Stunning and sensitive, this book would have been perfect but for the ending, which I felt petered out in a way that was meant to be philosophical but which just felt oddly disconnected given all the emotions that had filled the pages till then. I mean, honestly, I’d cried three times before even getting halfway …
October 2015 archive
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/10/31/did-you-ever-have-a-family-by-bill-clegg/
Oct 31 2015
Another Day of Life by Ryszard Kapuscinski
I had been thinking how terribly young the soldiers were that Ryszard Kapuściński wrote about in Another Day of Life when he brought me up short by noting that they were the same age as many of the fighters in the Warsaw Uprising at the end of World War II. Alexander Hamilton raised an artillery …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/10/31/another-day-of-life-by-ryszard-kapuscinski/
Oct 30 2015
The Adventures of Tintin, Vol. 1: Tintin in America / Cigars of the Pharaoh / The Blue Lotus by Herge
It is so weird how bad Tintin In America is compared with the other books in this collection. It’s the kind of thing you expect from a successful series writer towards the end of his interest in the venture as anything beyond a profit generator, when he’s just churning out pablum to please the mindless …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/10/30/the-adventures-of-tintin-vol-1-tintin-in-america-cigars-of-the-pharaoh-the-blue-lotus-by-herge/
Oct 29 2015
Remake by Connie Willis
Most of the rest of Connie Willis’ writing would lead a reader to expect that Remake, her tale of Hollywood endlessly recycling classic movies and classic actors through digital magic, would be a screwball comedy that packed an emotional wallop. But no, this is as close to dystopia as Willis gets. As the back cover …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/10/29/remake-by-connie-willis/
Oct 28 2015
Shah of Shahs by Ryszard Kapuscinski
Between the time when Ryszard Kapuściński saw the revolution in Iran in 1979 and when Shah of Shahs, his book on the subject, was published in 1982, his home country of Poland lived through its own revolution, one that started with strikes at a shipyard in the northern port of Gdańsk but collapsed as the …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/10/28/shah-of-shahs-by-ryszard-kapuscinski/
Oct 28 2015
The Clasp by Sloane Crosley
The weird thing for me with this book is how little I care for the story that inspired it, Guy de Maupassant’s The Necklace. That famous tale is essentially an account of vapid people doing stupid things, to their own detriment, exactly the kind of thing I have little patience for (looking at you, Fates …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/10/28/the-clasp-by-sloane-crosley/
Oct 28 2015
Chicken With Plums by Marjane Satrapi
Crushed this book in a single sitting today (tho it’s a graphic novel, so that’s not at all difficult) and was just devastated by that ending. Ostensibly the story of a musician who gives up on life after he cannot find a suitable replacement for his broken instrument, it’s a heart-rending tale of… well, I …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/10/28/chicken-with-plums-by-marjane-satrapi/
Oct 27 2015
Witches Abroad by Terry Pratchett
Teresa Nielsen Hayden has observed that while plot is a literary convention, story is a force of nature. In Witches Abroad, Terry Pratchett explores some of the things that can happen when these forces of nature latch on to people in his most unnatural of settings. People think that stories are shaped by people. In …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/10/27/witches-abroad-by-terry-pratchett/
Oct 24 2015
Busting Vegas by Ben Mezrich
Wait, so this is the second book he wrote about MIT students who figured out how to scam casinos? Anyway, the story itself is compelling enough, but the writing is violently purple. The best description I’ve encountered of his writing style is “non-fiction pulp”: tolerable enough for a book, I guess, and much improved by …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/10/24/busting-vegas-by-ben-mezrich/
Oct 21 2015
New Amsterdam by Elizabeth Bear
There isn’t a zeppelin on the cover to let readers know this is an alternate history, but by way of making up for it, Elizabeth Bear sets the book’s first story on board hydrogen-filled German airship. The Hans Glücker is on its way from Calais to the jewel of British North America, the eponymous New …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/10/21/new-amsterdam-by-elizabeth-bear/
Al Singh
Doug Merrill
Doreen Sheridan
John Pitzel
Lars N. Goldschlager
Laura Eilers
Professor X
Robert Maedgen
Sylvere Ap Leanan
The Shire