"

from Moon Palace by Paul Auster:

It was not hard to love my Uncle Victor, however. The food was worse than it had been with my mother, and the apartments we lived in were shabbier and more cramped, but in the the long run those were minor points. Victor did not pretend to be something he was not. He knew that fatherhood was beyond him, and therefore he treated me less as a child than as a friend, a diminutive and much adored crony. it was an arrangement that suited us both. within a month of my arrival we had developed a game of inventing countries together, imaginary worlds that overturned the laws of nature. Some of the better ones to weeks to perfect and the maps I drew of them hung in a place of honour above the kitchen table. The Land of Sporadic Light, for example, and The Kingdom of One-Eyed Men. Given The difficulties the real world had created for both of us, it probably made sense that we should want to leave it as often as possible.

to begin:

the royal and ancient borough of recumbency

the sea of sanguinity

crooked grinland