Books to Read While the Algae Grow in Your Fur, March 2009
- Diana Pharaoh Francis, The Cipher and The Black Ship
- Fantasy mind-candy. The first book does not, despite the title, involve
cryptography. The portrait of what it feels like to succumb to a compulsive
bad habit is memorable and telling.
- Fall of Cthulhu, vol. 4, Godwar
- Pointless if you have not been following along
(1, 2, 3).
- Carrie
Vaughn, Kitty Raises
Hell
- Patricia Briggs, Bone Crossed
- Dean
Baker, Plunder and
Blunder: The Rise and Fall of the Bubble Economy
- The best thing I've read on the current crisis: short, plainly written, and
totally accurate. (You can get a sense of its contents
here.)
- Robert Sharer with Loa
Traxler, The Ancient
Maya, 6th edition
- Massive (~800 pp.) textbook on Maya archaeology, supplemented with
ethnohistory and ethnography. Covers the whole period from first settlement
through the Spanish conquests, though naturally emphasizing the Classic period
(+250 to +900 or +1100, depending on where you are). The presentation is a bit
dry, but everything is laid out very clearly, and they really do try to cover
everything.
- Taylor
Anderson, Into the
Storm, Crusade
and Maelstrom
- More enjoyable than a trilogy of military SF novels which could be
summarized as "what these lemurs need is a boatload of vintage honkeys" has any
right being.
- Felix Gilman, Thunderer: A
Novel of High Fantasy
- The city itself as the enchanted realm, with lost, mad and exploited gods,
airships, music, feral children, and philosophes writing an
encyclopedia. (He realizes that the ecology makes no sense.)
Books to Read While the
Algae Grow in Your Fur;
Scientifiction and Fantastica;
The Dismal Science;
The Progressive Forces;
The Continuing Crises;
Writing for Antiquity;
Cthulhiana
Posted at March 31, 2009 23:59 | permanent link