I would like to read at least one book from/about/taking place in every country in the world. Reading expands our horizons and builds empathy.
Ideally, the book is written by an author from the country, and at least partly takes place in the country. As the friend who inspired me to read the world suggests, the books that "everyone" reads during junior high or secondary school in a given country are great for this journey.
I welcome your reading suggestions* or ideas for improvement. Feel free to open an issue or submit a pull request. Bonus points for graphic novels and queer literature. I am also open to reading novellas and plays. I won't necessarily track short stories on the website, but I will track collections of short stories, as well as children's books.
*a disclaimer: my counting a book here does not mean it is the "best" book for that country; I welcome suggestions especially for books that are culturally important (for example, a great recommendation is the kind of book students in that country are encouraged/required to read)
I released this under a Creative Commons license, so others can use my code and begin or begin tracking their own journeys. If you do use this, I welcome you to link back to this repo (or my website, linked below).
Note that not every country/territory/entity has GeoJSON; I welcome you to add it.
The map is available at paulkaefer.com/read-the-world.
- You may want to track books you've read. Or films you've watched, albums you've listened to, etc.
- You may want to learn the capitals or flags of each country, or how to say "hello" in the official language(s) of each country.
- You may simply want to track travels.
- Be creative! If you use the code in this repo at all, I'd welcome your feedback. For now, open an issue or submit a PR or something.
- generated .SVG as file output? esp. if a way to embed the text (books)
- then, use that as og:image? or a .png version, if easy enough to do automatically?
- how about as a function (call via JS console), so we don't repeatedly overwrite a file on the server...
- incorporate flag emoji somehow?
- see "Potential uses" above... might find a way to incorporate (i.e., link to) similar projects
- explore other map projections
- better visuals? (color scheme/hover)
- more information, such as links to the books?
- read countries_visited.csv and join, rather than having a column with duplication in the reading list
- add a content warning/trigger warning? perhaps, if there is interest
- In the meantime, feel free to open a ticket if interested in general or for a specific book(s), or have suggestions of warnings
Thanks to Lauren DG for inspiring me to read more books from around the world, Ann Morgan for her fabulous TED talk and website, and to @micahstubbs for this D3 map code.