It is a truth universally acknowledged that culture shapes the way we tell, share, and understand stories. The structures of stories and the conditions under which they are transmitted and read are all quite different depending on the geographical location, time period, and culture in which they originated. For literary studies, the handling of a vast variety of literature from all around the world is the cornucopia for its teaching and research. It is a wealth that has been merely a minor interest for literary studies for decades. In particular, the sensitivity for a variety of cross-cultural readings has only been treated as a margin in literary studies. For instance, it is nearly impossible to write only about the history of the nineteenth century novels in Europe from Finland to Turkey, because the bibliographies of books shared throughout Europe do not exist. At the same time, we only have limited knowledge on how and to what extent readers from Asian backgrounds understand the same stories in different ways compared to Westerners. Do readers from diverse cultural settings differ in the understanding of topics, do they differ in understanding the characters and plots, or does culture shape the reading in some dimensions, but not in others? Even more general questions on whether cultural reading habits exist have not been extensively investigated in literary studies. In addition to the general claims on reading “between” cultures, literary studies have a poor understanding of what cultural differences in reading means. It is noteworthy that systematic cross-cultural studies of reading literature remain rather uncommon, despite the diversity of literatures and their readers. In contrast to linguistics, where the mapping of the world’s languages and the differences in the use of languages are major research tasks in projects such as DoBeS, HRELP, TLA and WALS, no world atlas of literature exists to document the diversity of literatures as well as their readers. However, under other names, a variety of approaches have mapped the differences and intersections in the reading of literatures across the globe.