In 2019, director Bong Joon Ho was awarded a Golden Globe on behalf of his film Parasite, which won in the foreign-language category. During his acceptance speech, he seemed both proud and chagrined, and told the audience that “Once you overcome the one inch tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films.” And, indeed, Americans have warmed slightly to foreign films over the past few years; last year’s excellent German The Zone of Interest and (mostly) French The Anatomy of a Fall received critical acclaim and Oscar nods. Theatergoers heard Joon Ho.

But this same openness to foreign art has not manifested in the field of literature, where less than one percent of the fiction Americans read annually is in translation. Considering the average American doesn’t read even five books a year, this an abominable rate. Yet, theoretically, reading a novel in translation is a more fluid experience than finicking with captions in a film; if you breezed past the jacket copy you may even enter the narrative unawares. I don’t believe I can diagnose this issue, or provide a satisfactory historical context; all but the most basic of market logic of publishing and import are beyond my understanding and interest. But I can make an impassioned case for you, a lover of literature, to read a foreign novel.

You can be assured the average novel in translation is a better work than the average English novel. Why, you ask? Are we English speakers naturally worse writers? No- it’s the economics of translation. Consider the cost of hiring a translator, of securing rights, of taking a risk on an author unknown in the United States. Publishers have an incentive to only publish books they believe will perform well in the open market. Those costs promote the publication of the best of the best. And sure, it’s ridiculous to say that what sells best is of the highest artistic value. But most translated literature comes from small, independent presses committed to the furthering of the art form. (Look for New Directions, Seven Stories, and the New York Review of Books. If you’re open to importing from the U.K., check out Fitzcarraldo Editions.) Statistically speaking, however, a random English novel will be worse than a foreign offering.

Consider the Nobel. Regardless of what you think of the Swedish Academy, for the sake of argument accept it as a proxy for an objective ‘best literature’. The United States has won an outsize 10% of prizes in Literature, but that leaves 107 oeuvres unread, a wealth of the best words written, ever, catalogs and ready for your reading pleasure. Recently I’ve made a goal of reading at least one work by every laureate in literature; this year I’ve read Jon Fosse (Norwegian), Annie Ernaux (French), and Olga Tokarczuk (Polish). My god. Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead and The Books of Jacob are mind-rending, jealousy-inducing, absolute drop-down drag-out masterpieces, both sublime and entertaining, so leave your pretensions about literary stodginess at the door. I levitated reading Fosse’s Septology, and I have no more to say about that, for fear it will diminish the experience I had. I don’t think Ernaux has clicked for me.

This year please consider reading a work originally published in a language other than English. These previous arguments have been predicated on maximizing your reading pleasure, which should be your primary intention, but which is also a tad solipsistic. You owe it to your fellow human beings to broaden your horizons. Pun intended.