32 results for southern reach

Jan 03 2019

Looking Back on 2018

My compatriots here at The Frumious Consortium have guilted me into doing a recap post, gj, all. Between here and my work for Criminal Element, I read (with a big thanks to Goodreads for crunching the stats for me; hey, feel free to be my friend there, if you’re reading this) 185 books in 2018, …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/01/03/looking-back-on-2018/

Dec 16 2018

Night of Stone by Catherine Merridale

Night of Stone is a book for deep and dark December, and an amazing work of history. Carrying the subtitle “Death and Memory in Russia,” it focuses on the twentieth century, when there was more than enough of the first, and the second existed under the particular pressures of the Bolshevik revolution and Soviet governance. …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/12/16/night-of-stone-by-catherine-merridale-2/

Sep 14 2018

From Page To Screen: Crazy Rich Asians

I’m not one of those snobs who always insists that the book was better than the movie adaptation. In my experience as a pop culture connoisseur, particularly in our modern era, book and movie are often on a similar level to one another. Gone Girl, for example, was excellent in both forms, though that likely …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/09/14/from-page-to-screen-crazy-rich-asians/

Mar 24 2018

Any Day Now by Terry Bisson

For a good part of the way through Any Day Now, I was fairly certain that it would turn out to be the fourth perfect book, and even now I am not entirely sure that it is not. The book won’t be for everyone, though; I bounced off of the novel completely the first time …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/03/24/any-day-now-by-terry-bisson/

Oct 16 2017

The Gates of Europe by Serhii Plokhy

The first argument of The Gates of Europe is its existence: a history of Ukrainians as a people, a nation separate from others; a history of the Ukrainian lands that is not a subset of another history, whether that other history is Russian or (less probably) Polish. In his very first sentence, Plokhy cites the …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/10/16/the-gates-of-europe-by-serhii-plokhy/

Sep 14 2017

Europe in Winter by Dave Hutchinson

I should say two things right up front about Europe in Winter. First, intermittently during a bicycle tour across one of Europe’s smaller polities that steadfastly refuses to disappear completely is both the right and wrong way to read this book. Wrong, because it surely deserves closer attention that I was sometimes able to give …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/09/14/europe-in-winter-by-dave-hutchinson/

Jun 07 2015

Nebula Award winners 2015

The Science Fiction Writers of America announced the winners of this year’s Nebula Awards. Novel Annihilation, Jeff VanderMeer [Laura reviewed Annihilation as part of its trilogy, and didn’t like it as much as the SFWA did.] Novella Yesterday’s Kin, Nancy Kress Novelette “A Guide to the Fruits of Hawai’i,” Alaya Dawn Johnson (F&SF 7-8/14) Short …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/06/07/nebula-award-winners-2015/

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 …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/01/23/the-whisper-of-the-river-by-ferrol-sams/

Dec 18 2014

Odessa by Charles King

What I liked most about Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams is how clearly Charles King tells the early stories of Odessa’s founding. For while there had been a small settlement at the site under khans and Ottomans, none of the extant written records gives an unambiguous account of long-term settlement [at …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2014/12/18/odessa-by-charles-king/

May 12 2009

White Eagle, Red Star by Norman Davies

Just a few short weeks after the end of World War I on the Western Front, Poland and Soviet Russia started fighting again, skirmishing on their poorly defined border that built into full-scale invasions over the next year. Davies’ book White Eagle, Red Star: The Polish-Soviet War 1919-1920 tells this complex story clearly and incisively. …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2009/05/12/white-eagle-red-star-by-norman-davies/