I have been reading The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet and the further I go, the more it grows on me. I'm reading this book slower then most, but it invites a leisurely pace; it's primarily set on a train trip cross country so moving slowly is natural to the story's rhythm. The beginning is a lot of back story, discussing the accidental death of T.S.'s younger brother and the further fracturing of his family in its wake plus all about our narrator's map obsessions. But once the trip starts and T.S. discovers the journal he picked up from his mother's desk includes not biological field notes (as he expected due to her profession) but a manuscript based on the life of hisfather's great grandmother, then the dual plot lines that ensue really take off. I'm not sure whose story I'm loving more but there are moments like this from an exchange with an 82 year old geographer T.S. met, that do spark a chord (this said by the older man):

It is my belief , however, that there is much more to understand about the genesis of our food's ingredients - their relationship to the land, the ingredients' relationship to one another - before we can ever begin to understand what the impact of McDonald's has been on our culture.I could take a sheet of paper and draw the outline of North Dakota and then draw a point for each McDonald's in the state and even post this on the Internet, but for me, this would not really be a map - these would only be markings on the page. A map does not just chart, it unlocks and formulates meaning: it forms bridges between here and there, between disparate ides that we did not know were previously connected. To do this right is very difficult.

Maps have fascinated me my whole life and I've been knee deep in books on maps and travel since I started on this August column - plus I've fallen into a few by accident lately just through casual reading. (Is any reading truly accidental though?) One book I'm including in August along with T.S. Spivet is Katharine Harmon's The Map as Art: Contemporary Artists Explore Cartography. It is exactly as the title implies - a collection of maps and essays on artists (by Gayle Clemans) that shows the many things maps can be used to reveal rather than conventional geography. One that really stood out for me was Bryan Maycock's "Suther Street and Montague Road". Maycock used census records and other documents back to 1828 to trace his ancestors all over the streets of London. He placed them all on streets maps, showing where they lived and might have worked, traveled etc. He then used the maps as jumping off points to create drawings, paintings etc illuminating the lives of his distant family members. When I saw this I thought immediately of my own ancestors - on one side of the family we are not yet 100 years out of Canada, but in that time (from the 1920s) my father's family lived entirely in Woonsocket, RI and their lives were entirely contained in its streets. For my mother's family we go back for sure to the 1860s (and possible more) with most of that time (until post WWII) in the Bronx. Tracing both the Mondors and Lennons in those two towns would reveal everything about who we were, and explain so much - perhaps - about who we became.

Maps can thus not just show where you are going but where you are from and even more - who you are from.

For T.S. Spivet maps are used to show hundreds of different things which might seem eccentric until you page through Harmon's book and see that a lot of others are doing the same thing with maps in real life. And while many reviewers have mentioned that T.S. seems too young (and honestly there have been times when I've been uncertain if his age is authentic or not), there is nine year old Theodore Lamb who photographs maps in nature. "Everywhere I look I see maps, out of habit," he says in Harmon's book and this really made me think. In a lot of ways that matter we are surrounded by maps - there are the places where our food and clothing and furniture and everything traveled from to get to us, there is where it is all going once it leaves our house (in whatever form) and then there are all the invisible things - the emotional things - that could live in maps of our hearts. Consider the books that have mattered over the course of a single lifetime and what they show about you as a person. If you could make a line of all those maps - create streets taken and those passed by of titles read and ignored, what would it show about you? In many ways, our bookshelves reveal our inner most thoughts and passions more than anything else (and don't even get me started on what is revealed by people who have no books at all....).

The map of my life would include surfboard and parkas; Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash; many dogs, stitches, crosses and propellers. That's just off the top of my head - imagine how much more I could reveal if I really put my mind to it.

I love maps - in any shape or form, they fascinate me.

For more fascinating maps see the blog, Creative Mapping.

[Post pic of "Mount Fear East London", Abigail Reynolds - a relief map based on crime statistics using real neighborhood maps. The higher the crime on any given street, the higher the mountain. Reynolds is in the The Map as Art.]