I'm thinking about this right now as I read Kristin Hannah's The Women, where she doesn't seem to know that San Diego and Los Angeles are distinct cities that are a few hours' drive from each other. But it comes up all the time in books, even quite good books. For example, reading the Game of Thrones series, it felt like people were just zipping up and down Westeros at a moment's notice despite worldbuilding implying that these places are quite far from each other.
Are there books where the author does a great job of making the geography of their world — whether real or fictional, contemporary or historical — feel realistic? Or the converse, can you think of a book with a laughably bad sense of internal geography?
I'm leaving nonfiction books out of this, since presumably the people who write them have the actual facts of how space and distance works in their setting.
by bmadisonthrowaway