A Year of Reading: Best Gift Book of 2015 for Bookworms

Books take us on journeys. Whether it’s down a rabbit hole, across the windswept moors of England, floating on a raft down the Mississippi River, or circling the world in eighty days, we go places when we read.

Some books, particularly those in the fantasy and historical fiction genres, provide literal maps in their endpapers; but for the majority of novels, readers navigate the terrain freestyle, using their imagination to picture the latitude and longitude of story.

In Plotted: A Literary A...