Sep 19 2017
Death’s adoptive granddaughter. A perfectionist clockmaker. An unassuming monk. An uncannily talented novice, who’s prone to stealing things. These four form the primary cast of Thief of Time, the twenty-sixth Discworld novel. The conceit of the story is that if time is ever measured with perfect accuracy, it is captured, and stops. Completely. AFTER ONE …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/09/19/thief-of-time-by-terry-pratchett/
Sep 18 2017
It’s a John Le Carré book, so you know that someone is going to get screwed in the end. In his Cold War books, which were on the whole more subtle in their plotting if not as deft in their characterization, it wasn’t always possible to tell who was doing just what to whom, because …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/09/18/a-most-wanted-man-by-john-le-carre/
Sep 14 2017
I should say two things right up front about Europe in Winter. First, intermittently during a bicycle tour across one of Europe’s smaller polities that steadfastly refuses to disappear completely is both the right and wrong way to read this book. Wrong, because it surely deserves closer attention that I was sometimes able to give …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/09/14/europe-in-winter-by-dave-hutchinson/
Sep 13 2017
The summer of 1927, to be precise. The summer that Charles Lindbergh flew across the Atlantic, that Babe Ruth returned to form and led the New York Yankees to dominate baseball, a summer that Calvin Coolidge didn’t have much to say (not that that was unique to 1927), the summer that Sacco and Vanzetti were …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/09/13/one-summer-by-bill-bryson/
Sep 12 2017
In Naomi Novik’s Uprooted, things are not as they seem. She and her first-person narrator tell readers that from the novel’s very beginning: “Our Dragon doesn’t eat the girls he takes, no matter what stories they tell outside our valley.” Nor is the valley’s Dragon a dragon — “he may be a wizard and immortal, …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/09/12/uprooted-by-naomi-novik/
Jul 22 2017
A friend whose son plays the French horn was struck by the quality of Jasper Rees’ writing and sent me a copy of A Devil to Play, thinking that I would enjoy this memoir of renewing acquaintance with a musical instrument abandoned in Rees’ final years of school, and of course she was completely right. …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/07/22/a-devil-to-play-by-jasper-rees/
Jul 14 2017
Technology is rising on the Discworld, as surely and erratically as the morning light from the Disc’s sun. Moving pictures appeared briefly in Moving Pictures, but the unreality that they involved kept them from securing a lasting place among the entertainments for the people of Ankh-Morpork. In more recent books, the semaphore “clacks” have come …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/07/14/the-truth-by-terry-pratchett/
Jul 04 2017
Raven Stratagem picks up right where Ninefox Gambit left off, with the star-spanning hexarchate facing threats from within and without: internal heretics who threaten to disrupt the tight control of time that enables faster-than-light travel and other sufficiently advanced technologies, external aliens bent on conquest. A swarm sent by Kel Command, the highest authority of …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/07/04/raven-stratagem-by-yoon-ha-lee/
Jul 02 2017
“Of interest mainly to specialists” is one of those phrases that reviewers often use to suggest, however gently, that a book is terribly dull and that no one outside of a select audience should read it. With a subtitle that reads The Middle Kingdom and its Neighbors, 10th-14th Centuries, China Among Equals is clearly aimed …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/07/02/china-among-equals-edited-by-morris-rossabi/
Jun 29 2017
I’ve finished marking up my Hugo ballot for 2017, and I’m satisfied with where my votes have gone. That doesn’t mean I have finished reading everything that’s on the ballot — far from it — but I have done enough in each work that I am going to read to have a sense of how …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/06/29/hugo-voting-2017/
Al Singh
Doug Merrill
Doreen Sheridan
John Pitzel
Lars N. Goldschlager
Laura Eilers
Professor X
Robert Maedgen
Sylvere Ap Leanan
The Shire