Visit This Read That

What should you read when you visit a particular place?

It’s not so hard to discover what books are related to a particular place, but it’s not too easy to figure out which ones you should really read first. We all have only so much time, after all.
I looked and asked around for a web-service listing the most appropriate books to read when visiting a particular place. I came up empty and decided to create it myself.

Built on top of WordPress, Visit This Read That (VTRT) relies on the GoodReads API for information on books, with a sprinkling of the OpenLibrary API, and does geographic lookups via the Google Places API. Books listed for individual places can be voted up and down by users of the website, in similar fashion to how, say, Reddit works.

I’m indebted to Jacob Overmark Sebæk for some early beta testing and spending a gracious amount of time adding a long list of places and books. In the process, he also stumbled upon a few listings on the web that, in one way or the other, somewhat structurally list books for particular places. These included Tale_Away, Around the World in 80 books, and TripFiction, travel-related websites with a bunch of country/book lists; Mappit, a clever mashup using LibraryThing and Open Library, listing publications set in specific places, but, seemingly, less focussed on the social component for discovering the more appropriate books to read;
Of course, GoodReads also has a bunch of user-generated lists throughout the site matching books with locations, including the Around the World in 80 Books group.

If you like this project, I’d appreciate a vote over at Product Hunt.

API

In January 2022, I added an API, available to all. API calls are made to the URL below. Replace {google_place_id} with the Google Place ID of a place.

https://visitthisreadthat.com/api/index.php?id={google_place_id}

Here’s an example of the API call for the books associated with Brasilia:

https://visitthisreadthat.com/api/index.php?id=ChIJdeKa3xg9WpMRJEp1aeRwhHM

I specifically added the API to be able to use it in theplacesIhavebeen.com.

Dominoes

VTRT relied on LoremFlickr to display relevant images for the many cities listed on the site. In late 2024, LoremFlickr was blocked by Flickr, presumably for heavy API use. I updated LoremFlickr to run locally, and used that on VTRT, but as I moved VTRT to the same server as LoremFlickr in June 2025, I discovered that not only had Flickr blocked LoremFlickr, they had blocked the server running LoremFlickr.
The pretty pictures had to go.

•  books  GoodReads  reading  travel