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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 !