia and close study of books. I think it's it's a wonderful thing. um But I simply realised that when I was embarking on a quest which would require me to read one book every 1.87 days and write my response about it, there was not going to be any time to do any of the reading around that i would have done um if I were writing about a book in an academic way.
Navigating Context and Personal Engagement
00:11:35
Speaker
And in many cases, books would have come from traditions that were entirely unfamiliar to me, where I had no idea what the what the mores were, what the norms were, where I couldn't be certain whether a character performing in a certain way was unusual for that society or simply something typical for a man in his 30s getting married or whatever.
00:11:55
Speaker
And where I couldn't be certain if something was a joke or where there would be lots of references that I wouldn't even recognise as references. And so I realised this was at first incredibly daunting um because I thought, oh, God, I'm going to look really stupid because I'm not going to know what to say about this book. These books, I'm not going to know what I'm talking about. And I'm writing about my responses on this blog that is being read by people all over the place. And You know, it was really um quite a crisis in some senses.
00:12:24
Speaker
But I realised the only approach I could take to this was to admit that I couldn't understand everything. I couldn't be certain I would know the answers or I would i would get the meaning of many things and that be open about that and and do what I can, see if I could still have a meaningful engagement with these books in spite of the fact that there was going to be a lot I wouldn't understand.
00:12:45
Speaker
And what started out as a necessity actually became a revelation for me because I discovered that by noticing when I didn't understand something and paying attention to that and asking myself questions about it, I unlocked all sorts of different things. I learned more about myself. I learned to read myself better in the way that we we touched on earlier, um to understand more about my own conditioning and biases, my tendencies, the things that I tend to reach for to plug the gaps, I don't understand. Because I think this is one of the fascinating things about reading. You know, we often think about reading as being the words on the page, but pages and words and stories have lots of gaps in them. Because writers cannot put down that many details, actually, if you think of all the stimuli coming at us all the time, there's no way you could reflect all of that on the page. So writers have to be very selective. And they they put gaps in their stories. And one of the things that makes reading so satisfying is it's collaborative.
00:13:42
Speaker
ah We work with the text, with the writer to build the world. And we fill those gaps with our own imaginings. When we're reading something that comes from a familiar world, we tend to plug those gaps with things that fit quite neatly. And we're probably broadly in line with what the original author intended. But if we're reading something that comes from a very unfamiliar world, we may plug those gaps with all sorts of things that don't fit very well.
00:14:08
Speaker
and have nothing to do with what the the original author was envisaging. And that may, in the end, present us with quite an interesting picture that tells us more about ourselves than about the story or the the world that's being described. So learning what you tend to reach for, because all of us have different things that we reach for when we're not certain. And my defaults might be things like Bible stories or folklore or history. You might reach for ah your family story or places you've been to, pop culture or poetry. You know, there are all kinds of things that we resort to and none of us have exactly the same larder of things to draw on in
Workshops and Embracing the Unknown
00:14:46
Speaker
that way. so So all these things were ideas that were circling around my head for a long time. And in the end, I set up
00:14:53
Speaker
I started to run these incomprehension workshops to explore this idea of paying attention to not knowing. And I just i'd I'd recently been approached by the Cheltenham Literature Festival a few years ago to ask if I would be their literary explorer in residence. They were setting up this theme, Read the World, and they wondered if I could help with that. and it's ah It's a lovely title. I still don't really know what it means. But what I've decided it means is that I suggest unusual ideas about international literature. And sometimes they say yes. And in return, they get me to share lots of things and and take part in various events. And one of the things, one of the ideas I suggested was these reading workshops, incomprehension workshops.
00:15:30
Speaker
And I think they probably weren't too sure about this because they gave me their free venue in the catering tent, where basically had a little sort of dais in the corner and lots of tables where people were eating their lunch and not interested in what I was going on about. And the great thing about this venue was that you very quickly saw if something was working.
00:15:50
Speaker
And the extraordinary thing about these workshops, these incomprehension workshops, where What I basically did was I turned the school comprehension exercise upside down. So, you know, when you're given an extract of text and you're asked questions about it, what does this word mean? Rewrite the sentence and otherwise all that.
00:16:05
Speaker
I turned that upside down. So I gave people extracts of texts from books likely to be far outside their comfort zone or their experience. And I got them to ask questions about them. You know, what what don't you understand? what What would you like to know more about? And amazingly, these workshops, by the end of them, every time I ran them, there were about 50 or 60 people who would be They're engaged, taking part, really excited. People of all ages, people of all backgrounds.
00:16:30
Speaker
And I realised this was an extraordinary thing, a great leveller in a way, because no matter your education, no matter your cultural exposure, no matter how many languages you speak, No one can be an expert in all the world's literatures. They're just simply too many languages, too many stories, too many cultures. And so that means all of us, no matter who we are, will come to a point where we can't understand everything or we can't be certain of everything. And so all this requires is the ability to pay attention to yourself and to ask questions. And anyone can do that. And that is a lovely thing. It's a great way of bringing people together and and exploring reading in a through a slightly different lens, I think.
00:17:11
Speaker
So that was really down to the book. Did you find resistance in people to the idea of like not knowing? Like I i know from teaching students, at least, like there's a real fear or anxiety, at least this time out, Dan, like an anxiety about like not and getting it.
00:17:27
Speaker
as though there was something to get, right? I feel like much of my teaching life is just being like, it doesn't matter if you don't get it. i don't think you can get the novel or get the poem. But like, were there people in those workshops that were kind of resistant to the idea of not knowing?
00:17:41
Speaker
Absolutely. I mean, not just in the workshops, but in myself, i encountered resistance. So I realised that... I think many of us, you know, not knowing things, there's good reason why we have fear of it or we're we're anxious about it, which is because we're educated to believe often that, um and it sounds like teachers like you don't do this, Chris, but there are many structures in our education system that put emphasis on getting the right answer and success and um cleverness being about how much you know. Even programmes like University Challenge, um for example, carry the implication that education is about cramming your head with information and being able to get the right answer. Whereas really, I think at least it should be about how we think and, you know, how we use our brain and how we marshal facts to arrive at an understanding, a deeper understanding of things.
00:18:36
Speaker
So we often hide, I think we often hide when we don't understand from ourselves. And I certainly often know that if I, if something irritates me, if I tell myself this is badly written, or this isn't for me, or there's, you know, there's something wrong with this, it might be the case that it's not a well-written book, but it often and is the case that there's something I have missed or something I don't understand or something about it that unsettles me.
00:19:03
Speaker
And so I've learned to try and press on those things. And often in in the workshops, if someone would get annoyed about something, oh, this this is ridiculous, or why yeah why has this been written like this? I will gently try and encourage them to wonder about why that has annoyed them so much. And sometimes it will be the case that there's something interesting there that we can tease out together that might... might reveal there's something that they haven't quite connected there, or a gap that is worth paying attention to.
00:19:35
Speaker
yet you're absolutely right. That's a classic thing, I think, people, you know, many of us, and and it's understandable, the way our culture works, you know, we're socialised to regard ignorance as a weakness.
00:19:47
Speaker
Yeah, and i and I do think you're right. earlier education, I love teachers. Just putting that on the record, teachers are wonderful. But curricula and exam boards reduce texts to arguments or or singular meanings, right? So that like, if you're analysing the tempest, it's like about a particular thing and you need to say that particular thing in order to get an A or they do numbers now, don't they? I sound really old, but...
00:20:11
Speaker
some of the work at university is kind of undoing that being like no no no I'm not expecting you to have a singular response to this poem I kind of just want to see how you come at it right what you do with it how you make sense of the language or not make sense of the language if that's the case yeah but I think that's a hard sell often definitely yeah I think I think it is and and I think one of the many issues that our society our world faces at the moment is a reluctance to and to take a more humble approach about certain things or to admit that we may not understand everything or that there may be another side or something we haven't seen yet.
The Value of Uncertainty in Reading
00:20:49
Speaker
It is, you know, it's something very much in certainly in Western capitalist culture that is seen as a a desirable thing to be right, to be strong, to be definitive. And I think sometimes it does us a disservice.
00:21:02
Speaker
Yeah. And I think that kind of flows throughout this book about you offered lots of different ways of leaning into not knowing if you like, or like the experience of not knowing. And it was only after I'd finished the book that made me think of this book by Emily Ogden. I'm not sure if you know, it's called On Not Knowing. and It's over there somewhere. And i was like, oh my God, I forgot about this book.
00:21:21
Speaker
It's a really beautiful book of like these short meditations, really. And her definition, I thought I would share with you and see how it responds to your book. She says, when I talk about unknowing, i am not talking about the refusal to know what can be known or about the simple accident of not having found something out yet, nor even, although this is warmer, about the fact that we will each absorb only a finite amount of knowledge in the course of our finite lives.
00:21:48
Speaker
Instead, I'm talking about a capacity to hold the position of not knowing yet, possibility of not knowing ever. And I wonder how you feel about that idea. I absolutely i mean, that chimes with so much um that I often talk about. i mean, when I say, you know, I talk about not knowing it's not a complacent. I don't know. And I don't care.
00:22:08
Speaker
And sometimes the response to not knowing is to go and find out, is to go and do further reading, is to research. But actually, I don't think that should always be the default or the immediate response. I think there is value in sitting with not knowing and as Emily Ogden says, to you're being open to the fact that some things may never be answered. You can't Google everything. And actually that not knowing may be rich in itself.
00:22:34
Speaker
It may reveal things that, um unexpected things, gifts that perhaps we didn't expect. So, yeah, I i think that's a beautiful, a beautiful description.
00:22:45
Speaker
And like the the capacity to hold the position, right? She's talking about like, that's actually some kind of work you have to do to not want to shut down. What kind of advice do do you give to people to like, how do you hold the position? How do you expand your capacity to like,
00:23:01
Speaker
not want to reduce, not want to kind of close in. It is tiring. and And there are times when it it feels like too much work. I think that's fair to say. I think it's, I sometimes talk about having a filing cabinet um in my mind for questions or and where I try and i will put a question that is unanswered as yet, maybe answered later. that Sometimes books answer their own questions or answer the questions that they arise raise in my mind. I mean, for example, as I mentioned earlier,
00:23:32
Speaker
you know, if if you're uncertain whether a character is simply following societal norms, or and whether they're doing something that is aggressive or unusual, or defines them in some way, ah the story may reveal that because we may later discover more about that character that shows us they are actually a very ah conformist person, or they are a maverick, or they are So we may come to learn these things.
00:23:59
Speaker
So having that having that filing cabinet, that almost like cases that are open and where these things are slotted. So you don't feel that you're letting go of them, but they're there. They're somewhere there.
00:24:09
Speaker
It's a bit I sometimes think of it a bit like yoga where you're holding a difficult pose and it does eventually have to clap collapse into a kind of knowing. You do have to eventually arrive at some sort of conclusion, even if it's not a complete conclusion.
00:24:22
Speaker
Otherwise, what is the point of reading and writing? It is to communicate. But the longer you can hold that, the longer you can stay in that strange, slightly uncomfortable state, the more toned your thinking becomes, the more live, the more flexible you you are in your approach.
00:24:40
Speaker
So it is, it is yeah, it it's being prepared to admit that in the moment it may be slightly frustrating or or um difficult much as if you're doing exercise it may be frustrating in the moment but it yields rewards afterwards in which case what do you think unknowing or and not or not knowing can do for like close reading or for our reading practices like is there a way of connecting those two ideas that might be helpful for us Well, I suppose, i mean, it's paying attention to the other possibilities, isn't it? So if you're building a, ah you're paying attention to it, the way a certain word works, well, is is my interpretation the only way of looking at this? Why have i been drawn to this particular reading? Why has my eye been caught by this particular word or phrase or you know um set of images? How does stepping back and thinking about other possibilities inform my understanding of the book? It may be that it entrenches us further in our interpretation and and confirms us as you know, in our particular position, but it may be that it opens up other possibilities.
Alternative Interpretations in Reading
00:25:51
Speaker
I mean, Robert Douglas Fairhurst talks about this in his book as well. How would it be said differently? What are the alternatives? If you're trying to understand the work that a word is doing in a sentence, if you replaced it with something else, what might that do? um i suppose I'm perhaps looking at it from the other side of the coin, which is if my reading is is placing emphasis on this particular word, well, if I
00:26:13
Speaker
placed emphasis on something else, what might that do? How might that change my thinking about it? Why is it that this particular reading has has jumped out for
Global Reading Project Origins and Impact
00:26:22
Speaker
me? Which leads me to a question just more generally about like, what made you start the project of reading from around the world? Like, I know you've written about it, but like, what was the spark in you that made you think like, hey, I'm going to read a book every 1.78 days? Or because that's not just like, I'm going to do a challenge, right? That's not like, oh, this is my 2026 reading challenge. That's like kind of ethical drive there or something. There's some kind of like meaning making for you.
00:26:47
Speaker
Yeah, well, it it was a really strange thing. um i had been doing a blog called a Year of Reading Women because I'd been doing a journalism course at night school and we'd had to start a blog.
00:26:58
Speaker
And they said it has to be a project doing something, yeah documenting something. And I realised that my reading had been very male focused, really, as a link literature student. And in my 20s, I mostly read books by men and that didn't make a lot of sense to me.
00:27:14
Speaker
because I was an aspiring female writer. So I decided to spend a year just reading books by women. And this was a tiny little blog. Hardly anyone visited it, but I carried on writing my reviews. And then one day this reader in the US popped up and said that he had a book he wanted to recommend to me by an Australian writer, Tim Winton's clowns Cloud Street. And I sort of graciously said, well, thanks. That's really kind. You know, sounds great. But this is a blog about books by women. So ill have to wait till next year to read that.
00:27:44
Speaker
Thanks. I thought that would be it. But he came back. He was really persistent. But are you going to do a blog next year? Because need to know what you think about this book. was sort of like, um oh well, I'm not just going to do a books blog. I'm not that interested in that. You know, lots of books blogs out there. it would have to have an angle. But um maybe. So he said, well, what about books from different countries? And this could be your your Australian book. And at first, my my initial response was, who does he think I am? Doesn't he think that I'm already, you know, doesn't he imagine that, you know, I only read British books. i'm I'm a very cultured person. I'm very cosmopolitan. i know a lot about the world.
00:28:18
Speaker
And then I looked at my bookshelves and I realised that actually... they were incredibly Anglo-centric. Most of the books were by British and American authors, maybe a few Australian books, a few Indian books, but really very little beyond that. And that made very little sense to me when I started to think about it. I knew there had to be lots of extraordinary stories out there by writers working in languages other than English. And it seemed crazy that I would shut myself off from them. So with the Olympic year coming and 2012 being really international outward looking year for the UK, things felt rather different, I have to say, back then.
00:28:52
Speaker
I thought this would be a great opportunity to go out and try and meet the world through books. And it's really strange looking back at now. It was really naive. I had absolutely no idea that this would change my life, that it would lead to my first published book. I was going to be a novelist and I am now a published novelist, but my first book was to be a novel. That was what I wanted to do.
00:29:11
Speaker
and And I had no idea that this would lead to my first book. that 13, 14 years later, I'd be sitting here talking to you on a podcast about it. I mean, podcasts haven't even been invented then. And, um you know, it was just for my own interest. I decided I wanted to see if it was possible.
00:29:27
Speaker
And I thought, you books from different countries. Yeah, OK, but what about a book from every country? Now that starts to be interesting. What does that even mean? How many countries even are there? Oh, actually, that's a more complicated question than you might realise.
00:29:39
Speaker
Can you get books translated from every country? what does that entail? um And suddenly, all these questions started to open up about what the world was, what stories are, what reading them means. And yeah, it became something that defined to find my life, I suppose, in a certain way, although i at the time, I i really didn't didn't know that it would. I think the turning point for me came when I launched the blog. I launched the blog about three or four months before 2012, just to say, this is what I'm planning to do. Do you have any suggestions? And i as far as I knew, I might be on my own with this. I mean, a year of reading women had had hardly any readers.
00:30:20
Speaker
So it could have been a you know, a lonely quest where I just pursued this eccentric goal. But four days after I'd posted this short blog post online saying what I was going to do, I got a message from a woman in Kuala Lumpur called Rafida. He said, I love the sound of your project. I'd like to volunteer to go to my local English language bookshop and choose your Malaysian book and post it to you. Would you accept?
00:30:43
Speaker
And I kind of immediately replied, oh, yes, how exciting. Yes, please. Wow. And then as soon as I clicked send, I thought, oh, wow, I've really got to do this now. There's a woman. 6,000 miles away, going to a bookshop and sending me a book.
00:30:57
Speaker
And then suddenly it became, quickly, it became much bigger than me. it was And to this day, it's bigger than me. I mean, today I was sent a link by a reader in Jordan, to an article by an Egyptian journalist who's set himself a a reader ah reading quest, reading books from different countries, and said that his starting point, he decided to see if any other lunatics had done this, and he found me. And he kind of styled his clesque quest using some of my approaches and made his own tweaks to it. And it goes on. you know it's it's It's something that is is much bigger than me now. I couldn't leave behind if I wanted to, I
Writing Practices and Career Commitment
00:31:34
Speaker
think.
00:31:34
Speaker
Yeah, that's really interesting. And now that this title is relearning to read, right, which which says some interesting things in all itself. Like, how are you taking that forward now as you carry on reading? Right. yeah I don't I don't think you're doing a new project this year, are you? That's like, have you set yourself a reading challenge?
00:31:50
Speaker
Well, I mean, I have lots of reading for various things that I have to do, but then I'm a novelist as well. So I'm working on my next novel at the moment, reading wise. I mean, I do a book of the month every month on my blog still, um and I'll continue to do that indefinitely. um I think for a year or so after I finished the original project, I naively thought that that was it. um And I would disappear off and into the sunset and, um you know, maybe do another project in some time. But people kept contacting me. And so I ended up feeling quite guilty because there were lots of amazing tip offs and suggestions and and sharings of books that other people didn't have access to that I was not really doing anything with. And so I decided that I would do a book of the month where I would feature one book that I had been drawn to or been interested by that month.
00:32:40
Speaker
So that keeps me accountable in a way, because I need to be aware enough and pay enough attention to what stories are coming out, that what things are out there, or what deserves attention. And I try not to feature the obvious choices. And I try, although I i don't always stick to this, I try not to feature new books, books immediately as they're coming out, because I think One of the many problems that the publishing industry has is this sort of fascination with the new and the next. um And good books have long tails. Many books that in their time were not necessarily much noticed are the ones that have resonated down the years. And so I try to feature books that aren't necessarily brand new and aren't necessarily the ones that are getting all the all the attention in the in the mainstream media. And I'm fortunate that there are all sorts of people sending me things all the time or letting me know about unusual stories or interesting things. So it's a wonderful, wonderful thing. So that really, I don't imagine, i say this now and then next year it'll be different. I can't see myself doing another reading quest, certainly of the scale of reading the world, yeah because I'm still reading the world and and I will be for the rest of my life, I think. But who knows?
00:33:53
Speaker
Having said that now, that that's the death knell. they'll be Yeah, yeah. and yeah We'll come back to you on that one. I mean, which is like you're talking about writing. This is a good transition to this. We talked a lot about your reading practice, but I ask everyone on this show about their writing practice and whether you have one.
00:34:11
Speaker
Do you write in the same place at the same time of day? Do you have structure to it? Is there a word count? Is there... special chair M&Ms. Do you know what I mean? What is the setup for you?
00:34:23
Speaker
Yeah, um I do. i What I try to do is I have my mornings for my own writing and afternoons for other people's work. It doesn't always work like that. Until a year or so ago, i was very much an early riser. So I would get up at five and write for a couple of hours. um i have two quite young children so that's part of that but i i've had a couple of family bereavements in recent years and there's been a lot to deal with with that and so i've had to slightly rejig my life and and getting up at five on top of everything else was a bit too much i've done that for a number of years and it is magical i mean there's something amazing about the early mornings however i find
00:35:03
Speaker
the latest novel that I'm working on, which is actually an idea I've been working on, as most of my books turn out to be, and for probably five or six years. um At the moment, it's really, I'm really enjoying it. And it's not ah not a problem to spend two or three hours focused on it, to the exclusion of all else in the morning. So I don't feel that I need to create that same boundary space of time when no one else in the house is is awake to be able to do that. I'm not a stickler for word counts. I mean, I think if if you're in a first draft, I suppose i I like to write a thousand words each writing day at least, but I've become less wedded to that. I think it like so many things in life, it's about being honest with yourself about what you need. I don't struggle with discipline. So I think word counts can be a great way of tackling discipline issues if you're someone who struggles to get down to it.
00:35:57
Speaker
um I think I sometimes struggle with allowing myself to let the ideas unfold and maybe take enough time over developing them. And so actually, I've become less wedded to the word count thing, really. And particularly now i'm I'm editing. And it's a very long, slow process of editing this novel that has been through many drafts over five or six years. and finally seems to be finding its form probably because i have allowed it enough space to um to do that so yeah i think it's more allowing the time and making sure that i have a block of time two to three hours um uninterrupted time that's what i aim to try and have which i'm lucky to be able to achieve four days a week um so that's that's not bad yeah and typing all by hand
00:36:44
Speaker
ah Typing, yeah, no. i My handwriting's absolutely terrible. I don't think I would be able to read it back, let alone anyone else, if I were trying to write a novel by hand. That's very fair. Do you have an early memory of writing? Like as a child, do you have a one of those?
00:37:00
Speaker
Yeah, no, I wrote from a young age. um I think I attempted my first novel aged seven. I don't know where it is now. I'm sad about that. But it was a novel heavily derivative of the Chronicles of Narnia, took place in a castle with a bookcase that moved and gave on to another world. And my grandmother was the only reader of it. And she was very supportive.
00:37:22
Speaker
But yeah, it was it was hugely, hugely derivative. But I remember the the magic of that feeling. For a long time, I would get this feeling of a story wanting to be told or a story that I wanted to write. And I'd get that, I'd start something and then lose the momentum.
00:37:39
Speaker
And it would be a strange, very hard throughout my teens. I remember that it's been a long process of, of building up the ability to write fiction um and sustain a story. um And I think reading the world was a huge part of that. um You know, i spent my twenties writing unpublishable rubbish um having done a master's in creative writing, but and really kind of not producing anything for years.
00:38:07
Speaker
And it's strange because I realised when I was about 26, I sort of made a deal with myself. I had this realisation. I knew that I wanted to be a writer and I had made a rule for myself that I could never take a full-time job if I wanted to write, because I knew that I'm a very diligent, hardworking person. And if I took a full-time job, I would throw myself into it. and give it all my energy and my efforts and I would have nothing left.
00:38:32
Speaker
So I could work part-time, I could work freelance, but I could never take a full-time job. And that was a rule I set for myself very young. And there came a point after several years of sitting, writing nonsense, where I thought, maybe this is never, ever going to yield anything publishable, anything that anyone else will read. And I said to myself,
00:38:54
Speaker
if this isn't enough for me, if sitting in a room playing with words isn't enough for me, then I should do something else. But if it is, then I should structure my life to be able to that as much as possible.
00:39:08
Speaker
And I decided it was enough for me, and anything else that came would be a bonus. And so I continued to structure my life that way. And Then years later, i got I read The World, I got my first book deal and then had my first published novel and and so on. But there've been times in the years since where I've had to remind myself of that deal because it's not non-sailing. Even though I've had four books published, there have been plenty of hiccups along the way, plenty of rejections. As I say, my latest novel, what I hope will be my latest novel has taken six years of often quite punishing work yeah to get to a halfway decent draft.
00:39:47
Speaker
And draft and um so there are times when I still have to remind myself of this deal that I made that, playing with words, sitting in a room on my own, playing with words. That's what it is. That's the game.
00:39:58
Speaker
And that's what i signed up for. Other people have different metrics. And I have many writer friends who are incredibly prolific and disciplined in different ways and maybe write a book or two a year, particularly in the crime fiction world.
Impactful Books and Travel Reflections
00:40:13
Speaker
And it's extraordinary. I could never do that. I'm full of admiration. it's it That is an art in itself. That is you know something I could not do.
00:40:23
Speaker
Yeah, for me, it's it's about knowing what your own yeah idea of successes I think and what matters to you as a poet you will understand this I mean yeah I don't know what I understand about writing anymore but yeah there's a lots of poets will be like you know just stay true to the line right like write one line that's good and then you can write like a another one like great okay I'll write one line that is good and then you can keep moving forward if another person likes a poem then great you know like that that's a good starting point if I like the poem is one thing but
00:40:53
Speaker
what readings have taught me is that people like oh I love that poem i'm like that one that's like my worst one they're like no no that's the one that speaks and i'm like okay fine you know so I kind of give up you know the the kind of not knowing thing I'm like I'm just gonna admit to not knowing how this work resonates or doesn't yeah and just just let that happen that's That's very wise. Once a book is out in the world, once a piece of work is out in the world, it's no longer yours. It has its own life and um and its own adventures. And that's exciting and strange and sometimes quite unsettling. But there are wonderful things. I mean, I think it is that that sense of connection with readers. I had an amazing experience a couple of years ago in Assam in India, where I was speaking at a literary festival. And a young man in the audience stood up and he said, I'm here as a fanboy for Madam Anne Morgan.
00:41:42
Speaker
and he said um some years ago i was in the library and I saw a book with an extraordinary title reading the world and I took it home and I read it and I fell in love with that book and I never returned it and I still have it and um and it's one of my favorite books and I just thought how extraordinary to have had this connection with someone in such a different world a different part of the planet um in a place where you know very few outsiders ever go and yet my words have somehow managed to reach that person and mean something to them that's that's astonishing that's incredible it's big I ask everyone this at the end of the episode is for book book recommendations now I realize this is a probably dangerous question with you but you know you can give us 365 days worth of books from around the world but are there books in
00:42:31
Speaker
that you think listeners would like maybe old things maybe things that you've just come across or things you go back to even any book recommendations you want you can have as many as you like yeah I mean there is one that I talk about a lot and I love it and I will mention it I'll I'll I'm like there's one I'm reading at the moment that I love which I'll also mention but The one I talk about a lot is the book that I read for Togo from um back in 2012, which is a book called An African in Greenland, um which has more recently come out as Michelle the Giant um by a writer called Tete-Michelle Parmasian, translated by James Kirkup. It's an extraordinary memoir um of Tete-Michelle as a teenager running away from home in rural Togo, having had a run-in with a python and being told that he was going to have to go and live with the python cult in the jungle for seven years. And he didn't much fancy this, being afraid of snakes. So he happened upon a book about Greenland in his local evangelical bookshop.
00:43:29
Speaker
And he'd been to school for five years, so he just had enough French to read it. And he said, not only did this extraordinary country have no snakes, it had no trees in which they might hide. He ran away and went to live with the Inuit for two years. It took him 10 years to get there. And in 1965, he arrived and spent two years living with the Inuit, and then wrote this extraordinary memoir, this joyful celebration of human connection, of curiosity, of exploration, and something that I i um admire so much. And for me, he exemplifies good curiosity. And in fact, his book, an extract from his book is at the start of the final chapter in my book, Re-Learning to Read.
00:44:06
Speaker
And this summer, he and I went back to Greenland together. And we spent two weeks traveling along the West Coast, visiting many of the places that he first visited 60 years ago um and even met, in one case, a woman who had been a four-year-old girl when he arrived in the 60s and he'd stayed with her family. um And absolutely extraordinary. It was, for me, particularly with everything that's going on with Greenland this year, an extraordinary insight into a different way of engaging with a place and understanding
00:44:38
Speaker
A place that makes, you know, makes a nonsense really of imperialist desires and the the idea of owning and subduing and controlling controlling. I mean, it's such a wild and alien landscape, a place that the Inuit people have lived in for thousands of years and have succeeded in by being humble, by...
00:44:56
Speaker
living with the landscape by being honest about their limitations and um by not demanding too much of it. And seeing that, seeing that very different perspective was incredibly illuminating. So I love that book. I think it's just such a joyful book um and I would heartily recommend it to anyone. But a book that I'm reading at the moment and is a book called On the Calculation of Volume, which was in the running for the International Booker Prize. It's actually, well, it was recommended to me This is a hazard of being being Anne Morgan.
00:45:28
Speaker
I find people come up to me and recommend books to me in all sorts of situations. And then I was having dinner in a restaurant a week or so ago and someone whose judgment I really respect happened to be at the next table. And they said, oh, you must read this book on the calculation of volume. And and knowing their taste, I decided I would take them off And i'm just checking the author's name because, oh, yes, it's on my Kindle, which um means I never remember an author's name when it's on Kindle.
00:45:55
Speaker
It's Solvig Bala, who's a Danish author. It's actually in seven volumes and the first three are now available in English. And it's ah extraordinary. It's an antiquarian bookseller who finds herself trapped in the same day over and over again, the 18th of November, and has to try and work out how to get out of it, which when you first hear about it sounds like Groundhog Day. But it's so much better than that. And it's it's just extraordinary. And I'm in love with it. So, yes.
Podcast Conclusion
00:46:22
Speaker
that right now I was just looking up the translator and it's Barbara Havilland well Havilland um so that's quite exciting and the first book I when I was reading Reloading to Read I was like oh my god this book is right up my street why haven't I heard of it and I went to my I've got a wish list on a website I do not buy books from these people but you know where my wish list is I started it many years ago and there are now thousands of things on this wish list and I can't change it at this point in time but i've added it its so big it came back up to the top of the list as though i had saved it a long time ago so i was like i wonder what when i found out about it in the first place but that was it was a sign to me that this year this spring i will be buying it and reading it so that's on my list Good. Oh, well, you have to let me know what you think of it. For sure. Yeah, it's, it was recommended to me by one of the people in this town, Folkestone, where I live, who has the best taste in Biggs, I think, of of anyone living here. Yeah, they are, they are extraordinary. So yeah, heartily recommended. Amazing. Yeah, when you find, when you find those people who you trust their recommendations, you stick with them. Yes, exactly. Anne, thank you so much for your time today. I really appreciate It was really nice talking to you. Thanks, Chris. It's been a pleasure.
00:47:34
Speaker
Thank you for listening to this episode. If you liked this one, why not go back to episode 29 with Robert Douglas Fairhurst, who's mentioned in the episode, or even e episode six with Lola Alufemi, which is very different, but related perhaps take on knowing and imagining otherwise.
00:47:50
Speaker
Please subscribe to the show if you haven't already. Leave review on Apple Podcasts or YouTube. It really, really, really does help. Please go do that, if nothing else. Follow the show and meet on Instagram, tag me in posts of episodes you like, and you can get more information, in transcripts and the like at Substack.
00:48:07
Speaker
The show is made possible by an Impact Accelerator Award from the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the University of Hertfordshire.