I heard on the news last week that Jose Saramago had died. For those of you who – like me – are vaguely uncertain why you should know who this is, let me remind you: Saramago, a Portugese novelist, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998.

Hearing about Saramago’s death got me to thinking: Why is it that I, who claim to have some expertise in literary matters, know so little about Nobel Prize winners? Perhaps the answer is not as unusual as you might think, but it may say something about Americans’ reading habits.

Ask a well-read American to name the winner of last year’s Nobel Prize and you’re likely to see a blank stare. He or she might remember that William Faulkner won the prize, as did Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck. Devotees of Oprah’s Book Club will tell you that Toni Morrison won the prize several years ago. But likely as not, only a handful of Americans, even those who read voraciously, can name anyone else—even other Americans.

Well, maybe someone will remember Saul Bellow, another American once widely read but now relegated to library shelves with other ‘classics.’ That’s where you’ll find the work of Pearl Buck and Sinclair Lewis, both immensely popular writers in their day. And there are routine revivals of the plays of Eugene O’Neill, arguably America’s first great dramatist. But I suspect only literary hardcores know that T. S. Eliot won the coveted Nobel – maybe because he’s claimed by the Brits.

The Nobel is an interesting prize. First, it is always awarded to a living writer, so anyone who isn’t lucky enough to be selected before he or she dies is SOL (surely out of luck, for those who may be wondering). That means we won’t see the late John Updike getting the award that some say he so richly deserved. There’s still a chance for Philip Roth, though.

To return to my original observation: It’s likely that, even if you can name all the Americans and even all the British writers honored by the Nobel Committee since the prize was first awarded in 1901, you’d be hard-pressed to name half-a-dozen recipients from European countries, and even fewer from Asia, Africa, or South America. But there have been dozens, many of whom had distinguished careers and earned international acclaim – except in the rather provincial USA, where we prefer writers who file their income taxes in the same place we do.

I, for one, am somewhat saddened by that sense of isolation. Lest you think I’m casting stones in my glass house, let me assure you that my reading record for international authors isn’t stellar. I do profess some familiarity with the work of Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, the Russian writer whose railings against the Soviet system got him expelled from his homeland in 1973. (He ended up in Vermont. I wonder if he noticed the change.) I can claim to have read something by the German winners Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, Heinrich Böll, and Gunter Grass, the South African Nadine Gordimer, the Italian Luigi Pirandello, and the French philosopher Albert Camus. But I am clueless about the novels of Iceland’s Haldor Laxness, Japan’s Yasunari Kawabata, Denmark’s Johannes Vilhelm Jensen, Austria’s Elfriede Jelinek (although I have a copy of The Piano Teacher on my bookshelf) – the list could be extended, but it would only further demonstrate my shortcomings.

The point of all this is that I should read more of the literature of other nations. I suspect, too, that we Americans might understand a bit more about the world we live in if we were familiar with the works of Asian, Middle Eastern, African, South American, and even European authors. So I’m going to try to broaden my horizons. I hope you’ll join me in the adventure.