Nov 14 2021
I read Invisible Cities ages ago when I worked for a bookstore in Atlanta and was reading more consciously literary things. I picked it up again recently thanks to a Twitter thread. Jo Walton had been doing a series of 50 manipulated images of Venice. As she wrote, “In honour of Italo Calvino’s Le Citta …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/11/14/invisible-cities-by-italo-calvino/
Nov 13 2021
It’s 1922 and the Ku Klux Klan is marching in Macon, Georgia. The Klan I know from history is bad enough, but the Klan in Ring Shout is supplemented by literal monsters that Clark’s first-person narrator Maryse Boudreaux and her friends Sadie and Chef can see through the human form that the Ku Kluxes have …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/11/13/ring-shout-by-p-djeli-clark/
Nov 07 2021
Circassians! The father of Allie, title character and first-person narrator of Courtney’s novel, comes from a Circassian family. They’re an ethnic group originally from the Northern Caucasus. After their encounter with an expanding Russian Empire went the way of most encounters between small peoples and the empire, the vast majority of Circassians were expelled to …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/11/07/all-american-muslim-girl-by-nadine-jolie-courtney-2/
Nov 06 2021
For a certain kind of person, this book is a source of great joy. Fortunately, I am that kind of person, and I have kept coming back to it since I bought it in February. I first became aware of Art & Arcana when I flipped through an electronic version that came as part of …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/11/06/dungeons-dragons-art-arcana-a-visual-history-by-michael-witwer-et-al/
Oct 30 2021
Harrowhark Nonagesimus, generally and more pronounceably known as Harrow the Ninth, is one weird chickadee. Even among advanced necromancers, a company not generally known for bland probity, Harrow stands out. Readers of this book’s predecessor, Gideon the Ninth, know it; anyone wandering in on this book as the starting point in the Locked Tomb series …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/10/30/premature-evaluation-harrow-the-ninth-by-tamsyn-muir/
Oct 17 2021
I admired the conception of Das Erwachen (The Awakening) more than I enjoyed its execution. As Josef Ruederer’s widow Elisabeth wrote in an brief introductory note, “[He] wanted to portray life — history and people — in his home city through the nineteenth century up to the present [1916] in a four-volume novel.” Unfortunately, he …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/10/17/das-erwachen-by-josef-ruederer/
Oct 11 2021
That I am spoiled for choice among just the books that I own, to say nothing of any libraries that Berlin might have, can be inferred from the fact that in the four and a half years since I last wrote a coming attractions post, I have read north of 200 books, but only three …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/10/11/tales-of-the-squee-pt-2/
Oct 10 2021
In Border, Kapka Kassabova traveled to the corner of Europe where Greece, Bulgaria and Turkey meet to find out how the region had changed since the Iron Curtain had ceased to divide these three countries that have so much shared history. To the Lake takes her further west to where Macedonia, Albania and Greece meet, …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/10/10/to-the-lake-by-kapka-kassabova/
Oct 09 2021
On April 21, 1990, the second through sixth places on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart of pop music were occupied by “Don’t Wanna Fall in Love” by Jane Child, “All Around the World” by Lisa Stansfield, “I Wanna be Rich” by Calloway, “I’ll be Your Everything” by Tommy Page, and “Here and Now” by Luther Vandross. …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/10/09/piranesi-redux/
Oct 08 2021
I nearly noped out of Black Sun about a quarter of the way through, thinking that if I wanted to read about teachers abusing a child in supposed service to a greater cause then I would go back and read The Fifth Season and its sequels, but I don’t. I had given Black Sun a …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/10/08/black-sun-by-rebecca-roanhorse/
Al Singh
Doug Merrill
Doreen Sheridan
Emily Lauer
John Pitzel
Lars N. Goldschlager
Laura Eilers
Professor X
Robert Maedgen
Sylvere Ap Leanan
The Shire