Jan 01 2023

Taking Stock of 2022

I owe my favorite book of 2022 to the Hugo nominators who got Light from Uncommon Stars onto the finalist list, and the publishers who generously provided an electronic copy to all voters. Without those two groups of people, I would have missed out on a wonderful book and never been the wiser. The book revels in its weirdness, respects its characters, and trusts its readers to come along for the ride.

Light From Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki

The year turned out to be a good one for books in translation, with thirteen in total, if occasionally in funny directions. I didn’t plan on it, but Polish to English was the most common pairing with four: two memoirs, one historical novel, and one contemporary novel. I read two books translated from Russian into English, and they could hardly be more different: the next to last in a modern detective series, and The Brothers Karamazov. I read a book translated from Russian into German, as part of the Süddeutsche Zeitung‘s series on global metropolises. That same series led me to read a book translated from English into German. I figured that a book about Tehran by a person named Tirdad Zolghadr would have been written in Farsi, but no. I also read a book translated from German into English, though the author was born in Tbilisi and the book is all about Georgia. Eight hundred pages were simply easier in English. I read single books translated from French, ancient Greek, Norwegian, and Dutch.

I re-read four books: two by Fritz Leiber, one by Shakespeare, and one by William Gibson. This year I read seven volumes of poetry, including Macbeth as a drama in verse, and a new translation of The Odyssey. I am nearing the end of my project to read all of Seamus Heaney’s major collections, with two more to go. I read five books in German, all of them in the first half of the year. I finished up the Süddeutsche series of books concerning Munich, and I closed an odd gap in my German education by finally reading The Sorrows of Young Werther. I had hoped to mark more reading in the Süddeutsche‘s set of great novels of the 20th century by using a picture of me with a statue of Jaan Kross that I took in Tallinn this summer, but the book hasn’t grabbed me yet. Thirty-eight of the books I read this past year were written by men; 29 by women.

The Odyssey translated by Emily Wilson

Best title and author pair that my kids insisted on turning into a single phrase: Say Goodbye, Lewis Shiner. Best bits of French surrealism: The Man Who Walked Through Walls, Marcel Aymé. Best challenge to received wisdom in the theory of international relations: Before the West, Ayse Zarakol. Best new look at medieval Europe’s place in the world: Medieval Ethiopian Kingship, Craft and Diplomacy with Latin Europe, Verena Krebs. Best look at superheroes and their consequences: Hench, Natalie Zina Walschots. Best homage to Saturday mornings: Meddling Kids, Edgar Cantero. Best large feline carnivores: When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain, Nghi Vo.

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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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/01/01/taking-stock-of-2022/

Dec 30 2022

Wrapping Up

Time for some short takes to clear the desk for the coming year.

Primeval and Other Times by Olga Tokarczuk. Nobel winner Tokarczuk uses very short chapters, each titled “The Time of …”, to depict life in an archetpyal Polish village from just before the outbreak of the First World War through the last years of the communist period. While the details are specifically Polish, the name makes clear that the village is meant to stand in for universal social and human experiences. Tokarczuk ventures a bit into the mythopoeic, turning a beggar girl from one of the first chapters into Cornspike, something of an earth mother of the nearby forest, a counterpoint to the respectable women of the village, someone who couples with a ghost and gives birth to a daughter with unusual powers. Tokarczuk also gives chapters to the icon of the Virgin in a nearby town, the soul of a drowned man, an “instructive game for one player,” a network of mushrooms extending through the whole environment, an orchard, and, once, God. She concentrates on three generations of one family, and their closest village acquaintances. The book is short, the people are mostly interesting, and the incidents are convincingly arranged. I think that Tokarczuk danced right up to the mythical, and then skittered away without following through; I don’t know if she was afraid of writing an out-and-out fantastical book, or if she thought hints were sufficient for her purposes. As it was, Primeval and Other Times felt more like a promise unkept.

The Electric State by Simon Stålenhag

The Electric State by Simon Stålenhag. The art in this large and gorgeous book plonks the remains of gigantic, half-destroyed battle robots into a nearly deserted landscape of an alternative 1990s California. Some of the robots have friendly amusement-park faces to add glee to the menace. Meanwhile, vast mushroom-shaped installations lurk in the background, emanating a red glow from layers of fortress windows and tethered to the landscape by vast numbers of tentacle-like cables. Few people remain to be seen, and most of those few hide permanently behind their VR helmets. Clearly something terrible, and yet terribly beautiful, has happened. The Electric State is Stålenhag’s third book, following Tales from the Loop and Things from the Flood. The other two similarly juxtaposed science fictional objects with mundane settings; they were set in his native Sweden, while The Electric State moves to America. The story itself doesn’t make a whole lot of sense (though its ambiguous ending is the best part about it). Doesn’t matter. The paintings capture a whole gorgeous menacing mood and are better prompts to the imagination than companions to a text.

Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman. Humankind considers what Bregman says is the radical notion that most people are good, most of the time. Bregman argues against some of the most famous artworks and social experiments that have depicted humans as eager to be horrible to one another. He found a real-life Lord of the Flies situation, in which Tongan schoolboys were stranded on an island for more than a year. After their rescue, they were in good health, and the preferred solution when conflicts arose was to separate the boys until they settled down. The Stanford Prison Experiment was not only flagrantly unethical, but it was stage-managed behind the scenes to increase conflict and bad behavior. Most people resisted giving simulated shocks in the Milgram psychological experiment. The expected breakdown of civil order during strategic bombing in World War II never happened, regardless of who was doing the bombing. Bregman touches lightly on evolutionary reasons that friendliness might have given homo sapiens a leg up on neantherthalensis and other species co-existent in pre-history. He talks about the long career of the idea that civilization is just a thin veneer, and that strong rulers are needed to rein in brutish humans. He thinks it’s an idea whose time has gone, and he marshals considerable evidence for why. Humankind is enlightening and hopeful, though it’s maybe a little short on the staying power of racism and, particularly, sexism. I found it well worth the time to read, and a well-argued counterpoint to gloom and doom.

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Dec 29 2022

Aspects by John M. Ford

So many weeks and months gone by, and still none of the right words about Aspects. John M. Ford sold his first story to one of the “big three” science fiction magazines before turning 20. Ford wrote a Star Trek novel from the point of view of the Klingons years before The Next Generation brought Lt. Worf to the bridge. He wrote another — How Much for Just the Planet? — that settled the main conflict with a song contest, in the style of Gilbert and Sullivan operettas. The powers that be never let him write a third. He won a World Fantasy Award for a poem — “Winter Solstice, Camelot Station” — that originally appeared in his Christmas card and only later saw print in an Arthurian anthology. He wrote a gaming supplement, The Yellow Clearance Black Box Blues, so perfect in its zaniness that its fame has nearly eclipsed the game for which it was written. He wrote the extraordinary sonnet “Against Entropy” in less than eight hours in response to an idle blog comment. These are some of John M. Ford’s aspects.

Aspects by John M. Ford

He wrote Web of Angels, a cyberpunk novel, four years before Neuromancer. The Dragon Waiting is a fantasy novel set in an alternate Europe where Byzantium still rules while York and Lancaster contend for the English throne. There are no dragons, unless one counts Wales. It has depths that repay numerous re-readings, and is not immune to the occasional meta joke: the story features a captain, a doctor, an engineer and a scientist together in an undertaking they occasionally refer to as “the enterprise.” It won the World Fantasy Award in 1984. He never wrote a sequel or another major work set in the same, fascinating, detailed world. He said he had a horror of the obvious. These, too, are some of the aspects of John M. Ford.

He wrote The Last Hot Time a story of magic and elves in a Chicago that’s part 1930s, part 1990s, and part post-apocalypse. It’s short and irresistible. He wrote Growing Up Weightless, a book of life on a lunar colony. It’s in dialogue with The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and is so much better than Heinlein’s book that it’s almost embarrassing. He wrote a Cold War thriller about a lost Marlow play. He wrote so many short items, pastiches, parodies and occasional poems at just one site that it took twelve blog posts to begin to catalog them. And then he died. Suddenly and completely one night in September 2006.

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Dec 25 2022

Merry Christmas

Luke 2:1-14, Anglo-Saxon:

Soþlice on þam dagum wæs geworden gebod fram þam casere Augusto, þæt eall ymbehwyrft wære tomearcod. Þeos tomearcodnes wæs æryst geworden fram þam deman Syrige Cirino. And ealle hig eodon, and syndrige ferdon on hyra ceastre. Ða ferde Iosep fram Galilea of þære ceastre Nazareth on Iudeisce ceastre Dauides, seo is genemned Beþleem, for þam þe he wæs of Dauides huse and hirede; þæt he ferde mid Marian þe him beweddod wæs, and wæs geeacnod. Soþlice wæs geworden þa hi þar wæron, hire dagas wæron gefyllede þæt heo cende. And heo cende hyre frumcennedan sunu, and hine mid cildclaþum bewand, and hine on binne alede, for þam þe hig næfdon rum on cumena huse. And hyrdas wæron on þam ylcan rice waciende, and nihtwæccan healdende ofer heora heorda. Þa stod Drihtnes engel wiþ hig, and Godes beorhtnes him ymbe scean; and hi him mycelum ege adredon. And se engel him to cwæð, Nelle ge eow adrædan; soþlice nu ic eow bodie mycelne gefean, se bið eallum folce; for þam to dæg eow ys Hælend acenned, se is Drihten Crist, on Dauides ceastre. And þis tacen eow byð: Ge gemetað an cild hræglum bewunden, and on binne aled. And þa wæs færinga geworden mid þam engle mycelnes heofenlices werydes, God heriendra and þus cweþendra, Gode sy wuldor on heahnesse, and on eorðan sybb mannum godes willan.

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Dec 24 2022

That’s Dickens with a C and a K, the Well-Known English Author

Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it: and Scrooge’s name was good upon ’Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

A Christmas Carol

Mind! I don’t mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country’s done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

Scrooge knew he was dead? Of course he did. How could it be otherwise? Scrooge and he were partners for I don’t know how many years. Scrooge was his sole executor, his sole administrator, his sole assign, his sole residuary legatee, his sole friend, and sole mourner. And even Scrooge was not so dreadfully cut up by the sad event, but that he was an excellent man of business on the very day of the funeral, and solemnised it with an undoubted bargain.

The mention of Marley’s funeral brings me back to the point I started from. There is no doubt that Marley was dead. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate. If we were not perfectly convinced that Hamlet’s Father died before the play began, there would be nothing more remarkable in his taking a stroll at night, in an easterly wind, upon his own ramparts, than there would be in any other middle-aged gentleman rashly turning out after dark in a breezy spot—say Saint Paul’s Churchyard for instance—literally to astonish his son’s weak mind.

Scrooge never painted out Old Marley’s name. There it stood, years afterwards, above the warehouse door: Scrooge and Marley. The firm was known as Scrooge and Marley. Sometimes people new to the business called Scrooge Scrooge, and sometimes Marley, but he answered to both names. It was all the same to him.

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The rest.

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Why don’t you try W.H. Smith?

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/12/24/thats-dickens-with-a-c-and-a-k-the-well-known-english-author-2/

Dec 23 2022

We’re In This Together by Linda Sarsour

A Young Readers edition of her bestseller We Are Not Here To Be Bystanders.

Wow, this book is a rollercoaster. And let me start out by saying that it’s actually quite good, and honestly great if you’re a young person looking to get started in advocacy and public policy in America, potentially worldwide. Linda Sarsour’s story is inspirational, explaining how she used everything she was raised in, the good and the bad, to form her mission, taking the breadth of her worldview and focusing it into direct, impactful action.

As the daughter of Palestinian immigrants in New York, she helped her dad run the bodega he named after her while absorbing his life lessons on how to treat the people around them. As a student whose mother thought it was better for her to go to an underachieving school close to home rather than to a more prestigious school further away, she saw how minorities were overpoliced and punished for things their white counterparts would never be criminalized for. As a young person visiting family in Palestine, she saw the terror and fear engendered by the Israeli forces occupying her parents’ homeland. And as a grown-up and mother, she saw that her voice was best used not as an English teacher, as she’d originally planned to be, but as a political advocate, stepping in to help her community — whether this means fellow Brooklynites, minorities, Muslims or Arabs — whenever they’re in need.

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Dec 22 2022

Age Of Bronze: Betrayal (Part One) by Eric Shanower

reissued in full color throughout, with the colors exquisitely done by John Dallaire.

I remember the first time I read the first book in this series. Having been a bit of a Greek mythology buff in my youth, I was completely blown away by how historically accurate Eric Shanower was in his depiction of the stirrings of the Trojan War, but also by how human he made the historical figures, often eschewing tales of gods and “powers” for more prosaic explanations. I never managed to snag a copy of Sacrifice, but when I was offered the chance to review Betrayal, I absolutely leapt at it. Besides, it’s not like I don’t know most of what happened to Iphigenia anyway — tho that said, I’d still love to read Mr Shanower’s interpretation of it, which I’m sure will be as carefully chosen as the rest of his work so far.

This third book in the series takes place after the events at Aulis, with the Achaean army well underway but still a fractious beast. The Achaeans have been trying to wage war against Troy for over three years now, but keep stabbing themselves in the foot. Now that they’ve collected all the men they need and finally understand where Troy is on a map and have found prevailing winds, they’re ready to either treat with or capture some of Troy’s neighbors in order to increase their strategic foothold in the area.

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Dec 19 2022

You Never Said Goodbye by Luca Veste

So I was pretty pleased when within the first few pages, the love interest turns out to be an Arsenal fan! But then the Main Character asks her what she likes about them, and she responds, “Well, they used to be good[.]” I will shelve my entire lecture on the Mikel Arteta project that was well underway in 2020 when this book was set and say only: welp.

That was, perhaps, my first indicator that this book and I might not see eye to eye on a lot of things. The afterword actually helped me gain a greater perspective on what was going on with the author as he wrote this. His mother apparently walked out on him as a child, and the echoes of that loss permeate this novel, that he wrote as an exploration of that pain. And I must say, his generosity in writing for the disappeared mother, Laurie, in this book, is above and beyond. The empathy was greatly touching, as this book chronicles both her life and the life of the son she left behind, in multiple narratives that shift back and forth in time.

Laurie is a teenager when she falls in love with bad boy Anthony Sullivan. She knows that something truly dangerous lurks behind his eyes, but it’s only as her world narrows to serving his needs and interests alone, even as he grows wealthier and more powerful, that she realizes that she’s utterly trapped. Her best friend from childhood eventually helps her run away with the love of her life, and Laurie builds a quiet, happy existence with her new husband and, soon enough, two children. But a grave miscalculation brings them back to Anthony’s attention, and Anthony is not the kind of person to let things — or people — go.

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Dec 16 2022

Down to the Bone: A Leukemia Story by Catherine Pioli

What an absorbing, educational and ultimately devastating graphic novel depicting the artist’s own journey with cancer, from diagnosis through treatment until her own untimely end.

Catherine Pioli never got sick or injured as a child, so thinks she’s finally outrun her long streak of good health when her back and shoulder pain get so bad that she can barely walk, much less work. Her doctors finally schedule her for a hospital stay so they can run all the tests, and are just as surprised as she is to discover that she has leukemia.

As a graphic artist, she decides to chronicle the journey via drawings, not only of her own life grappling with the disease and often debilitating treatment, but also cartoony illustrations bringing her cellular processes to life. The effect of the latter is both cute and informative, as she educates readers on the clinical details of leukemia in accessible language with engaging illustrations.

But it’s the more sophisticated depiction of her personal life that really leaves an impact on the reader, as she shows how the diagnosis and treatment affect her everyday existence. There isn’t a mawkish moment in the book as she wryly examines how her life changes, from the first extended hospital stay to how the diagnosis affects her relationship with her family and loved ones to just trying to survive, never mind thrive, within the constraints of her new reality. It’s no small triumph that her narrative stays so fresh and lively throughout. The hair loss subplot is common throughout many cancer stories, but the way Ms Pioli talks about her own experience with it feels vital and new.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/12/16/down-to-the-bone-a-leukemia-story-by-catherine-pioli/

Dec 14 2022

Tread Of Angels by Rebecca Roanhorse

This novella opens with Celeste, a faro dealer in the mining town of Goetia, surveying her table of mostly fellow Fallen, as the descendants of those who lost the rebellion against Heaven are known. Society in the post-Rebellion world is strictly divided between the Fallen and the Elect, the descendants of the righteous, who are in charge of almost everything worth controlling. This includes most industry and the systems of administration that keep the town running.

Celeste could pass in high society due to having inherited her looks from her Elect father, unlike her sister Mariel, who takes after their Fallen mother. While Mariel is a talented singer, racism ensures that she can only make a living performing in saloons and dive bars instead of the opera houses where less talented singers tread the boards. Loyal to a fault, Celeste stays with Mariel in the slums, dealing cards while looking out for her little sister.

So when Mariel is hauled away by the local Elect authorities on suspicion of murder, a frantic Celeste will stop at nothing to free her. It’s an ordeal just to discover where she’s been taken. Celeste is thus surprised to find that the Virtue who finally lets her in to see her sister is also willing to appoint her as the advocate for Mariel’s defense. When Celeste expresses her reservations, Ibrahim assures her that she doesn’t need any legal training for the position, as what matters most in the court where Mariel will be tried are the purity of truth and soul.

Since Celeste is no fool, she figures she’d better go about collecting exculpatory evidence as well. Her search, however, finds her testing the very limits of her own senses of both morality and self, as she finds herself entangled in the machinations of greater powers that seek to use her as a pawn in their sinister games.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/12/14/tread-of-angels-by-rebecca-roanhorse/