>Since the site is in English I think it is likely aimed at an English audience...
To be fair, fully half of the top ten books were not written in English. Non-Indo-European languages can be translated just as well as French and Russian can.
True, but the number of people who focus on non-indo-european languages is a lot smaller than people who focus on languages "closer to home". Probably just comes down to numbers.
It would be interesting to see how culture impacts story/book. Russia seems to have so many amazing works of literature, but is that a function of their culture, or because of the intense focus the USA/UK put on Russia and learning their mindset during the Cold War, or because of something else?
>True, but the number of people who focus on non-indo-european languages is a lot smaller than people who focus on languages "closer to home". Probably just comes down to numbers.
I think it's likely less a question of focusing closer to home and more a product of how the publishing industry operates, as you suggested earlier. Would certainly be an interesting question for more investigation. If it were just down to numbers, I'd expect at least one book written in a non-Western language-- English language readers assuredly aren't quite as insular as the list would suggest.
>It would be interesting to see how culture impacts story/book. Russia seems to have so many amazing works of literature, but is that a function of their culture, or because of the intense focus the USA/UK put on Russia and learning their mindset during the Cold War, or because of something else?
This is also a really interesting question. There might even be some historians here who can chime in on it. It's common for certain countries' language and literature to become "in vogue" at different points in time (e.g. French was really popular in Russia in the 19th century, following the French Revolution). Maybe a similar effect played a role?
To be fair, fully half of the top ten books were not written in English. Non-Indo-European languages can be translated just as well as French and Russian can.