What happens when the way you were taught to read stops working the moment you step outside your own culture?
Ann Morgan is a UK-based author, speaker, and editor best known for reading a book from every country in the world in a single year, a project she chronicled on her blog A Year of Reading the World and in her book Reading the World (published in the US as The World Between Two Covers). In her newest book, Relearning to Read: Adventures in Not-Knowing, she looks at what it actually takes to read well across cultural and linguistic lines.
Ann returns to walk through five techniques for relearning how to read, covering how to notice your own hidden bias, why every reader fills in a story's gaps differently, what a book's assumptions reveal about who it expects you to be, and why this should all matter to us curious travelers.
This conversation gets into something bigger than books: what it actually means to sit with not knowing, and why that discomfort might be exactly where the growth happens. Ann pushes back on the idea that understanding everything is the goal, and the reframe she offers reaches well beyond the page. If you've ever wondered what it actually looks like to get better at reading books from other cultures, this episode lays it out step by step.
What's one time you filled in a story's gaps completely differently than the writer intended? I'd love to hear your thoughts, and I hope you'll share by sending me an audio message.
Tune In To Learn:
Why the way Ann was taught to read stopped working once she started reading internationally
How growing up in a culture that caters to you can hide how much of reading has been made easy for you
Why she encourages readers to hold onto their questions instead of rushing to answer them
How paying attention to what annoys you while reading can reveal a hidden bias
Advice on knowing when to push through a challenging book and when to just put it down
How noticing what a book explains, and what it assumes you already know, tells you who it was written for
Why every reader fills in a story's gaps differently, and what that reveals about you
How AI and shrinking attention spans are reshaping the future of reading and storytelling
A story from Ann's recent trip to Greenland with her friend Tété-Michel Kpomassi, sixty years after his first journey there
Resources:
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Relearning to Read: Adventures in Not-Knowing
A Year of Reading the World
Ann on Instagram
Reading a Book from Every Country in the World with Ann Morgan
Michel the Giant: An African in Greenland
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