Sarah Buitendach: Have couch, will travel

I recently met someone who has been to 150 of the 195 United Nations member countries. He’s shortly heading due east to the independent island states in the South Pacific. Once he’s touched down in Tonga, Vanuatu, and their tiny tropical neighbours, the list will have shot up considerably.

It’s fascinating to hear his accounts of the logistics of reaching, say, Iraq, or of how he’s going to navigate trips to the lesser-visited central African nations. I admire this kind of bucket-list manoeuvre. It speaks of commitment, drive, and a desire to understand the endless facets of humans and the world we live in. It is also, I’m afraid, a quest I shan’t be replicating. Nervy incursions into potentially volatile places and tiny planes dropping into far-flung outposts would leave me stricken and reaching for the Valoid. I’m a bit of an unambitious flake like that. Ship me to Casablanca and a nice little hotel, for sure. Whisk me away to Washington for a weekend, with pleasure — but I’ll leave South Sudan to said explorer.

Armchair adventure is more my speed. From the comfort of my bed, and with a charged Kindle, I can set sail to the corners of casbahs and Venezuelan villages, all sans visas and anti-nausea meds. Research reveals that reading “by place” is a method of book selection adored across the globe. The New York Times is especially famous for it. They regularly highlight new books, by continent, that have been translated into English.

More recently, they have introduced a cracking series called “Read your way through”. Here they ask writers to draw up reading lists of works about their cities. Booker Prize-winner Bernardine Evaristo has done London, prolific Turkish fiction writer Elif Shafak Istanbul, and American novelist Paul Theroux Boston. Other destinations include Kingston, Tangier, and Mexico City. It’s impossible to read one of these features without having a burst of wanderlust.

Online review-database Goodreads boasts stacks of user-generated catalogues of books about countries and, in 2012, Ann Morgan, a UK author, read a book for every one of the 196 independent countries (if this teaches you anything, it’s that the definition of “country” is hotly contested). She’s continued to add to it, and you can access her excellent list of fiction and non-fiction picks at ayearofreadingtheworld.com.

Writing this sparked a conversation with friends about books they’ve loved for their evocative settings. Our chat took us over the Rocky Mountains to Montana and washed us up on the Sri Lankan shores. We all agreed, however, that this handful of books are especially worthy to note if you are a sofa sojourner.

• From the May edition of Wanted, 2023.