Three-Toed Sloth

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

Comic book mind-candy horror. 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