{"id":4450,"date":"2015-05-28T06:47:12","date_gmt":"2015-05-28T10:47:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=4450"},"modified":"2015-07-27T07:31:39","modified_gmt":"2015-07-27T11:31:39","slug":"where-you-from","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=4450","title":{"rendered":"“Where You From?”"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"LonesomeThe .Mic website has compiled a map<\/a> purportedly showing the most popular novel set in each state based on Goodreads scores for books with more than 50,000 ratings. (What I found out from this is that Goodreads lets you search books by place, albeit not very efficiently. Try it here<\/a>.) Many of these most popular books have been adapted into movies, \u201cperhaps not coincidentally,\u201d says .Mic author Kevin O\u2019Keeffe, demonstrating the symbiosis between the two art forms.<\/p>\n

The most popular book set in New York, no surprise, is The Godfather<\/em>, and California\u2019s the more high-falutin East of Eden<\/em>. The choice for Texas, Lonesome Dove<\/em>, seems perfect; Kansas\u2019s is, predictably, The Wizard of Oz<\/em>; Hawaii\u2019s is Hawaii<\/em>. The most popular book set in New Jersey is the 1970 Judy Blume classic, Are You There, God? It\u2019s Me, Margaret<\/em>. Come on, New Jersey literati\u2014nothing in the last 45 years?<\/p>\n

Washingtonians will probably be surprised to see that the most popular book \u201cset in D.C.\u201d is Leaves of Grass<\/em>, which as far as I know wasn\u2019t set any particular place and isn’t a novel. Perhaps the collection\u2019s ballooning from an original edition of 12 poems to, with multiple revisions over the years, more than 400, is what makes it especially apt for the nation\u2019s capital. (My quick check of the Goodreads data suggests this pick should have been The Exorcist<\/em>.)<\/p>\n

Stephen King\u2019s The Stand<\/em> captures four states: Idaho, Vermont, Colorado, and Arkansas. The biggest surprise, however, was seeing Arthur Conan Doyle\u2019s A Study in Scarlet<\/em> as the most popular book set in Utah. Really? Most of that book is set in London and the information about Utah is second-hand and none-too-accurate. And here we hit upon the biggest flaw in the method used to create this map. The story merely has to be plunked into a state, it does not necessarily have to reflect the people, geography, history, or culture of the place. Not at all the same thing as Faulkner\u2019s Mississippi, or Cheever\u2019s Manhattan and suburbs. This is how the post-apocalyptic Station Eleven<\/em>\u2014a novel whose catastrophes erase all borders and whose setting represents no locales that are more than names\u2014can be picked to represent Michigan.<\/p>\n

Of course, anyone can quibble. Still, it\u2019s an interesting exercise and revealing something about how people\u2019s opinions form about states they do not know. When we think of Staten Island, do we picture the Corleone family? When we think of Mississippi, do we recall The Help<\/em>, and Alabama, To Kill a Mockingbird<\/em>? Sure we do.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The .Mic website has compiled a map purportedly showing the most popular novel set in each state based on Goodreads scores for books with more than 50,000 ratings. (What I found out from this is that Goodreads lets you search … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"\"Where You From?\" - the most popular novel set in your home state","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[40,104],"tags":[284,30],"class_list":["post-4450","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction","category-the-morgue","tag-map-making","tag-novel"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-19M","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4450","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4450"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4450\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4452,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4450\/revisions\/4452"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4450"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4450"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4450"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}