- Three Squares: The Invention of the American Meal by Abigail Carroll. Cultural history of food in America: what constitutes a meal and when and how it should be eaten; tracks the rise of the formal evening meal, commercial packaging, and snacking.
- Dreamsnake by Vonda N. McIntyre. Hugo- and Nebula-winning classic about a snake-handling healer in a post-apocalyptic world: how did I not read this sooner?
- The Fated Sky by Mary Robinette Kowal. Sequel to The Calculating Stars. Civil unrest breaks out during the first mission to Mars. I honestly think it’s better than the first book, which just won a Nebula.
- The Man Underneath by R. A. Lafferty. Third volume of Centipede Press’s Collected Short Fiction series. David Hartwell once told me that a Lafferty story was more powerful as one story in a magazine than it was as one story in a collection of other Lafferty stories, where his tricks and devices start to get repetitive. This volume proves his point, I’m afraid.
- Lands of Lost Borders: Out of Bounds on the Silk Road by Kate Harris. Travel book in which the author and a friend bike across central Asia, from Istanbul through the Caucasus, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, China, Nepal and India, and inadvertently prove that white woman privilege can be cashed in anywhere in the world.
- The Faithful Executioner by Joel F. Harrington. Microhistory teasing out meaning from, and providing context to, the memoirs of a 16th-century Nuremberg executioner.
- The Iron Dragon’s Mother by Michael Swanwick. Proficient fantasy novel from one of my favourite authors. Third in a loose trilogy set in an industrial Faerie, with a different focus and scope than the first two (The Iron Dragon’s Daughter and The Dragons of Babel). The two viewpoint characters don’t feel balanced to me—Helen is too absent—but it’s a fluid and delightful read.
Books Read: 2Q 2019
Jonathan Crowe
Jonathan Crowe blogs about maps at The Map Room and writes and reviews science fiction and fantasy; his work has been published by AE, The New York Review of Science Fiction, Strange Horizons and Tor.com. He lives in Shawville, Quebec.
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