Reading Maps – Journeys from fiction drawn on the real world

I find naval battles fascinating, but they can be hard to visualize over time. Not only location of key events like this, but where each ship is located, where/what they were shooting, etc. There are a handful of YouTube channels that do reasonable jobs animating this, but I’d love something interactive I could scrub through at my leisure and provide lots more detail and context. I had been tinkering with an educational game where you could load in a battle and watch from almost any perspective (especially on deck), but as you might imagine that is a wildly large scope. Maybe something like this is a better first step :)

I love this. There are books I've read that I never really had a good mental image of where the locations were.

Just a note that despite the title these are not all fiction. Which is great! I can think of a couple books i'd love to add.

One of things I enjoyed about Piers Anthony's Xanth (as a teenager) was it being a punny geographical version of florida and its features. Even had me looking up maps of florida to pinpoint where they were in the story a couple times. It also had a time-period element where people from random time periods (from our world) might enter into the same Xanth lifetime/lifespan. That weaving of real world geography and time-periods together within the punny world of Xanth was creatively interesting for me.

I’d like a book search engine that allows me to search for books covering a certain place and/or time. Like: “Is there a WW2 memoir of someone who passed the place where my grandpa was POW?”

What a good idea! Admirations to the authors!