For the past few years, I have been keeping track of most of the books I read.
It gives me some feeling of accomplishment and progress, adding a notch to the reading log, but also helps me keep track of what I’ve read, and where I am in the backlog of prolific authors or book series.
I initially tracked these books on goodreads, but it was acquired by amazon and later deprecated its API, making the platform less desirable. Instead, I have been tracking them in a simple markdown file I run through some templating/pandoc and push to my personal site.
Being French and living in the US, I tend to mostly read books by French or American and British authors, but wanted a clearer picture. So I built around-the-word to put the authors of the books I read on a map.
The map is an interactive HTML country-level map — hover over countries to see counts.
The python script that generates it takes a goodreads export or a simple markdown list and looks up each author on Wikidata (with a lazy Wikipedia parser fallback) and maps their birthplace. Results get cached to JSON, so you can manually fix the inevitable historical and geopolitical edge cases: borders change, colonization and decolonization happened. George Orwell was born in India, but is considered British.
The map is rendered using D3 and topojson’s world atlas. The resulting HTML file embeds all the javascript it needs.
uvx around-the-word -i goodreads_export.csv -f goodreads -c cache.json -o map.html
The result confirms what I suspected: my reading is overwhelmingly Western. The US dominates (partly due to technical books), followed by France, the UK, and Canada. Beyond that, the map is sparse — a few books from South America, the rest of Europe and a handful of other countries leaving entire continents close to empty.
If you have suggestions from regions I haven’t explored, send them my way!