Books with Maps – dinipandareads

Happy Friday book lovers! We’re back with another First Lines Friday, a weekly feature for book lovers hosted by Wandering Words. What if instead of judging a book by its cover, its author or its prestige, we judged it by its opening lines? Here are the rules:

Pick a book off your shelf (it could be your current read or on your TBR) and open to the first page
Copy the first few lines, but don’t give anything else about the book away just yet – you need to hook the reader first
Finally… reveal the book!

First lines:

“The gallows had been erected in the shadow of the clock tower, partly so that the spectators could witness the executions without the nuisance of sun in their eyes, and partly so that the Tribunal could keep its killings on precise schedule. Order in all things, that was the Tribunal’s motto.”

Do you recognize the book these first lines come from?

It’s time for another Top 5 Saturday, a weekly meme created by Mandy @ Devouring Books and this week’s topic is: books with maps. I’m a real sucker for a good map at the start of a story! If there’s a map at the front I’ll constantly flip to it as I’m reading to better situate myself; plus, I love making a trail to see where our characters have been and where they’re going next. The one thing I hate about reading SFF on my Kindle is that I can’t see the maps in as large of a scale as I want to. The zoom feature stresses me out 😂 Which is why I buy the physical book if I end up liking the story because the map is one of my favorite parts of reading SFF! I love when the maps include different details for different areas–I think the more detail in these maps the better because I just want to absorb ALL THE DETAILS. Here are five maps that I absolutely love:

Godsgrave – The Nevernight Chronicle
I mean, I couldn’t NOT include this map. I want to blow it up and hang it on my wall somewhere. Lucky for me, I think my Darkdawn Illumicrate box does come with a map (it’s not huge, but it’s bigger than the book)! The details in this map are exquisite and I kept staring at it trying to soak in EVERYTHING!

Erilea – Throne of Glass Series
I think this was one of the first fantasy series I read and even though I’m putting off reading the final book because I don’t want it to end, I love the vast world that Maas created.

The Four Corners of Civilization – The Kingkiller Chronicle
I honestly wish that this map was more detailed. I love this story and I loved flipping back and forth to the map while reading the story, but I think it would’ve been so much better if it had more detail!

Grishaverse – The Shadow and Bone Trilogy
I honestly love the details in this map. It’s not as overloaded as let’s say the Itreya map, but it’s still got awesome illustrations that depict the unique areas of the Grishaverse. I definitely flipped through to the front of the book several times while reading this series to trace the characters’ steps!

Ketterdam – Six of Crows Duology
This is the type of map that makes me want to shove it right in my face so I can make out every single curving street and minute detail that was put into creating a map of a city! I loved the description of the city of Ketterdam and this map definitely helped me to picture it better 😍