Andy Barnes is a volunteer at the Oxfam bookshop in Cotham Hill, Bristol. When not volunteering he’s still surrounded by books, working as a bookseller at Waterstone’s. He calls himself an obsessive reader with good reason – he’s on a mission to read at least one book by an author from every country in the world.
I wasn’t sure what to write about in this post, and my procrastination was manifesting itself in the usual way (i.e. reading a book), when I realised that the answer was right in front of me. I was finishing off The Punitive Squads by Ales Adamovich, a harrowing, fictional account of Nazi atrocities against civilians in World War II. Adamovich was Belarusian, and Belarus has become country number 136 on my LibraryThing world reading map. Most importantly, I found the book in my Cotham Hill Oxfam shop.
As my ‘round the world’ reading has progressed, finding the books I need has become more of a challenge. Initially I did most of my buying in charity and secondhand shops. I lived in London at the time, and the Gower Street Oxfam shop was a favourite haunt. Recently I have found myself resorting to the internet more and more. However, I still scour the shelves in Oxfam, and it has paid off twice in the past few months. As well as the Belarusian book, I also picked up Riding the Whirlwind by Habte Bereket Selassie, an Eritrean writer. Eritrea subsequently became number 132 on my list. It’s a real testament to the shop and the donations we get.
It made me wonder what nationalities we have on our shelves at the moment. We are a fairly small shop, so it didn’t take long to do a quick scan. The UK and USA were well-represented, of course, and a search through the classics yielded lots of French, German, Italian and Russian writers. Looking elsewhere in Europe we had writers from countries including Austria (Elfriede Jelinek), Croatia (Slavenka Drakulić) and Georgia (Boris Akunin). Africa was represented by Egypt (Alaa al-Aswany), Botswana (Bessie Head), South Africa (J.M. Coetzee) and Algeria (Albert Camus). From the Americas we had Canada (Margaret Atwood, Robertson Davies), Martinique (Patrick Chamoiseau), Jamaica (Andrea Levy), Chile (Isabel Allende) and Colombia (Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Laura Restrepo). From further east there was Japan (Kazuo Ishiguro), Australia (Peter Carey), China (Gu Hua), Malaysia (Catherine Lim) and Hong Kong (Timothy Mo). An impressively cosmopolitan bunch of writers, and there were almost certainly others that I missed.
My literary travels have taken me all over the world, but most of my journeys have started in bookshops like Cotham Hill. I would encourage volunteers and managers to celebrate the diversity of literature we sell in our shops, because to me, it is representative of what Oxfam is all about. And if that’s not enough, I may be around, hunting for country number 137…
Read Andy’s post on Reading ’round the world, follow his journeys at LibraryThing, and let us know your thoughts on his global reading mission and any of the above authors.
Tags: Andy Barnes, favourite finds in an Oxfam shop, Oxfam shops and specialist book shops, Oxfam volunteers
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