Three years ago, around this time, I got what I thought was a brilliant idea. Having observed other writers spending a year doing various things that interested them–from living biblically to buying nothing–I thought I’d spend a year learning at least something about every country in the world, from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe.

I’ve always been fascinated by other countries. As a kid, I bombarded tourism bureaus with requests for information, resulting in a deluge of promotional brochures flooding my parents’ mailbox. As an adult, I became a travel writer–supplementing that career with other types of writing to pay the bills.

And yet, there were embarrassing gaps in my geographic knowledge. Sure, I could rhyme off the names of most Western European capitals and identify, with some degree of confidence, the largest lake in South America or the highest mountain in Asia. But when it came to finding Niger on a map or knowing what the climate is like in South Korea, I was at a bit of a loss.

My curiosity extended beyond the standard high school geography staples of longest rivers and most important national resources. Mainly, I was interested in daily life in other countries. Are people in Mongolia and Paraguay as obsessed with Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie as we North Americans seem to be? (I devoutly hope not.) What do people eat for breakfast in Morocco and Cambodia? What pop songs dominate the radio waves in Lebanon and New Zealand?

Surely I wasn’t the only person who wanted to know.

I thought immersing myself in world geography would be a timely project. After all, YouTube regularly lights up with videos showing poor souls displaying their geography-related mental blocks, including a beauty pageant contestant from South Carolina who gave a very nervous response to a question about geographic illiteracy, and a contestant on “Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?” who thought Europe was a country and had never heard of Budapest.

There aren’t links to those videos here because I think these poor women have already suffered enough for their televised blunders without me pointing more folks their way. But the two clips did get me thinking: Couldn’t we all use a bit more information on the people we share this planet with?

Like any freelance writer, I immediately started pondering ways to turn my latest idea into a book, or at least a magazine article. I bounced it by my agent, but he wasn’t sure it would work. I toyed with it for a few weeks, then laid it aside as other, paying jobs came along.

However, the idea just wouldn’t go away. Three years later, it’s still niggling at the back of my mind.

Of course, it didn’t help that public examples of gaps in geographic knowledge kept surfacing, including the allegation that vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin didn’t realize Africa was a continent. (Again, Google it if you’re keen–I’m no Palin fan, but she’s already done her time for this one.)

Then it occurred to me: Why not just pursue the “Year of Geography” idea on my own and write about it online?

Amazing as it may seem to all you 20-somethings who have grown up posting your lives on the Internet, this was something of a revelation for a 40-something, dead-tree freelancer like me. But the more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea of pursuing something I was passionate about just for the love of it, without waiting for a publisher or an editor to give me permission.

And then I stumbled on an inspirational New Year’s Day quotation that writer Alison Stein Wellner posted on her blog, A Very Curious Mind. It comes from author Ray Bradbury, a guy who knows a thing or two about writing what he loves. Here it is:

If you are writing without zest, without gusto, without love, without fun, you are only half a writer. It means you are so busy keeping one eye on the commercial market, or one ear peeled for the avant–garde coterie, that you are not being yourself. You don’t even know yourself. For the first thing that a writer should be is–excited. He should be a thing of fevers and enthusiasms. Without such vigor, he might as well be out picking peaches or digging ditches; God knows it would be better for his health.

Say it, brother.

When I first read that, it hit me between the eyes. Re-reading it now, I’m still struck dumb by the simple truth of it.

So that’s it. I’m going to pursue my small project, despite the fact that it’s rather nerdy, probably unmarketable and likely of limited interest to anyone else but me.

When I first had this idea, I downloaded the full list of 192 United Nations member states, which hasn’t changed in the interim. I decided to focus on one country each month in some depth, and to divide the 180 remaining countries into 12 batches of 15 countries each (in alphabetical order), one batch for each month of the year.

My goal, by the end of the year, is to be able to do the following for all 192 countries:

* Find it on a map.
* Name its capital.
* State three other things about it: a famous citizen, the language spoken, the currency used, whatever.

I suspect I’ll end up learning far more about many of the countries than that rather unambitious list would imply. We shall see.

But now, I suspect I’ve rambled on far longer than a typical blogger should. Forgive me–I can’t quite shake my dead-tree heritage. So I’ll close for now. I’ll be back soon to share what I learn about Andorra, Angola, Bahrain and the other countries in Batch One. Afghanistan is the first alphabetically, but it’s my “In Depth” country for January, so the post about it will come later in the month. The first in the series, about Albania, will go online tomorrow. Til then, Happy New Year.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared in 2009 on another blog.

Illustration: Can Stock Photo, file number csp1015799.