Let's say, for the sake of argument, that it's lunchtime. And let's say, for the sake of argument, that you're sitting in a New York diner, eating pastrami on rye - you work in an office, say, on Fifth Avenue - you're in advertising, or publishing. Or let's say you're grabbing a quick cheese sandwich between clients, in a brothel in Leipzig. Or you've got a moment or two to yourself, for a quiet smoke, just a quick break from selling your Baby Jesus snowstorms and "What Would Jesus Do?" bracelets from your souvenir kiosk at a dusty bus- stop in Bethlehem. Or it's time for noodles, kishimen, at a bench with 500 others in the canteen of a hypodermic needle incinerator factory on a light-industrial estate on the outskirts of Kyoto. Or it's a 3"x12" sub in a Polish-run café by the beach on an unseasonably rainy day in St Kilda's, in Melbourne, Australia.
And let's say, for the sake of argument, that you have a book propped up in front of you. You're trying not to stain the pages. Assuming it's not the new John Grisham or Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, what is it? If you're a high-class German prostitute looking to make some serious money it might be Gewinnen mit Aktien by Bernd W Klöckner (Falken-Verlag, hardback, DM100). If you're chowing down in Kyoto it might be a Haruki Murakami. In Israel you might be tucking in to Moshe Bernstein's A Gedenk Licht (Peretz, hardback, $27). If you're in New York, and you can stomach a pitcher of schmaltz, you might be reading Tuesdays with Morrie: An Old Man, A Young Man and Life's Greatest Lesson by Mitch Albom(Doubleday, hardback, $21). If you're the Australian, you might be drooling your mayo over Sara Douglass's Crusader (Voyager, paperback, $19.95). Goodness only knows what it might be if you're in the Ukraine, Armenia, Turkmenistan or Bedford: whatever it is, it's unlikely to be familiar to your pen-friend in Malawi or Denmark.
At a certain age, and at a certain stage of one's reading, even the most assiduous, the most compulsive of readers - the bibliomaniac - has to acknowledge that they can't read everything, unless they're Melvyn Bragg, of course, or Goethe. There comes a stage in one's reading when the only honest response to a friend's enthusing about his or her favourite author is to ask that which Harold Ross - son of an Ulsterman, who stood no nonsense - would scribble in the margins of the scripts and proofs at the New Yorker: "Who he?".
Let's not pretend: when did you last read a book by any of the younger Russian novelists? You've read Victor Pelevin? Really? Chapaev i pustota, or the translation, The Clay Machine-Gun (Faber, £9.99)? Did you finish it? Did you understand it?
A vague knowledge, a passing familiarity, a limp handshake, an acquaintance with one's own national literature is about the best that most of us can manage. Most "foreign books" - or as some of the American chain bookstores have it, "Literature Not Yet Translated" - simply do not take up space in another nation's mind, let alone on its bookshelves. To be English or Scottish or Irish or Welsh and to have read French literature means to have spent a lifetime struggling through the obvious two or three dozen books that most French students would have skimmed, absorbed and discarded by the age of 18. It is of course always amusing to meet someone from the Czech Republic, say, or Hungary, and to hear them claim that the most exciting contemporary English novelist is Malcolm Bradbury, but then visit France and try enthusing about how much you've enjoyed Camus, or Georges Perec. "Have you read Dominique Eddé?" your French friend might ask. To which the only honest reply, for most of us, is "Who she?".
Readers get stuck in a rut. If you happen to have been born in Britain, for example, the chances are you will, by your late teens and early 20s, have developed a ruinous taste for biography. This doesn't necessarily mean that you'll be addicted to the heavyweights, such as Richard Holmes's 432-page Coleridge: Early Visions (HarperCollins, hardback, £15.99), or his 633-page Coleridge: Darker Reflections (HarperCollins, hardback, £19.99). You might just be dipping in to the occasional Humphrey Carpenter at weekends - you can handle it. You may even be one of the few not itching with excitement at the thought of Martin Amis's Experience, forthcoming from Jonathan Cape (ISSN: 0224050605), and according to his publisher "destined to become a classic".
It may simply mean that you are a mackintoshed habitué of the "True Crime" section in W H Smith, and are slowly, furtively adding over the years to your slightly stained bedside collection of books about the Krays, and serial killers, quietly stocking up, say, on Calling Time on the Krays: the Barmaid's Tale (Warner, £6.99), by Mrs X, or Sandra Harrisson Young's Destined for Murder: Profiles of Six Serial Killers With Astrological Commentary (Llewelyn, £10.99). Or it may only mean that you are a fan of the sub-autobiographical froth that sometimes passes for British fiction.
Whatever the signs and symptoms, there's no doubt that biographies and autobiogra phies infest our small island, like rats and free local newspapers, and it's easy to see why. The legendary Leon Edel, Henry James's biographer, claimed that "The secret of biography resides in finding the link between talent and achievement." The motive to discovering this link is what we amateur psychologists like to call envy, and everyone knows that envy grows rich and thick in damp, dark and crowded places like England.
Imagine, though, that you had been born in Italy. Things might have been so different. Apart from wearing nicer shoes, you might have developed an enthusiasm for long poems in terza rima or for novels of great length and philosophical depth and distinction. On the other hand, you might have been born in Romania, and been seduced by Ionesco.
Is it possible to overcome these limitations? The readers of the English-speaking nations have perhaps the greatest opportunity to do so - after all, we get a lot of books in translation, unlike, say, the 150,000 speakers of Gagauz in Moldavia, or the native Inuit, or the Cuzco Quechua speakers of Bolivia. These poor people may never get to read a book by Nick Hornby or Helen Fielding (but then again, the Bolivians have their epic drama, the Ollanta, and the West Greenlandic Inuit have a rich tradition of religious texts stretching back to the 18th century, which may be some consolation).
The availability of books in translation may in fact be the problem. They queer the pitch. What sounds and reads like genius in the French can often seem like nothing but a moaning metaphysical drone when translated into English, and this may deter the reader from seeking out the original. Very often when reading books in translation, you have to make a huge effort to try and imagine the original texture and context and flavour, which has usually dried out or congealed in transit: it's like being faced with a black plastic plate of M&S sushi fresh from Swindon and being asked to believe that you're eating Japanese food. It requires a willing suspension of disbelief.
The literature of other nations, then, like the cuisine, and the children, always seems precocious, gross, too saucy, or simply dim-witted to the outsider. It's a sad fact, but literature often does not travel well - the manners and modes differ so greatly that they present a barrier to distant appreciation and understanding. This may explain, for example, why it is almost impossible for the English to understand American L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, or to really enjoy David Foster Wallace: you need to have been force-fed from an early age on Melville, Whitman, and Doctor Seuss's Green Eggs and Ham.
These vast national differences and boundaries are reflected in miniature within states and nations, in the form of regional, ethnic, gender and class differences. It is of course unrealistic, although entertaining, to imagine that everyone within a particular country is inclined to read the same - there are many in Britain, for example, who suffer acute auto- and biographophobia. Ronald Reagan, returning from his tour of South America in 1982 is reported to have said, "Well, I learned a lot... You'd be surprised. They're all individual countries", and the same might now be said of what we used to call the United Kingdom. It may seem hard to credit it, but Colin Bateman is a very famous novelist in Northern Ireland, and there are people who regard the Poet Laureate as the greatest living English poet.
There are even sub-cultures within sub-cultures. It is of course possible that someone working within a university but outside the Faculty of History might find occasion to consult the new five-volume Oxford History of the British Empire (Oxford University Press, hardback, £30 per volume). But who but a handful of die-hards within the English Department will be bothering to read theoretician Stanley Fish's latest, The Trouble with Principle (Harvard University Press, hardback, $24.95)? And for that matter, who but a madman or a judge reads all the books on the Booker Prize shortlist?
This is no excuse for complacency. Indeed, for all of these reasons, it is one's duty as a reader to beat one's own pathway through the great felled forests of the world's literature, and to avoid at all costs the easy, recommended routes and the quagmires of the bestseller lists. A bestseller list, after all, measures only so much bulk and wind, and when flicking through the New York or Sunday Times one should always be mindful of the old Russian proverb - shit floats. Publishers and booksellers like to pretend that they know what the public like and what the public want, but the public remains, as the public always was, a phantasm: it is less real, certainly less corporeal, than any one single woman, man or child.
On World Book Day, then, pass on by the Waterstone's Recommends and refuse to click on Amazon's Hot 100. Try and forget the big names. Refuse the offerings of the major publishing houses, and disregard the sayings of pundits and reviewers - although, since you asked, I'm currently enjoying Ewen A Whitaker's Mapping and Naming the Moon: A History of Lunar Cartography and Nomenclature (Cambridge University Press, £37.50), Eva Crane's The World History of Beekeeping and Honey Hunting (Duckworth, £85), Alison J Clarke's Tupperware: The Promise of Plastic in 1950s America (Smithsonian Institute Press, $24.95), Mary F Corey's The World Through a Monocle: the New Yorker at Mid-century (Harvard University Press, $25.95), Antonio Tabbuchi's Declares Pereira (Harvill, £5.99), and Moby Dick, by Herman Melville (Penguin Books, £1). Ignore this. Go teach yourself Gagauz - I can recommend the Ollanta.
