Jan 24 2018
Wladimir Kaminer left Moscow for Berlin in 1990, and since then he has lived and chronicled the life of a Russian in the German capital. In roughly two dozen books, beginning with Russendisko (Russian Disco, first published in 2000), he explores with droll humor what it’s like to make a new life in a changing …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/01/24/goodbye-moskau-by-wladimir-kaminer/
Dec 30 2017
The third book in the series felt like the weakest, and tho Kevin Kwan tried to make a point about how the old guard are mostly a bunch of racist elitists who are insecure because they inherited everything instead of making their own fortunes, I really felt like that one scene was just a ham-handed …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/12/30/rich-people-problems-crazy-rich-asians-3-by-kevin-kwan/
Dec 26 2017
I think the thing I found most infuriating about this book was how it was taken as a matter of course that everyone would be so incredibly disrespectful of their parents. I mean, I’m not terribly close to my own parents and have gone my quietly rebellious way from what they had in mind for …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/12/26/china-rich-girlfriend-crazy-rich-asians-2-by-kevin-kwan/
Nov 04 2017
So this is not the book to start with if you’re new to Liane Moriarty. Ordinarily, she writes suspenseful novels of the secrets hidden behind the facade of the average (Australian) suburbanite, and usually she makes good use of interesting plot mechanisms to create dazzling puzzle boxes of novels. But Truly Madly Guilty’s mechanism is …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/11/04/truly-madly-guilty-by-liane-moriarty/
Oct 27 2017
This was pretty terrific. Kambili is the daughter of Eugene, a Great Man: he’s a pillar of the community, and not just of the towns they shuttle between in a migration familiar to anyone who’s ever grown up middle class or better in a third-world country. He’s a big deal in Nigeria, a wealthy, self-made …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/10/27/purple-hibiscus-by-chimamanda-ngozi-adichie/
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/
May 28 2017
As far as fantasy novels go, this has a great setting and characters (with one exception that I’ll get to in a minute) and above all atmosphere. Essentially an alternate world take on Weimar Berlin before the fascists’ rise to power, it depicts life lived on a razor’s age, hedonism in the maw of societal …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/05/28/amberlough-by-lara-elena-donnelly/
May 15 2017
Reader, I devoured this book on my road trip to visit my in-laws over Mother’s Day weekend. It is, as the author admits, something of a ridiculous novel: a contemporary of Jane Eyre’s contemplates the similarities between their lives even as she herself, the titular Jane Steele, solves problems by means of murder, and finds …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/05/15/jane-steele-by-lyndsay-faye/
Jan 02 2017
Quite charming, and for the most part a note-perfect retelling of the classic for modern times. There were really only two false notes for me: the first was the laughable idea that, as a writer-at-large, Lizzy Bennett earns $105k a year, and the second was the last marriage proposal of the book, which I thought …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/01/02/eligible-a-modern-retelling-of-pride-and-prejudice-the-austen-project-4-by-curtis-sittenfeld/
Dec 05 2016
The only problem with reading comics in their original single-issue format is that, if you’re like me and disorganized and somewhat absent-minded (and thus, the kind of person who finds Goodreads a godsend for its ability to help me keep track of what I’ve read and what I haven’t,) a lot of times, you don’t …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2016/12/05/fables-the-deluxe-edition-book-two-by-bill-willingham-et-al/
Al Singh
Doug Merrill
Doreen Sheridan
John Pitzel
Lars N. Goldschlager
Laura Eilers
Professor X
Robert Maedgen
Sylvere Ap Leanan
The Shire