Friday, December 4, 2009

Reading Maps, or Six Degrees of Jane Austen

OK, so librarians don't actually sit around playing Six Degrees of Jane Austen on their lunch breaks. Anyone who reads enough starts seeing intersections between the books they've read, though, and some librarians set these connections down in reading maps.


The reading map pictured above (from the Oak Park,IL Public Library) includes the novels written by Lady Caroline Blackwood, and books about the men she married (among them, the artist Lucien Freud and the poet Robert Lowell).

Neal Wyatt's reading map for Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, a novel of alternate history by Susanna Clarke, focuses more on that novel's time (the Dickensian world, the Napoleonic Wars, and the Regency world) and place (Faerie, Venice, London and New York).

If you had the time, which book would you choose to map and what would be some of the books you would include?

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