Jan 17 2024

Guided Tarot Box Set by Stefanie Caponi

One of the silver linings of 2023 being such a garbage year for me emotionally was the fact that it encouraged me to start making better use of my many Tarot decks, not (necessarily) to divine the future — tho my weekly spreads do have the concerning habit of choosing to focus on Arsenal games instead of my actual personal life when the former arise: as of this time of writing, I’m 8.5/10 correct publicly posted predictions — but to work on my inner impulses when faced with daily challenges. And while I have mumblemumble number of decks, I realized that I don’t actually own a copy of the classic Waite-Smith which set the standard of symbolism for the many decks that came in its wake.

Given that this box set was going for pretty much the same price as a deck alone, I had to snag it. In all honesty, I really wanted a book that does a deep dive on the symbolism of Pamela Colman Smith’s art, created in collaboration with the academic and mystic A. E. Waite. I’ve seen really cool ads on social media for pdf downloads of that kind of exploration, but I’d much rather have a hard copy, so thought this would be a good place to start.

The presentation box this comes in is lovely: sturdy, with a satisfying flip-top lid closure, and with the most gorgeous metallic lettering on the front. Inside, there are slots for both the book and the deck, which keeps everything secure and tidy. That said, the box is so large, I’m not sure what to do with it now. I’m uninterested in carrying the whole kit and caboodle around: I’ll pack the deck into my purse for the month of January, then store it with my other decks when it’s not in active rotation. It seems weird to have the book stay in the box, tho perhaps once the month is over, it makes sense to store deck and book together in the original packaging. It’s just not very practical for the more advanced reader, tho I suppose that isn’t really the target audience for this set anyway.

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Jan 16 2024

Children Of The Phoenix Vol. 1: The Eye Of The Storm by Oskar Källner & Karl Johnsson

I went into this thinking, mostly due to the publisher, that it was a graphic novel. I was a bit surprised to open it up and find that, while there are certainly very lovely, impactful illustrations courtesy of Karl Johnsson, this is very much a middle-grade chapter book. That’s not a bad thing at all, just a surprise, and in hindsight a welcome foray by Papercutz into the wider book market.

The Eye Of The Storm further plunges readers straight into an alien environment, as names and descriptions are thrown about with little explanation of who these people are and, more mystifyingly, whom they’re arguing about. We cut over to two young Swedish siblings, Alice and Elias, getting into school shenanigans before heading home where the real trouble lies. Their parents have a volatile relationship and their mom, Tien, hasn’t come home after a very loud and public argument with their dad Adam. She’d headed off into the nearby Lunsen Forest with Adam in hot pursuit. He hadn’t been able to find any trace of her, however, and when she hadn’t returned the next morning, he called the police.

Unfortunately, the police seem to be under the impression that Adam harmed Tien. Unwilling to be processed into State care while the cops interrogate their dad, Alice and Elias take off into the forest themselves. They find some of the equipment they knew their mom, a university researcher, had brought into Lunsen. But they also find a lot more than they’d ever bargained for, as a strange figure leaps out of the shadows to attack!

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Jan 11 2024

The Woman In Me by Britney Spears

Y’all. Y’ALL. I was barely thirty pages into this book and I wanted to take up my sword and shield and fight to the death for Britney. And I know that autobiographies aren’t gospel: they’re always going to tell you only one point of view. But damn, y’all. Even if she was exaggerating (and I’ll explain shortly why I don’t think that’s the case,) her family fucked her over.

And honestly, as far as memoirs go, this book feels like it barely scratches the surface of how pop megastar Britney Spears came to be where she is today. She covers in broad strokes — with the help of a ghostwriter, and THAT’S TOTALLY FINE! She’s never claimed to be a prose author, and it’s great that she clearly knows when to rely on the expertise of others — her life growing up in Louisiana, her desire to be an entertainer, her creativity, her love life and the nightmare conservatorship that controlled her every move. While she pulls no punches in calling out her parents and Justin Timberlake for being dicks who capitalized off of her pain to enrich themselves, she’s far gentler with both her sister and the other men who were in her life, including Keven Federline, a trash fire she has every right to cuss out but doesn’t.

What makes her book so convincing is both the grace it’s clear she’s attempting to live with and extend to others, as well as the matter-of-fact tone throughout (and yes, you know Gallery’s legal team fact-checked this book to death and back.) Britney doesn’t care if she sounds stupid or wacky, and she’ll straight up confess when she’s being a bitch. But she also wants to know why she isn’t allowed to be a normal human being with emotions, who makes very normal human choices and, yes, even the occasional mistake. Sure, most reasonable people know that the attention that comes with all the money — especially when you’re an entertainer who needs the fame for your livelihood — can be a nightmare, but the amount of dissection and excoriation she received was next level, and truly appalling.

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Jan 10 2024

City Of Betrayal by Victoria Thompson

Hunh, this had better not be the last book in the Counterfeit Lady series, as seemed to be hinted at in the afterword. I understand how this seventh volume would be a thematically appropriate story to finish on, but it absolutely lacked the larger part of why so many readers, myself included, have adored these adventures for years.

Some background: the Counterfeit Lady in question is Elizabeth Bates nee Miles, a one-time grifter who’s mostly been on the straight and narrow since marrying her beloved Gideon and settling into New York City’s upper upper middle class. The tale of how she met Gideon, however, is quite unconventional. While running for her life in Washington DC, she joined a group of women suffragists in order to evade detection, and wound up getting thrown in prison anyway for being “part” of the protest. During this ordeal, she met and struck up a friendship with Gideon’s mother, and soon found herself falling in love with upright, honest Gideon himself.

While she’s tried to distance herself from her criminal past, she’s found that there are circumstances where utilizing her uncommon skillset is necessary for protecting the vulnerable and ensuring that justice is served. Most of the books in the series have been about the cons she runs for exactly that purpose, often with the help of both the Bates and Miles families. This novel is a departure, tho shady dealings certainly abound as Elizabeth, Gideon and Mother Banks head down to Nashville to help lobby politicians to ratify the 19th Amendment, the law that will finally give American women the right to vote.

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Jan 09 2024

Divine Deco Tarot by Gerta Oparaku Egy

I have been trying really hard not to buy more Tarot decks, but the moment I saw the graceful figures Gerta Oparaku Egy uses on her cards, I knew I had to own this one.

This deck was inspired by three disparate influences that resonate deeply with me. The first and most obvious is dance, as the people on these cards move fluidly and expressively in line with each card’s meaning. The box cover, for example, shows off the art on the Three of Cups, hearkening back to the ideal of the Three Graces.

The second influence is the Art Deco movement, which also gives the deck its name. The background pattern work is exquisite, with sleek lines and streamlined motifs that both complement and contrast with the dancers, setting the perfect stage for each card. Finally, Ms Egy draws on her cultural background as an Albanian to weave Balkan folk themes into her art, making for glorious linework with a predominantly blue and orange color palette.

The figures themselves are multiracial and feature all manner of healthy, strong bodies immersed in the joy of dance. The cards are nicely sized for shuffling and have a nice feel to them. I do think there was some controversy over what finish eventually came out vs what was promised during the Kickstarter: I’m pretty sure my cards don’t have a matte linen finish, but I’m honestly quite happy with what I do have, especially for the price point. I do wish that there’d been a booklet included with card meanings as the artist sees them — especially if it were to provide more insight into her design process, as many Tarot decks’ accompanying booklets do — but I can understand why that was omitted to help keep costs low. That said, I wasn’t the hugest fan of the booklet that the publisher recommended in lieu, but it was certainly serviceable (tho in all honesty, I just look things up on Astrotalk’s Tarot website instead.)

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Jan 08 2024

The Case Of The Missing Piece (Bad Machinery #9) by John Allison

(this review was originally written before the turn of the year, so apologies for some end of 2023 recap misery near the bottom there.)

As is tradition, I took some time out of my day this past Christmas to sit down and read another installment of my beloved Bad Machinery series by John Allison. I’m a little sad to be so close to the end of these graphic novels, tho must admit that this book is likely my least favorite of the bunch to date. There are precious few traditional mysteries here and only the slightest hint of the supernatural in what’s mostly a coming-of-age tale, as our beloved Tackleford Mystery Club members inevitably grow up and grow apart.

It all begins when Shauna’s mum Ella decides to get married to her long-term boyfriend Dan. Even more excitingly, Dan wants to formally adopt Shauna, which thrills them all to bits. Trouble is, Shauna’s older half-brother Darren is set to get out of prison in time for the wedding. Shauna has a lot of unresolved feelings regarding Darren, and worries how his return will affect her family’s happy dynamic.

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Jan 04 2024

The Mocktail Club by Derick Santiago

What a perfect time to be able to dive into a gorgeous book of alcohol-free but still very sophisticated beverages for adults!

Just in time for Dry January comes a slender but glamorous tome explaining how to create delightfully nonalcoholic twists on several classic drinks recipes, while also introducing new favorites to the home bartender’s repertoire. The Mocktail Club is a surprisingly comprehensive survey, not only of the contemporary trends in adult nonalcoholic beverages, but also of what it takes to set up a decent bar at home. While this book is clearly written with newcomers to sophisticated beverages in mind, it also provides plenty of interesting new information for any seasoned drinkslinger.

The first section of the book is dedicated to explaining mocktails and basic bar ingredients, equipment and techniques. The rest of the book is divided into seven chapters, each focusing on an inspirational spirit. Thus you’ll have recipes for drinks you’d otherwise make with gin or tequila or wine etc., usually with a specific substitution of the nonalcoholic version of the booze. The really interesting thing about these recipes is that tweaks are provided to give each drink a more complex mouth feel, akin to what alcohol usually provides, minus the intoxicating properties ofc.

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Jan 03 2024

Taking Stock of 2023

The more my eyes went up and down the list of books I read in 2023, the more they came to rest on We Never Talk About My Brother by Peter S. Beagle. The call from Stockholm doesn’t come for people who publish books with titles like Lila the Werewolf or The Innkeeper’s Song, but looking on the one hand at the works of Orhan Pamuk, or Olga Tokarczuk, or the prose of Czeslaw Milosz, and Beagle’s writings such as Summerlong, “Two Hearts,” and, yes, The Last Unicorn, I’d be hard pressed to say why not. I haven’t read any of Mo Yan’s work, but his citation notes “who with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary,” and if that’s not Peter S. Beagle to a T, I don’t know what is. Anyway, Beagle’s best really is that good, and I need to read more of his work that I’ve missed.

We Never Talk About My Brother by Peter S. Beagle

Two more books that made me smile every time I thought back on them are The Red Prince by Timothy Snyder and Silver in the Wood by Emily Tesh. One is a non-fiction story of an improbable prince, and how he bobbed on the currents of history, the other is a splendid tale of people and deep magic. They have their commonalities, but mainly they’re simply terrific at what they are.

Early in 2023 I said good-bye to Erast Fandorin, at least for the first read-through. I’ve been reading this series about Russia’s Sherlock Holmes since the early 2000s, and I think it’s terrific. I wish it had a bigger audience in English. By spring I also came to the end of my reading of Seamus Heaney’s main collections. I was inspired by a great collection of interviews between Heaney and Dennis O’Driscoll, in a volume that’s the closest thing to an autobiography that Heaney left behind. Without really realizing it, I read six of the current thirteen Rivers of London books this year. Three were novellas — The October Man, The Furthest Station, and What Abigail Did That Summer, so they went down easy, and also expanded the series beyond Peter Grant and what befalls him at the Folly. I saw Mary Robinette Kowal do a reading at a local Berlin bookstore. She was great! I picked up several of her books, and I think I’ve read all of her major works now. I’m looking forward to the next novel in the Lady Astronauts series, which is what she read from in Berlin; its publication is scheduled for 2024.

This year I read eight books in German, exceeding for the first time in a long time my general rule of thumb that about 10 percent of my reading is auf Deutsch. Some were short, some were comics or pointed charts, and one weighed in at about a thousand pages, though I read the first half 30 years ago and did not go back to the beginning when I finished it. As balance of a sort, though not deliberately, I read about half as many works in translation in 2023 as I did in 2022: Polish to English was again the most common with three, two by the amazing Jozef Czapski; one from Russian into English; one from Estonian into German; one from French into German; and one from Ancient Greek into modern English for a total of seven.

The Iliad by Emily Wilson

My only re-read this year was a look back at a classic portrait of Joe Biden in the 1988 presidential election, part of the epic What It Takes by Richard Ben Cramer. I read three volumes of poetry: Seamus Heaney‘s last two major collections and Emily Wilson’s new translation of The Iliad. Seventeen books I read this year were by women (counting The Iliad for Wilson rather than Homer), and 41 were by men.

Best pop culture insider Thing, even if it’s from more than 50 years ago: Eve’s Hollywood by Eve Babitz. Best advocate for finally attempting some Proust: Lost Time by Jozef Czapski. Best depiction of a querulous, self-aggrandizing knight of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth: Memoirs of the Polish Baroque by Jan Chryzostom Pasek. Best instruction of what to do if you have two lieutenants in your wardrobe: Mitsou by Colette. Best “What I Did On My Summer Vacation” (Weimar Republic edition): Schloss Gripsholm by Kurt Tucholsky. Best body-strewn epic: The Iliad translated by Emily Wilson. Best German cartoons: Wofür sich Frauen rechtfertigen müssen by Katja Berlin.

Full list, roughly in order read, is under the fold with links to my reviews and other writing about the authors here at Frumious.

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Jan 02 2024

Looking Back On 2023

Happy New Year, friends and readers! I decided to start this year with a recap post on my very first day back at work, instead of struggle bugging with it for a few days like I have in years past, lol.

Part of this may be due to how eager I am for 2024 to get into gear. 2023 was HARD, y’all. The founder of The Frumious Consortium unexpectedly died, leaving me and Doug to muddle through as best we could in taking over and carrying on her legacy. My non-blood-relative aunt died, my dog died and, to top it all off, my best friend metaphorically self-immolated in a spectacular trash fire that broke my heart and left me crying almost every day for nine weeks. My mom and aunt from Malaysia have been living with me since August, which has been both surprisingly great and the expected trial. And then there are all the daily challenges of being a woman and mother of three in this 21st century — tho let me tell you, I am far more grateful to live in the today than in the past!

Anyway, 2023 has been A Lot — and occasionally Too Much — and I am glad to see the back of it. I did not at all manage my stated desire of taking on less work, and read 304 books this year according to Goodreads (as always, feel free to be my friend there!) I did, however, enjoy more of the books I read than I did last year, ending up with 34 favorites, a distinct improvement on 2022’s 24. As usual, one of my first favorites was a book that was published in a previous year, Micaiah Johnson’s stunning sci-fi debut The Space Between Worlds. However, my list of the year’s best will be limited solely to 12 books that actually came out in 2023, in order of publication.

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Dec 31 2023

The Iliad translated by Emily Wilson

Introducing her translation of The Iliad, Emily Wilson gets right to the heart of the matter. “The beautiful word minunthadios, ‘short-lived,’ is used of both Achilles and Hector, and applies to all of us. We die too soon, and there is no adequate recompense for the terrible, inevitable loss of life. Yet through poetry, the words, actions, and feelings of some long-ago brief lives may be remembered even three thousand years later.” (p. xi) The story of The Iliad is one of wrath, of folly, of stubbornness, and also of valor, of love, of devotion, and further still of the fickleness of the gods’ favor and the inevitability of fate. Through all of that, it is a story of fighting and killing, and the bitter loss that each death means. Wilson’s translation of Homer’s epic shows all of these facets brilliantly to a modern reader, without losing sight of the distance to Iron Age Greece.

The Iliad by Emily Wilson

Her introduction provides context for a modern reader experiencing the poem. For example, The Iliad is just part of a much larger set of legends and stories concerning the Trojan War. Ancient audiences would have known them, and understood The Iliad as telling one part of a greater tale in particular detail.

We know about many of [the other stories] from quotations and summaries of lost texts, such as the Cypria, the Little Iliad, and the Aethiopis, all non-Homeric epics about Trojan legends. Numerous ancient poets, dramatists, and visual artists recycled and reinvented this rich body of myth. And yet almost none of these stories appears directly in The Iliad. The poem avoids all of the obvious highlights of the traditional story, including the Wooden Horse. It does not start at the beginning—with the Judgment of Paris, the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, the abduction of Helen, or the muster of ships at Aulis—or end with the fall of the city. Instead, the action takes place over a few days in the last year of the war—neither the beginning nor the end. A brief and ostensibly trivial episode—a squabble between two Greek commanders—becomes the subject of a monumental twenty-four-book epic. (p. xviii)

The ten years of the Trojan War, for anyone who would like a refresher, began when Paris abused Greek traditions of hospitality, and carried off Helen, the wife of Menelaus, King of Sparta who had been Paris’ host. The stories differ on whether or not Helen was willing. Menelaus gathered allies who sailed to Troy, also known as Ilium, to regain Helen. Paris and the Trojans likewise gathered allies to fend off the attacks of fellow Greeks. Wilson adds, “The Iliad eschews the obvious way for Greeks to tell the Trojan War story: as a conflict between “us” and “them.” The Trojans are not dishonest foreigners, despite the fact that the Paris abducted his host’s wife.” (p. xviii) Throughout The Iliad the Greek gods bestow their favors to one side or the other. Some gods, notably Zeus, change sides more than once, as if all of the fighting were merely an interesting spectacle. Eventually Troy will fall, but as Wilson notes above, that happens after the end of The Iliad.

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