It should have been painfully obvious to me from the blurb that this would involve retellings of fairy tales, but I did not realize till I was well into the Beauty And The Beast tale and then ZOMG, THIS IS MY JAM!!! Andrzej Sapkowski has written a terrific fantasy novel with a sympathetic hero, and reading this really enriched my Witcher 3 gaming experience (tho I still need to figure out what exactly happened with Triss Merrigold. I guess that’s what the Internet is for :P.) The only thing I didn’t really understand about this book was the ending. Maybe I’m just exceptionally dense, but I didn’t get The Last Wish part. I’m also hoping the subplot about the kid is resolved in future books, tho since DCPL’s Overdrive doesn’t have any of those, it’ll be a while till I get my hands on them and find out. Looking forward to eventually doing so, tho!
Doug wrote about it here and you can get your own copy at
Want it now? For the Kindle version, click here.
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/09/11/the-last-wish-by-andrzej-sapkowski/
After the wise and charming Where’d You Go Bernadette? I really wanted to delve into this author’s back catalog and be as similarly enthralled. Alas, Maria Semple’s debut novel This One Is Mine lacks the wit of WYGB, instead drawing on a cast of unlikeable characters who spend most of the book being mean or stupid or selfish, or some combination of the three. There are glimmers of the compassion that’s such a large part of WYGB, but the way this novel is written strips the characters of pathos, and makes it read a bit like The Corrections-lite (which some people might consider a good thing, ech.) I get the Anna Karenina homage, and like the idea of it as an updated version of that sans the long digressions into agriculture, but I don’t think it works on its own (and regular readers know my opinion of AK, which doesn’t help this book any either.)
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/09/11/this-one-is-mine-by-maria-semple/
When I first started reading this, I was so completely taken aback by the Boys’ Own, jolly-good, public school vibe of the writing that I honestly wasn’t sure whether I was going to like it. The first part was, thus, slow-going for me, used as I was to depictions of Arthurian romance that were a lot less grounded in reality than this was. But as the book progressed, as we got to Excalibur and Morgause and Lancelot and Guenever and the Grail and Mordred, it became readily apparent that the entire point of stripping the earlier part of the fantasy of the romance of it all was to allow T H White and, by extension, the reader to examine the enduring legacy of the Arthurian legend in how it changed, for good, how the English moved from Might Is Right to a legal system in which no one was exempt. And I know it’s a bit disingenuous to say that it was Arthur himself who, if he wasn’t entirely fictional was likely far less important than the literature he inspired, ushered in the concept of civil laws: I’m well aware that Mr White was likely using the legend to fit his own meditations rather than the other way around. But by God, it’s a convincing, compelling use of the Arthurian story, to ask the reader to consider humanity and civilization and justice and what it means to be great and good, through this familiar literary lens. Mr White pulls together all the disparate strands, popular and obscure, of the legends and lays and fits them into a coherent narrative that feels fresh and, even after nearly a century of the book’s writing, contemporary in its consideration of the human feelings that propel the narrative. My only complaint is that the book ends before the actual death of Arthur: I would have loved to see how Mr White would have handled that!
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/09/08/the-once-and-future-king-by-t-h-white/
Just shy of halfway through Life Among the Savages, Shirley Jackson relaxes and lets her characters — her immediate family, for this is a memoir — tell their stories without too much authorial interference. Before that, the set pieces feel a bit like set pieces, and it has a sense of an author putting on her best story to sell to the slicks.
That’s perfectly fine; it’s the style of the era she was writing in, and she was aiming for the top of the market. Further, there are probably many authors who would give their eye teeth to write a book as good as Shirley Jackson when she’s trying too hard. The book’s most famous episode — when her eldest child goes off to kindergarten and reports on the anarchic doings of one Charles — is from this section of the book.
Once she lets the characters take their natural courses, she mixes hilarity, generosity and insight in recounting the early years of her first two children, the birth and toddlerhood of her third, and the arrival of her fourth.
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/09/04/life-among-the-savages-by-shirley-jackson/
I think I would have liked this book more were it not marketed as the next Gone Girl. On its own, it’s a decent mystery novel with an excellent framing device, but I was expecting something far more diabolical and cautionary than the “don’t marry a psychopath” takeaway which, while good advice, is also fairly obvious advice (as opposed to Gone Girl’s “yep, this is what marriage can be. Beware!”) Also, everyone in The Girl On The Train kinda sucked. All of the main characters were fairly awful, and I found Tom and Scott to be nearly interchangeable. I loved the beginning and the way pronouns were flung around for maximum mystery whilst still avoiding outright confusion, but by the time I’d figured out whodunnit etc about 75% of the way through (tho I figured at about the 60% mark the pattern, so to speak, of the murderer’s psychopathy,) I didn’t really care any more because everyone was such a selfish, self-defeating mess. I can root for you if you’re either but it’s really hard to do so when you’re both.
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/09/01/the-girl-on-the-train-by-paula-hawkins/
I gained an incredible amount of depth and nuance from re-reading this book as a minority member of American society with African-American friends and neighbors and co-workers, with firsthand experience now of their culture and struggles, as opposed to my first encounter with To Kill A Mockingbird when I was a 13 year-old member of an Asian majority. Back then I thought this was an amazing book about injustice and prejudice and how to handle oneself with grace: now the pain that underpins the novel is no longer an abstract. To Kill A Mockingbird is an impassioned plea for social justice, self-reflection and kindness, and I’m almost afraid to read Go Set A Watchman now (tho I’m sure my Ingress bookclub will help carry me through!)
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/08/31/to-kill-a-mockingbird-by-harper-lee/
After the verve and uniqueness of the first book, this installment of the Fangborn series was a definite let down. Too much happens to Zoe too quickly, with only the sketchiest of explanations: whereas the globe-trotting of Seven Kinds Of Hell felt exotic and fast-paced, everything that happens here just feels rushed and jumbled. While that’s an apt mirror for all the chaos our heroine endures, it doesn’t make for a pleasant, or even very interesting, read. I’ll still give the last novel a try, tho I’m hoping it returns to the form of the first book and isn’t a continuation of this confusing mess.
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/08/28/pack-of-strays-by-dana-cameron/
Raising Demons is perfect. There are two other books I can think of that I regularly describe as perfect – Ellen Kushner’s Swordspoint and Bertolt Brecht’s Threepenny Opera — and now I have a third. It is possible that if I took out my jeweller’s loupe, I could find an imperfection, an infelicitous word here, an unnecessary phrase there, but I very much doubt it.
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/08/26/raising-demons-by-shirley-jackson/
Charles Stross’ Laundry series began as an unholy mashup of H.P. Lovecraft, The Office, and spy thrillers, told through the eyes of an initially low-level functionary. Bob, as you know, is Bob Howard, a systems administrator who stumbles onto the secret congruencies between higher math and applied magic. Paraphrasing Clarke’s Third Law, in the world of the Laundry sufficiently advanced mathematics are indistinguishable from magic. In fact, working sorcery is a branch of math and computation. For most of human history, this has meant that it was accessible only to a select few, but as both math and computation became first commonplace and then ubiquitous over the course of the twentieth century, sorcery was first institutionalized and then bureaucratized. In the books’ backstory, this parallels the trajectory of intelligence agencies in our timeline.
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/08/24/the-annihilation-score-by-charles-stross/
It is so very difficult for me to review Marilynne Robinson’s works, because I always feel like my own prose is inadequate to describing hers. I cried a lot reading Lila, because I understand what it feels like to fall in love with someone even when you don’t trust love or people or existence, when fear and shame are your mainstays and hope feels like an unattainable luxury, or something you deny yourself because it’s better that way, safer. I cried because this novel mirrored the fierce tenderness I feel every day as a mother, the gratitude I have for the sweetness of my children, the appreciation of every closeness they allow me. I cried because unfailing kindness always makes me cry, and unfailing kindness is the undeniable basis of religion in this book, never mind that it isn’t and will never be my religion, though they do share convictions. Lila wasn’t as good as Gilead, but that is asking too much of any book, that it outdo that masterwork. It is, however, an excellent novel on its own, and one to treasure on its own merits. Now I need to go lie down, I’m so worn out, but in a good way, from the experience.
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/08/23/lila-by-marilynne-robinson/
Al Singh
Doug Merrill
Doreen Sheridan
John Pitzel
Lars N. Goldschlager
Laura Eilers
Professor X
Robert Maedgen
Sylvere Ap Leanan
The Shire