The radio's bookshelf
Every book the show has aired since 1983 in chronological order. Click a cover to explore more.
Two voices carried the show
Weekdays read each year, by reader stronger color = more weekdays
Click a square to see that reader's books for the year.
Table view
About twenty books a year
Books read each year one cover per book read
Each cover is one book read on air, stacked in the order they aired; a repeat gets its own cover. Hover for details, click to open.
1 Both surveys count audiobooks and e-books as books, so listening to Chapter A Day would count.
Table view
Longest readings the six longest by year
The show's favorites
Genres books
Click a bar to see every book in that genre.
When the books were written books by decade first published
Click a bar to see the books from that decade.
New books and old share of readings by when they aired
Brand-new: published within two years of airing. The years before 2010 show the range across five-year periods.
Most-read authors one cover per book
A Wisconsin show that comes back to its classics
Click a number to see those books.
Books with a Wisconsin connection, by decade
Share of the books aired each decade that have a Wisconsin author, setting or publisher. A repeat within a decade counts once.
The books the show keeps coming back to aired three or more times
With a Wisconsin connection
Other repeats
Music sets the mood
Theme music, by group books read
Click a bar to see the books read with that kind of music.
Most-played composers and performers readings
Colored by music group, as above. Click a bar to see the books.
When the music echoed the book theme music as listed in WPR's booklist
History
Every week of the show one row per year and one bar per reading
Each bar runs from a reading's first day to its last. Tap or hover a bar for the book, click to open it.
Thanks for reading!
About the data
- Source. WPR's Chapter A Day booklist, a public Google Sheet kept by the show's staff, with one row per reading: a book aired from start to finish, so a repeat is a new row. Air dates are parsed from the sheet's "Aired from" text; a few obvious typos (a wrong year, a range that overlaps other books) are corrected by hand. Two readings the sheet lists twice (same book, dates and reader) are counted once, and a book listed both with and without its subtitle counts as one book.
- Books. Genres, page counts and first-publication years come from Open Library and Google Books, matched by ISBN or by title and author, so they're approximate. About 20 first-publication years that were wrong or missing (a modern edition's year for a Dickens collection, 1600 for Just Mercy) were corrected by hand.
- Book age is the year a book aired minus its first-publication year. Open Library sometimes gives a reprint's year instead; where that year falls after the airing, the age is shown as unknown, and a few older books may still look newer than they are.
- Public domain means first published in 1930 or earlier, the U.S. cutoff as of 2026, going by Open Library's first-publication year. The sheet's own "Public domain?" column is blank for over half of readings, so it's used only where it says yes. Books with a hand-corrected year (see Books, above) use that year instead.
- Read in full? is an estimate: the book's page count divided by its weekdays on air. A typical episode covers about 20 pages, so a book at 40 or more pages an episode was probably excerpted. Page counts vary by edition, and the sheet doesn't say what was cut.
- Seasonal readings. Christmas readings are found by title. Halloween, Black History Month and Presidents' Day readings were picked by hand and count only when they aired in October or February.
- Wisconsin. Author: born, lived, worked or studied in Wisconsin per Wikipedia/Wikidata, a Wisconsin place in the author's Open Library bio, or a hand check, plus authors listed on the Wisconsin Literary Map. Setting: Wisconsin place names in the show's description. Publisher: Wisconsin presses. Treat the counts as a floor.
- Music. Theme music is grouped by composer, performer and label rules plus hand-tagging of about 300 entries. Classical eras come from a composer-to-era list, and composers the sheet names by surname only are written out in full. "Echoes" are keyword matches between the book and the music, checked by eye.
- Covers come from the booklist itself, or Open Library where the sheet has none. Cover images belong to their publishers.
See the original booklist, or download the cleaned data: readings · books · Wisconsin flags · music groups. Built with D3; Wisconsin outline from us-atlas (U.S. Census Bureau boundaries).
A project by Lagging Indicators. AI assistance (Claude) was used for data review and code generation. Not affiliated with Wisconsin Public Radio.