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From Visual Companion

I enjoyed reading Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code and Angels & Demons but, having never been to Europe, I kept wanting to see all the cool landmarks he was describing. Luckily for me, he made illustrated versions of both and I love them. Soon thereafter I read John Grisham's The Broker and again I wanted to see all the things he was describing, this time (mostly) in Italy. However, there is no illustrated version and I was then hit with the idea of creating this site.

My goal with this site is to let people create and share visual companions (hope the term isn't trademarked/service marked) for any book for which one would be suitable. Two genres that lend themselves nicely to this kind of treatment are biographical/historical books and realistic fiction.

A few I'll start working on myself are Donald Trump's Trump: The Art of the Deal (New York/New Jersey), David Baldacci's Stone Cold (Washington D.C.), John Grisham's The Firm (all over) and The Broker (mostly Italy) and Cory Doctorow's Little Brother (San Francisco.) (Little Brother is a great story and you can read it online for free here.) Some of the stuff will just come from what I find on Wikipedia, Flickr, etc., but ideally people who read books that take place where they live or have been will contribute.

One thing that will make all this tricky is that authors of fiction, well, make stuff up. They might take a real city and invent a fake place, which may or may not be based on an actual place. They might do any number of things for any number of reasons. Sometimes it's a mistake but more often than not it's intentional. Sometimes they take artistic liberties with places, other times it's just a matter of not wanting to get into trouble by saying that X street is a bad place to be, or saying that there's treasure buried underneath a certain house. As the protagonist says in Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City, part of his job as a fact-checker is to verify that there aren't facts in fiction--to make sure "if a story set in San Francisco contains a psycho named Phil Doaks, there is no Phil Doaks in the San Francisco phone book who might turn around and sue." Differences between fiction and reality should be noted but there's no reason to harp on the author about such things. Feel free to post info about related/similar/possibly-inspirational places.

What this is and isn't

This is just a little site to provide meta-information for books. In addition to obvious things, like pictures of places where stories take place, it could also include charts and graphs of characters who appear in multiple books.

Despite the fact that this looks like Wikipedia (due to using their software) this is most emphatically not Wikipedia. NPOV is not important. This isn't meant to be a sterile, academic resource. It's just a fun place for people who like books to come share a little more information about them in a unique way. If you have pictures from New York or New Jersey that remind you of Judy Blume's books, they're welcome here. If you live in a small Main town that you think looks like Stephen King's fictional town of Castle Rock, go ahead and share. If you've got some good pictures of houses on Klickitat Street or the statues in Grant Park, I'd love to see them.

Despite the fact that I love talking about books and authors, this should also not be a book review site. There are already a million of those.

Maps

Update: wow. The PHDs at Google have come up with something slightly similar. books.google.com scans and OCRs books so you can search for text in them and do other stuff. Evidently they've started parsing for place names and (ta-da!) making maps! Here's their map of places listed in The Firm.] Not as good as mine if I may say so myself--they just link to every place mentioned in the book, no matter how big or small, like Tupelo, which is mentioned once, and only as a generic American city. Nice to know that great minds think alike, thought. :-) Here's mine (in progress.)

Neal Stephenson wrote Mother Earth Mother Board for Wired in December 1996. He went around the world and put GPS coordinates into the article. Here is a Google map I made showing where he was.