See what you read with Googlelitrips

July 25, 2010 4:22 PM

Googlelittrips is a website that utilizes Google Earth to show readers the important locations in books they are reading.

While it focuses on children’s books from an educational point of view, there are maps for a variety of works from Make Way for Ducklings to The Odyssey to The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. A complete list of the Lit Trips is here.

Note: you can get a feel for the project by just exploring the site, but to access maps for individual works, you must have Google Earth and you must download a .kmz file. If you do so, each file opens up to placemarks relevant to that literary work, paired with matching quotes and often additional links about the place.

posted by TrarNoir (10 comments total)

Oooo. Someone's using the Internet to re-create the sense of place that Tom Taylor's father sought to instill in him in The Unwritten. Excellent!
posted by limeonaire at 4:29 PM on July 25, 2010 [1 favorite]

The one for Schrodinger's Cat just makes the map collapse in on itself and crash the browser.
posted by griphus at 4:40 PM on July 25, 2010 [2 favorites]

yeah I'm reading Against the Day right now. I believe I would need a computer monitor made out of iceland spar to take that Lit Trip.
posted by mannequito at 4:53 PM on July 25, 2010 [2 favorites]

this is a great concept. I am always interrupting my reading to google and map about places in my books :)
posted by supermedusa at 5:14 PM on July 25, 2010

I just finished reading the Odyssey, and a piece of geography called Ulysses Found, so this is handy right now. Of course, most all of the locations are vague and in dispute, but that's kind of the fun of it. Lots of different ideas.
posted by Devils Rancher at 5:31 PM on July 25, 2010

When my sweetie and I were traveling in Iceland last summer, I made him drive through some random (and gorgeous) farming valleys merely because they had featured in the book Iceland's Bell by Halldór Laxness, which I had read prior to the trip. I would love to have Google Earth files for Laxness's books.
posted by matildaben at 8:20 PM on July 25, 2010

I'm glad I'm not the only one that immediately thought of Against the Day. I would love, absolutely love, to see one of these for that book. If it is even possible, that is.
posted by ztdavis at 9:47 PM on July 25, 2010

Nice idea, but all the files I tried to access 404ed...
posted by sodium lights the horizon at 5:28 AM on July 26, 2010

Google Books will let you do something like this for nearly any book.
posted by dmd at 11:39 AM on July 26, 2010

What, no City of Glass?
posted by speicus at 2:15 PM on July 26, 2010