This past year I've read a few books about maps that have sat on different sides of subject.
Early this year through approximately 6 months of employment related crisis, I managed to get through How to Lie with Maps (Monmonier). I found this book to be incredibly boring. It was focused on bits I already was well aquaintd with regarding mapping distortions related to projection, symbology, ect.. It spoke about the distortions of advertising through cartographic info and how this impacts represntations of space. It spoke about the false towns used by some cartographers to effectively "watermark" thier work. The book itself was dated, and attempted to be relevant through short chapters related to digital mapping appended.
In contrast I also recently finished The Word for World: The Maps of Ursula K. Leguin (various). I found the essays and the entire ethos behind this book to be much more inspiring, but also allowed me to create more meaning from my poor experience with How to Lie With Maps. Where Monmonier took a bit of an obvious critique on mapping distortions, the book regarding Ursula's various maps brought in grander ideas of dreams, and intrinsic personal reflections a cartographer has on a map or a user has with using and map, and the reverse. This book brought into perspective questions not of just how manipulation occurs through maps, but how we see ourselves in maps, and asking questions on where on those maps we feel safe or where we might be drawn. Maps themselves are designed for planning, for charting course, for recording history ect. The stories left out of these representations are stories none the less in omission.
There is an especially interesting passage on Ursula's interest in dragons, and how dragons and sea monsters have been famously included on the edges of maps through out various histories. "Here there be dragons", they would warn. These are places that were marked as only to be traveled by the fearless or noone at all. It brought forth questions again of "wilderness", and "urbanness". Places for people, places for dragons, places for dreams. There of course is discourse to be had regarding colonialism and the impacts of an empire's decrees of Terra Nuilius. Places deemed "empty" which have simply been places where people and life have exsisted since the near beginnings of humanity.
My thoughts on this continue to roll over in my mind.