Category: Doug

Of Dice and Men by David M. Ewalt

Ewalt gives his slender volume the subtitle “The Story of Dungeons & Dragons and the People Who Play It,” at which point my inner copyeditor immediately reaches for the red pencil to change it to “A Story…” and “Some of the People…” There are a lot of stories of Dungeons & Dragons, and Ewalt surely …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2014/11/05/of-dice-and-men-by-david-m-ewalt/

Tintentod by Cornelia Funke

This was the immensely satisfying end to a very good trilogy, although I will have to think about it a little longer to say just why. The author thanks her English translator in the acknowledgements to German edition, so she is presumably very happy with its rendering as Inkdeath.

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2014/10/14/tintentod-by-cornelia-funke/

The Unquiet Ghost by Adam Hochschild

The Unquiet Ghost is both a terrific historical and journalistic investigation and a historical document itself, as the author acknowledges in a preface written in 2002, some eight years after the book’s first publication. More than eight more years have passed, and the conditions that made the book both possible and urgent slip ever further …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2014/10/07/the-unquiet-ghost-by-adam-hochschild/

Glamour in Glass by Mary Robinette Kowal

Glamour in Glass is the second novel in Mary Robinette Kowal’s Glamourist Histories series. This review contains spoilers for Shades of Milk and Honey, the first in the series.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2014/10/06/glamour-in-glass-by-mary-robinette-kowal/

Just Send Me Word by Orlando Figes

From the Preface to Just Send Me Word: A True Story of Love and Survival in the Gulag, by Orlando Figes: Three old trunks had just been delivered. They were sitting in a doorway, blocking people’s way into the busy room where members of the public and historical researchers were received in the Moscow offices …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2014/10/03/just-send-me-word-by-orlando-figes/

Shades of Milk & Honey by Mary Robinette Kowal

Delight is something I probably shouldn’t inquire too deeply about, so I will simply say that Shades of Milk and Honey by Mary Robinette Kowal was a delight. I knew that Regency romances were a Thing, and I knew that not having read Jane Austen is a gap in my education, and so I am …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2014/10/01/shades-of-milk-honey-by-mary-robinette-kowal/

Names for the Sea by Sarah Moss

“It’s time for me to read Names for the Sea,” I told the friend who had sent me a copy. Some books are like that, resting placidly in the to-be-read pile for months before suddenly announcing, somehow, that it is time to read them. And indeed it was; despite a personal schedule that veers from …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2014/09/28/names-for-the-sea-by-sarah-moss/

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

Walker Percy’s foreword to the book cannot be bettered: Perhaps the best way to introduce this novel — which on my third reading of it astounds me even more than the first — is to tell of my first encounter with it. While I was teaching at Loyola in 1976 I began to get telephone …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2014/09/20/a-confederacy-of-dunces-by-john-kennedy-toole/

Taking Stock of 2013

Retconning, so as to have a copy of these online as well. This was a year of living hand-to-mouth after the move to Berlin. Forty-eight in total; one in German; three in electronic form, fewer now that I was no longer commuting on the Moscow subway. The year I read almost everything that John M. …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2014/01/03/taking-stock-of-2013/

Taking Stock of 2012

Retconning, so as to have a copy of these online as well. This was the year of moving to Moscow and out of Moscow. Most of my books were in storage the full year. Thirty-nine in total; none in German; ten in electronic form after receiving a Kindle for Christmas in 2011. The Hundred Thousand …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2013/01/05/taking-stock-of-2012/