Ancient History

Maybe not "ancient" in terms of human history, but I'm talking Internet here.

Here are the remnants of something I started back in the late 1990s when I was still a working librarian. It was in response to a recurring school assignment. I can't remember if it was a high school or community college assignment but students kept asking for books translated into English from another language. No specific language, but the book had to have literary merit.

At that time, there was no Google , no search engines, there was barely an Internet, I  started this before graphical interface.  See what I mean by "ancient"?

These requests usually came to me because I was the person on the staff who read the most "foreign" fiction. I remember having a difficult time getting the rest of the staff to agree to ordering translated works. So this was a tough assignment since the material had to be accessible as well as literary. So I started a list and as soon as free web sites were available I put it on Tripod (now Lycos).

Fast forward a few years and the list was no longer necessary since we had an online catalog, better search engines, etc.  And then I retired.  So I updated it sporadically. It was no longer necessary to limit it to books available in a specific library system. Nor did the books have to be of interest to a specific student group.

Now it's a real mess, since  Goodreads, Library Thing, Riffle and other such sites make it much easier to do this sort of thing. But it's still a list of translated works, geographically arranged, that may be of interest.  So I won't totally erase it.  But I probably won't bother to add to it or correct the typos and poor formatting. 

So here it is for what it's worth: The Geographical Reader