A thirty-year-old fantasy adventure novel has aged less badly than a seventy-year-old Hollywood novel. That’s the first thing that struck me thinking back on Steven Brust’s Jhereg, and comparing it to the other book that I just recently finished. Though to be fair, I suppose I should check back in another forty years. I’ll mark …
Category: Doug
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/05/16/jhereg-by-steven-brust/
May 14 2015
What Makes Sammy Run? by Budd Schulberg
I skipped a good sixty or seventy pages of this book in the hope that jumping ahead would prevent me from pronouncing the Eight Deadly Words, but in the end it didn’t. As the copyright page tells any reader, “The novel What Makes Sammy Run? was originally published by Random House, Inc., in 1941. Copyright …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/05/14/what-makes-sammy-run-by-budd-schulberg/
May 09 2015
History is Weird
The second offspring of [Jewish] messianic hopes [in eighteenth century Poland] was Frankism—from the name of its founder, Jacob Frank (?–1791). Frank’s father had fled Poland to escape persecution as a follower of Sabbatai Zevi, and Jacob Frank himself traveled widely in Romania and Greece, where (in Salonika) he met those believers in Sabbatai who …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/05/09/history-is-weird/
May 04 2015
The End of the Sentence by Maria Dahvana Headley and Kat Howard
Of course the house is haunted. But what does it want? Who is writing the letters that seem to deliver themselves? And what does that person (?) want? Malcolm Mays, a protagonist on the run from his past, might live to find out. Or wish he hadn’t. The End of the Sentence is deliciously creepy.
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/05/04/the-end-of-the-sentence-by-maria-dahvana-headley-and-kat-howard/
May 01 2015
What Work Is by Philip Levine
What Work Is We stand in the rain in a long line waiting at Ford Highland Park. For work. You know what work is—if you’re old enough to read this you know what work is, although you may not do it. Forget you. This is about waiting, shifting from one foot to another. Feeling the …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/05/01/what-work-is-by-philip-levine/
Apr 30 2015
So, Anyway by John Cleese
The back of the dust jacket of So, Anyway… by John Cleese gives the book an unofficial subtitle, “The Making of a Python,” and indeed, that is what all but one of the book’s chapters describes. There are a few flash-forwards, or asides regarding later events, but the bulk of the story concerns what happened …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/04/30/so-anyway-by-john-cleese/
Apr 29 2015
Pyramids by Terry Pratchett
One of the possibly apocryphal stories told about Terry Pratchett being knighted for services to literature is that he said his service was “presumably not trying to write any.” He knew better, of course, and kept right on writing literature as long as he could. Pyramids is the seventh Discworld book, and at this point …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/04/29/pyramids-by-terry-pratchett-2/
Apr 27 2015
The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate by Ted Chiang
This novelette won the Hugo in 2007. I picked it up as a standalone e-book that was part of the Humble Bundle mentioned here, and it’s the first work I’ve read by Ted Chiang. It won’t be the last! The story as a whole is broken into several parts, which nest and braid together in …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/04/27/the-merchant-and-the-alchemists-gate-by-ted-chiang/
Apr 24 2015
The Martian by Andy Weir
The Martian starts with a soon-to-be-classic opening line: “I’m pretty much fucked.” One of humanity’s first manned missions to Mars has encountered a dust storm stronger than their base and their return vehicle can withstand. During the hasty evacuation, a freak accident incapacitates one of the crew of six; even more freakishly, it does not …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/04/24/the-martian-by-andy-weir/
Apr 22 2015
What If? by Randall Munroe
What would happen if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90 percent the speed of light? If every person on Earth aimed a laser pointer at the Moon at the same time, would it change color? Is it possible to build a jetpack using downward-firing machine guns? If an asteroid was very small …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/04/22/what-if-by-randall-munroe/
Al Singh
Doug Merrill
Doreen Sheridan
John Pitzel
Lars N. Goldschlager
Laura Eilers
Professor X
Robert Maedgen
Sylvere Ap Leanan
The Shire