November 2016 archive

The Sellout by Paul Beatty

I picked up this book hoping for a little comfort after the recent elections but found something else instead: stark truth served up as satire. The stark truth is rarely comforting but — and this is why the book merits four stars from me rather than three — in Paul Beatty’s hands, it is not …

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2016/11/14/the-sellout-by-paul-beatty/

Glory In Death (In Death #2) by J. D. Robb

A solid near-future police procedural, with a fully realized setting that falls firmly on the side of feminism and social justice. It isn’t the most inspired mystery — I figured out whodunnit 56% of the way in — but the world building and the cop talk more than made up for it. The thing that …

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2016/11/08/glory-in-death-in-death-2-by-j-d-robb/

Baptism of Fire by Andrzej Sapkowski

Andrzej Sapkowski’s novels of the Witcher, Geralt of Rivia, came late to the English-speaking world. Baptism of Fire, the third novel in a long narrative about Geralt, about wars overwhelming the world that he knows, and about a child of prophecy, was published in Poland in 1996. It was published in English in 2014, by …

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2016/11/02/baptism-of-fire-by-andrzej-sapkowski/

The View from the Cheap Seats by Neil Gaiman

One of the descriptions of Neil Gaiman that has stuck in my head is “reasonably facile writer.” He used the phrase in a New Yorker profile back in 2010, and there’s a British self-deprecating quality to the description, but there’s more than a little truth to it, too. Gaiman writes quickly, and with reasonable facility, …

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2016/11/01/the-view-from-the-cheap-seats-by-neil-gaiman/