Google Lit Trips uses Google Earth to show readers important locations in works of literature. For example, if you’re reading The Grapes of Wrath, you can follow the Joads’ travel along Route 66, or while reading Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, you can track the kid from Texas to Mexico and beyond.
The site’s main focus is on children’s and YA lit, with maps for classics such as Make Way for Ducklings, The Slave Dancer, and Paddle-to-the-Sea. But there are a growing number of “trips” for adult literary fiction as well, including The Road by Cormac McCarthy, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by Joyce, and The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini.
map for The Kite Runner - Google Lit Trips
A complete list of the books on Google Lit Trips can be found here. To access the maps, you need Google Earth (a free download).
And if you’re so inclined, the project is open to user-created maps for other works of literature. Imagine the possibilities: a globe-hopping “lit trip” for The Inheritance of Loss, or small-scale, block-by-block maps of 1950s Hong Kong from The Piano Teacher by Janice Y. K. Lee, or Holden Caulfield zigzagging across New York City.
