Ever since I got it for a birthday present one lucky year, I have been metaphorically clutching The Dictionary of Imaginary Places to my heart.
The Dictionary is a marvelous compendium of fictional places on earth.
These places need to be at least somewhat fantastical--no obvious stand-ins for real places. And they need to already 'exist'--no future locations.
Once past those hurdles, though, you're free to explore a gratuitously vast and diverse menagerie of wonders like the Sea of Frozen Words, the City of Dreadful Night, the Other End of Nowhere, Quarll's Island, Pa-Anch, the City of the Blind, Pyrandria, or the aforementioned ambivalent utopia of Satrapia--all entries in the Dictionary.
But my favorite place to visit in this book is actually the second-to-last paragraph of the Author's Note to the revised edition, a tiny kingdom of poetry bounded by and consisting of the following words:
"The imaginary world keeps growing, and countless continents of the mind are born between book covers every year."
Countless continents of the mind.
And all we have to do is close our eyes.
