After a bit of a dry year last year, we were back to our usual bibliophilic bounty this Christmas. Here’s a photo of the books we got (because except for the calendar, all we got each other were books. That works out well for us).
Spouse got:
The Martian by Andy Weir, in which an astronaut scientist is marooned on Mars.
Chapelwood by Cherie Priest; the next installment of The Borden Dispatches.
The Long Fuse by Don Cook.
The Survival of the Bark Canoe is a classic by John McPhee. I found this lovely hardback version, in good condition, at Mockingbird and decided Spouse had to have it.
Spouse immediately started Chapelwood.
The Long Fuse is about England in the years leading up to the American revolution, and Cook’s premise is that political mis-steps in British politics lost them their colony just as much as we won our freedom.
Spouse also got a gift card for the Four Eyed Frog, and one for Mockingbird, so he’s pretty well set.
I got:
The Science of Monsters and The Science of the Magical by Matt Kaplan. Kaplan is a science journalist who has written for The Economist and Natural Geographic. He takes ideas from the mythic and legendary; minotaurs, vampires, sacred chalices and magic wands, and theorizes about their “natural world,” biological of physical genesis.
Six-Gun Snow White, Cathrynne Valente’s Weird West fairy tale.
The Big Knockover, a Dashiell Hammett story collection edited by Lillian Helman.
I used the last of last year’s gift card at the Frog to get Charles Stross’s The Rhesus Chart, one of the Laundry Files novels, but I spent the rest of the Christmas weekend with Hammett.