Writer, editor, translator, project manager, reformed bookseller. Currently based in Berlin, following stints in Moscow, Tbilisi, Munich, Washington, Warsaw, Budapest and Atlanta. Also blogs at A Fistful of Euros, though less frequently than here these days.
Most commented posts
- The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison — 9 comments
- White Eagle, Red Star by Norman Davies — 7 comments
- Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire — 6 comments
- Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovitch — 6 comments
- The Stone Sky by N.K. Jemisin — 6 comments
Author's posts
Beren and Lúthien mainly reminded me of why I never finished The Silmarillion. There is a paragraph late in the book that explains as well as any. Editor Christopher Tolkien is describing a misunderstanding that arose between his father and his father’s publisher after the apparently unexpected success of The Hobbit. Tolkien had sent the …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/02/04/beren-and-luthien-by-j-r-r-tolkien/
Rory MacLean gave his book on Berlin the subtitle “Imagine a City.” His American publishers changed this to “Portrait of a City Through the Centuries,” which is odd because it loses the ties to MacLean’s prologue “Imagine” and epilogue “Imagine Berlin.” Further, the book is not a portrait but rather a collection of almost two …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/02/03/berlin-by-rory-maclean/
This was fun. It wasn’t deep, but it was fun. California Bones is set in an alternative present in which magic of various kinds works, and California is split into two independent polities — inexplicably not nicknamed Lo Cal and No Cal, although it is implied that southern California is colloquially known as the magic …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/02/02/california-bones-by-greg-van-eekhout/
One of the things I like about middle and later Discworld novels is Terry Pratchett’s willingness to start a farce and then just keep going with it, well past the point where a more cautious or less experienced author would have reined in his plot and characters. I noted this in particular in The Fifth …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/01/30/monstrous-regiment-by-terry-pratchett/
Not all terrific books about Russian topics have to be gigantic. In The Noise of Time, Julian Barnes sketches the life of Dmitri Shostakovich in fewer than 200 pages, drawing mainly on three periods in the composer’s life while using those to look back on other times. In the first, it is 1937, the height …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/01/26/the-noise-of-time-by-julian-barnes/
Wladimir Kaminer left Moscow for Berlin in 1990, and since then he has lived and chronicled the life of a Russian in the German capital. In roughly two dozen books, beginning with Russendisko (Russian Disco, first published in 2000), he explores with droll humor what it’s like to make a new life in a changing …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/01/24/goodbye-moskau-by-wladimir-kaminer/
Tim Moore is a British travel writer, and two of his previous books involved long-distance stunt bicycle rides. One of them was a more or less straightforward ride along a route taken by the Tour de France. Fair enough, who has taken a bike tour and not wondered what it would be like to attempt …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/01/22/the-cyclist-who-went-out-in-the-cold-by-tim-moore/
This was a good year for reading. No household relocations, no major changes on the job front, no international incidents. That adds up to a longer list of books (somewhat eclectically defined) read than any year since I began keeping these lists. Voting for the Hugo award drove a lot of my reading in the …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/01/04/taking-stock-of-2017/
What a lovely start! In The Wee Free Men, the thirtieth Discworld book and the second explicitly marked as intended for young adults, Terry Pratchett introduces Tiffany Aching, a young witch who would go on to feature in four more novels, including Pratchett’s last. Likewise, he introduces a new setting, a rural area known as …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/01/03/the-wee-free-men-by-terry-pratchett/
Mission Child begins on the other side of the Prime Directive. The first-person narrator, Janna, is a member of a renndeer-herding clan on a world that isn’t Earth but that was colonized by humans at some point in the unspecified past. Settlement took place long enough ago that an indigent species has been re-engineered to …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/01/02/mission-child-by-maureen-f-mchugh/
Al Singh
Doug Merrill
Doreen Sheridan
John Pitzel
Lars N. Goldschlager
Laura Eilers
Professor X
Robert Maedgen
Sylvere Ap Leanan
The Shire