Today’s post isn’t going to be a philosophical one; it’s short and fun because I just found a place that’s both neat and inspiring in a literary way1. It’s called “Read the Places” and here’s how the website describes itself2:
Not a map of books.
A book you can walk through.
An open atlas of the real places in novels, in the order the story visits them. In public-domain books, every place is pinned to the verbatim line that names it; books still in copyright are mapped as cited works — the place and why it matters, without quoting. Always with how sure we are. (Readtheplaces.com)
If “A book you can walk through” doesn’t inspire you to find something or someplace to write about, I don’t know what will. They have over 2000 places mapped across over 400 books and 300 cities. Chances are you’ll find your favorite book or favorite city in there, or maybe even your favorite book set in your favorite city.
Even if a place isn’t real, they’ve sleuthed around and tried to set a point at where it would be in real life. For example, there’s a marker in Oklahoma where the Joad farm would have been in The Grapes of Wrath. But what’s more interesting than a single point is that on the same page, you can follow their journey down Route 66 as it happens in the book without even leaving the page.
They’ve also done a fantastic job with one of my favorite books, Pale Fire. Not only do they make the easy connection of the fictional New Wye being Ithaca, NY (Nabokov taught at Cornell from 1948 to 1959), they also identify several other places from the book:
(That dot in the middle of Lake Cayuga is John Shade’s house above the lake.)
You can browse by country, author, era, or city. Under city, I clicked on the intriguing “a northern Italian abbey” and was surprised (though in retrospect I shouldn’t have been) to see an entry for Umberto Eco’s excellent The Name of the Rose.
Go get searching, and have fun wandering!
I’d love to hear from you!