Wandering in Literature
An interactive reading map for seeing books through geography rather than chronology.
VISIT LIVE PROJECT
2025 – 2026 Ongoing Solo design & build
WHY I MADE IT
A different way to look back at reading
The idea for Wandering in Literature came to me at the end of 2025, when I was sorting through my reading notes from the year. I had been reading quite a lot of travel writing, especially books about Central Asia, and the usual month-by-month reading list suddenly felt a little flat. I started wondering what my reading would look like if I arranged it by place instead.
What interested me most was seeing different writers pass through the same region and come away with very different impressions of it. As a small experiment, I put the covers of the books I had read onto a world map in PowerPoint and shared it on Xiaohongshu. The post ended up getting more than 15,000 views and 1,200 likes, which made me think this way of looking back at reading might be interesting to people other than me.
That simple map stayed in my mind. I wanted to go a step further and make it something you could actually explore — not just a record of where my books had taken me, but a way of moving between books, places and different ways of seeing the same part of the world.
HOW TO EXPLORE
Build a literary geography of your own
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01
Add
Add a cover or import your reading list.
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02
Locate
Place each book by country or region.
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03
Revisit
Browse by year, add notes and export your map.
BEHIND THE BUILD
Turning a manual composition into a working product
The project is built as a mobile-first Next.js and TypeScript application and deployed on Cloudflare Workers. IndexedDB keeps the guest library private on the reader’s own device, while optional Supabase integration supports private cloud storage and cross-device access.
I used ChatGPT as a development collaborator to translate product requirements into code, debug interactions, test edge cases and iterate on the interface. I directed the concept, research, feature priorities, visual language and final product decisions.