I suppose it would be smart to wait until I got to the part where Italy can properly be said to be Mussolini’s before writing about a book called Mussolini’s Italy, but my progress through this volume has been so slow — “deliberate” would be a kinder word, if less accurate — that I might …
Category: Doug
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/02/03/premature-evaluation-mussolinis-italy-by-r-j-b-bosworth/
Feb 02 2015
Buddha’s Little Finger by Viktor Pelevin
Third time wasn’t the charm. I’ve tried twice before to read Buddha’s Little Finger, and it just didn’t catch with me. This time around was no different. Usually I describe reading Viktor Pelevin with a short monologue accompanied by hand gestures. “It’s like somebody opened up your brain” — both hands held together to form …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/02/02/buddhas-little-finger-by-viktor-pelevin/
Jan 28 2015
Vlast and Cool and Dangerously Sympathetic
I’m about a quarter of the way through Truth and Fear (concurrent with more Discworld, The Iliad – to see whether it captures me the way The Odyssey did, and in a modern translation since I bounced right off of Chapman’s, and probably some other things that rise to the surface of the to-be-read piles), …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/01/28/vlast-and-cool-and-dangerously-sympathetic/
Jan 23 2015
The Whisper of the River by Ferrol Sams
The Whisper of the River follows Porter Osborne, Jr. to college in the city of Macon, Georgia, in the late 1930s. It also follows Run with the Horsemen, the first book of Ferrol Sams’ semi-autobiographical trilogy. Young Osborne, improbably known as Sambo, grew up as the only son of a planter in rural Georgia in …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/01/23/the-whisper-of-the-river-by-ferrol-sams/
Jan 19 2015
Wolfhound Century by Peter Higgins
Sometimes it’s nice to be squarely in the middle of the target audience. Although I am not sure whether anyone would have said ex ante that the audience for a police procedural set in an alternate history Russia with fantasy and science fiction elements was much more than just me. But Peter Higgins went and …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/01/19/wolfhound-century-by-peter-higgins/
Jan 15 2015
Mort by Terry Pratchett
I’ve read the first Discworld novel, The Colour of Magic, several times, but I had never taken the plunge and dived deeper into the series. I missed them, somehow, when they were new and I was devouring almost all the fantasy in sight. Then I was overseas for a while and doing my best not …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/01/15/mort-by-terry-pratchett/
Jan 09 2015
Eight Pieces of Empire by Lawrence Scott Sheets
Last autumn, Berlin celebrated the 25th anniversary of the opening of the Wall, and the peaceful collapse of the Communist order in eastern Germany. Eight Pieces of Empire: A 20-Year Journey Through the Soviet Collapse, by Lawrence Scott Sheets, reminds readers that in other places the end of Communism was not peaceful at all. The …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/01/09/eight-pieces-of-empire-by-lawrence-scott-sheets/
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/01/02/taking-stock-of-2014/
Dec 30 2014
Blood of Elves by Andrzej Sapkowski
Blood of Elves is billed as “a novel of the witcher” and this same witcher, Geralt of Rivia, is blurbed as the inspiration “for the critically acclaimed video game The Witcher,” which tells me some interesting things right away. First, that one way to get fantasy translated into English, it helps to have a popular …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2014/12/30/blood-of-elves-by-andrzej-sapkowski/
Dec 23 2014
Poland: A History by Adam Zamoyski
Adam Zamoyski began Poland: A History as an update and revision to his 1987 book, The Polish Way. He found that history had gotten in the way, and that just revising the older work would not be enough. In the early modern period, the Poles failed spectacularly to build an efficient centralised state structure and …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2014/12/23/poland-a-history-by-adam-zamoyski/
Al Singh
Doug Merrill
Doreen Sheridan
Emily Lauer
John Pitzel
Lars N. Goldschlager
Laura Eilers
Professor X
Robert Maedgen
Sylvere Ap Leanan
The Shire