[Eric]

A lot has been written here since, but I first want to bring up a few things that Titania brings up in #28:

The pressure to conformity is increased as publishers booksellers become more populist and money-driven. If a narrower choice of books is sold dirt cheap by supermarkets, people will tend to buy what they see in front of them.

Language is also an incredibly important factor. I have some of the unfamiliar names on my list because I've read them in languages many Brits and Americans have never learnt. While most of Dostoevsky, Balzac and the Icelandic sagas are available in at least one English translation, very many books written in European countries, especially during the past couple of decades, are not available in English. So it stands to reason that if you can read two or three of someone else's languages, your choice is increased a good deal. Because in the case of, for instance, Swedish (which I read with ease), not only do I have access to lots of Swedish books but also to books translated into Swedish which are not yet available in English.

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For me, fiction is important because, as both Nnyhav and Jan Mbali say, it helps you get a coherent view of the world. Fair enough. But if you only read things originally written in the USA, Britain and a few other English-speaking countries, plus a couple of French and Russian classics, where is your view of the thirty of forty countries of Europe, what makes them tick, let alone countries further afield?

If, for instance, you want to get beyond the clichés of plumbers, raving Catholics, anti-Semites and so on, little pigeonholes that Poles often get shoved into, Poland has a vast 20th century literature, with loads of authors to choose from. Nowadays, Poland is so "in" that the British TV comedy series Harry and Paul has a regular sketch (repeated with variations) about two Polish sisters running a takeaway coffee shop and their inept customer.

Thirty years ago, when I first got interested in Poland, there was virtually no information about Poland in mainstream Britain (except during the rise of Solidarity) and their literature was virtually a blank, except for some short-stories by Bruno Schulz, available in Penguin. Things have got better, but I think that British awareness of Polish literature as a national literature is still very circumscribed. That is one dimension of fiction I regard as valuable: opening foreign eyes to the national psyche and history.

Poland has had a particularly traumatic past, and I think that as well as reading huge history tomes, like those of Norman Davies, their authors, such as Konwicki (novels), Milosz (essays), Gombrowicz (diaries), plus more recent ones, can help an understanding. Poland is also linked umbilically to both Lithuania and Ukraine. This is also in evidence in works of fiction. Many leading Polish authors did not come from Warsaw, Kraków, or "Wooch" (Lodz, to you), but from outlying areas of what used to be Poland. Nor were they all Catholic - quite a few Polish authors had some kind of Jewish background.

So, Polish fiction, alongside poetry and non-fiction, can help you understand a largish country right in the middle of Europe, with immigrant communities spread throughout the world. That aspect of, in this case, Polish fiction is important for me.