Find books set in your hometown | Hacker News Reader

Find books set in your hometown

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56 pointsmwattsun35 comments

IMDB has this for locations - you can find commercials and TV filmed in your area.

Works best in California, of course.

https://www.imdb.com/search/title/?locations=London%2C+Engla...

I upvoted because it’s pretty neat, but FYI if you put in a less popular location (say, Foobar, Illinois) it’ll show places near Foobar (if any) then any listings that have a bare “Illinois” (with no city specified) as the filming location. This is obscured by the fact that the results page doesn’t show the location for each film (you have to click through and manually see the metadata).

Title is misleading. It should be. "Find books set in your American Hometown with this neat tool."

I don't have a lot of faith in this data set. The Books Around America site lists the Blue Ridge Mountains as being in Arizona, which is 1500 miles away from their actual location in NC/VA.

There are various blue ridges in AZ so it sounds like polluted data.

https://www.fs.usda.gov/recarea/coconino/recarea/?recid=5489...

Well, that's hilariously less accurate than the case I tried. I tried the zip code for a suburb in Salt Lake County, UT that's ~12 miles away from city center Salt Lake City. At least I got a bunch of books set in SLC.

Then there's a bunch of other places that aren't in the "Choose Location" list at all despite being similar or larger in population compared to places that are in the list. E.g., Visalia, CA[0] is not listed but Provo, UT[1] is.

[0] https://worldpopulationreview.com/us-cities/visalia-ca-popul...

[1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/us-cities/provo-ut-populat...

Harrisburg (the capital city of Pennsylvania) isn't in the list. But Harrisburg (a neighborhood of 3k people in Houston, Texas) is listed.

    Almost heaven, Arizona
    Blue Ridge Mountains, Colorado River...

;)

The only story by a well known author I know set in my little town in Massachusetts is by H.P. Lovecraft. But he places the town about 50 miles away from where it really is, and the description he gives of the downtown area is way, way wrong- cobblestone streets and brick buildings, when at that time the town was dirt roads and farm houses. I've always wondered if he simply didn't know the town actually existed, as he used a few different non-existent Massachusetts towns in his writing and he could have thought he was doing it again here.

I searched for books set in Iowa City, IA. None.

Here is a non-none list: https://www.mappit.net/bookmap/places/958/iowa-city-ia-us/

not very useful if you don't live in america, america is the exception not the standard

This is the actual link: https://crossword-solver.io/books-set-around-america

The dataset seems to be extremely small, perhaps n=5000

> There’s something magical about taking your nose out of a book and finding yourself in the same setting as the characters.

I had (am having?) the similar magical feeling when reading a book on iPad you can open Google Maps, find the location a character is in now - and see pictures of the place people took, sometimes up to the exact building the author describes.

E.g. in The Little Drummer Girl by le Carre you can follow the exact route characters taken. And there is a 360 deg view of some remote place in Lebanon near Israeli border that some tourists uploaded. Magical feeling, indeed.

You might try worldcat.org (most books as cataloged by libraries are there). Just tried my home town (village in NY state) and the results looked pretty good. Easy to just look at just fiction, biography, etc. Disclaimer: I worked at the host organization (OCLC) for most of my life, much of it related to WorldCat.

I was curious to know how the top 10 locations fare when adjusted to their metro population. It turns out New Orleans tops the list by far, with San Francisco and Las Vegas afterward. Perhaps this shows how "interesting" these cities are as a backdrop, compared to merely populous urban centres.

What does it mean that Bisbee AZ is home to the highest percentage of mystery novels? Because there's a huge number set in Los Angeles.

That of all novels in Bisbee the percentage is highest for mystery.

Which may mean there’s one and it’s a mystery. The article itself could probably be replaced by the actual link.

Or, more likely given the low quality of the dataset from my own observations, a mystery series set in Bisbee skewed the results. (In my experience, mystery probably has or had the highest number of content factories - but then again, I ingested the entirety of the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, Boxcar Children, and other such drivel as a misguided youth…)

Edit: yes, this seems to be the case https://www.goodreads.com/places/488311-bisbee-arizona

But honestly the low sample size is the biggest problem.

Nothing for Gettysburg? Really? I am certain there are many books set in Gettysburg.

https://www.goodreads.com/places/1916-gettysburg-pennsylvani...

I didn't know goodreads had such a feature. This seems much better than the OP website.

I was curious to find novels set in Rome.

> in your [US] hometown

Also, the clickbait stripper could probably be expanded do something about 'with this neat tool'?

> in your non-rural [US] hometown

Sure, even worse. The source (not submission, see other comments) article at least implies it should work anywhere in the USA.

I was just pointing out that the title makes it sound global; it's very far from it.

Link to the actual book finder: https://crossword-solver.io/books-set-around-america

It's actually a pretty shitty tool. I put in William Faulkners hometown and it listed nothing by him.

That's too bad because I've been really interested in a tool like this. Sometimes I just want to read books taking place in Switzerland or St. Louis MO or Montreal.

I agree. I watch movies and read books entirely based on where they're based so that I can get a feel of being there.

tbh, I posted this hoping someone would make a better one

But the tool asks you to name a city and shows you books set in that city. None of Faulkner's books were set in his hometown.

They were set in Mississippi and it mentions being able to find fictional towns.

Edit: Or maybe I misread it because now that I go back I'm not seeing that. My bad.

Seconding this opinion. Why does it have a useless zip code box when you can't search using your zip code? I had to pick a city twenty miles away with the drop-down box. This is garbage.

I'll take this as a joke because Faulkner's novels were set in a fictional place: "William Cuthbert Faulkner was an American writer known for his novels and short stories set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County.

I like the idea. I tried out my hometown and the results were pretty good, but I wanted more.

It only returns one book per genre over 6 genres. I was expecting to find a certain book set in my hometown (Clear Lake in Houston), the book is called "Friendswood," based on the real Friendswood, TX, and uses the same street names.

It wasn't listed, but it did return "The Martian," which I guess would be right due to the presence of NASA JSC.

They should probably check for translation issues across books because one of the cities listed in the graphics is “Providencia RI” which is most likely referencing “Providence RI”. I assume it’s not a popular literary destination, but it appears that none of its references are in English or the books are actually referencing a Providencia Island, which there are a few of, but none of which are in RI nor the US?

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