the geography of my bookshelf

This project is an interactive map and dashboard of the books that I have read in the past few years displayed geographically by authors nationalities. After having realized how Anglo-American centric my reading was, it prompted me to take a more global look into reading and to explore culture more mindfully through a literary lens.

17 out of 195 countries read

2 this year2 in the past year

• 1 author
• 2 or 3 authors
• 4 or more authors

the goal

It is no surprise to me that much of what I read is Anglophone literature. This is probably true for cinema, music and other art forms. However, for literature specifically, this was an uncomfortable fact to deal with. When reading a book, I always imagine what the author is like, how do they carry on their day and how much they are shaped by their environment. Reading is such a beautiful window into individuality and culture that I felt the need to explore that more globally. By limiting my reading to mostly 2 countries, I felt that I was excluding myself from realities that I don’t relate as much but that I am nonetheless curious about.

The goal of this project was to reflect on these ideas of culture around reading. This resulted in an interactive tool that showcases from which authors nationalities have I read from and use that as a proxy to understand how global or narrow my reading really is as well as how it evolves. This is an automated tool that will keep updating throughout the years, serving both as motivation and a commitment to reading perspectives from different corners of the world.

a note on nationalities

One of the ideas that I struggled with was the meaningfulness of mapping what I read geographically and how to approach it. I have read books from authors that were born in countries that don’t exist anymore, from authors that have multiple nationalities or from authors that have one nationality but that might not agree or identify with it. Even within a country, the space and time axes are so significant for what culture is and what it means that the more I thought about it, the less sense it all made. Current borders are just one of hundreds of variables to consider for what culture is.

In the end, I decided to pursue the simplest solution: map authors to contemporary borders while trying to be honest about its potential misunderstandings. The reason for that was mostly the thinness of the data, I am not the most avid of readers and I don’t have an accurate tally of all the books I have read over time. Because of this, it seemed clear that mapping to nationalities would yield value in creating a simple visualization tool that allowed me to understand how I’m spacing my reading across different countries and continents.

The map above is inaccurate by design because it is impossible to condense authors across millennia and their ideas into such a little box called “nationality”. However, even an inaccurate map can give useful information if we can calibrate it and if we are aware of its limitations. This is the mindset I went with in this project.