Last Friday was a special day. Nearly seven years on from launching my quest to spend 2012 journeying through a book from every country, I had the chance to meet the man who gave me the idea to read the world.

His name is Jason and the concept of exploring international literature came out of an exchange we had in the comments section of a blog I used to write about women’s literature. Jason suggested I read Cloudstreet by the Australian writer Tim Winton and everything spiralled from there.

Over the intervening years, Jason and I have kept in touch, mostly through Facebook. When my first book, Reading the World (titled The World Between Two Covers in the US), came out, I sent him a copy as a thank you for his part in inspiring what turned out to be a life-changing project.

As Jason lives in Wyoming, US, and I live in the UK, however, there was never much prospect of us meeting… until last week. Jason was coming to London for Man Booker 50, a festival celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Man Booker Prize. It was the perfect chance to say hello.

We met at the Sail Loft in Greenwich, on the banks of the River Thames. Jason was accompanied by his friend Ben, who took the photograph above (thanks Ben!) and is married to Ana, one of the volunteer translators who made it possible for me to read a book from São Tomé and Príncipe back in 2012.

Although we’d never met in person, the conversation flowed freely, centring around books. I was particularly interested to hear about Jason’s experience as a BookTuber – his channel is called Old Blue’s Chapter and Verse. Never having explored this world, I was fascinated to learn about some of its conventions. The concept of ‘buddy reads’, for example, struck me as very interesting – the idea is that two BookTubers read the same title simultaneously and post videos about their experiences.

When Jason revealed that he is engaged in a buddy read of 1984, the conversation took flight. All three of us turned out to be big admirers of George Orwell. It was amazing to hear how Jason was finding encountering the book as an adult when so many people, myself included, read it for the first time at school.

He reminded me quite how dark it is and said he was troubled by the idea of it being taught to children. In response, I suggested under-18s might actually be more comfortable with Big Brother’s dystopia than we would be: as most youngsters will be used to living with a degree of control and scrutiny, these ideas may not be as disturbing to them as they would be to independent adults.

From there, we moved on to taboos in books that readers fail to acknowledge. Jason gave the example of Penelope Lively’s Moon Tiger, which he is surprised that many people seem to read without realising that it involves incest. We wondered if this is a sign that we readers unconsciously censor references to subjects that we find too upsetting.

The conversation wasn’t all book-based. There were a few culinary detours along the way. Jason tried his first scotch egg – with great success – and shared some wise advice on not assuming that things you like in isolation will work well together. He had learnt this too his cost some while before when he attempted to construct a kipper sandwich and found that the addition of mayonnaise to the fish produced one of the most disgusting things he’d ever tasted.

I’m sure we could have talked for hours, but Jason and Ben had an evening appointment with Hilary Mantel and Pat Barker. Unable to compete with such brilliance, I bade them goodbye, hoping it won’t be too long before our paths cross again.