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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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/01/03/taking-stock-of-2023/

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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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/01/02/looking-back-on-2023/

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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Dec 30 2023

The Education of an Idealist by Samantha Power

Samantha Power was a writer before she went into public service. And even though she’s been America’s ambassador to the United Nations, and is now serving as the chief of the US Agency for International Development, it’s possible — maybe even probable — that she’s a better writer than anything else. Which means that even after I have read The Education of an Idealist, it’s difficult to pick up the book, look at the quotes I had flagged for writing this review, and put it down again in anything like a reasonable amount of time.

Here’s a case in point from early in the book where she’s talking about her time at Lakeside High School in suburban Atlanta, a few years after her mom had brought her and her younger brother to the United States from their native Ireland. (It’s also one of several locations that make me think that Power and I very likely have mutual acquaintances.) Court-mandated desegregation brought a fair number of Black students to Lakeside in the mid-1980s when Power was there. She reflects on what that meant in practice.

By the time I arrived at school in the morning, rolling out of bed around 7:30 a.m. and taking a quick ten-minute walk to school, most of my black peers had been up for several hours—first waiting for a neighborhood bus that would take them to a transit hub, then catching a second bus that brought them to Lakeside. I played on the school basketball team and ran cross-country and track. Due to afternoon practice, I started on homework “late”—after six p.m., when i would arrive home. The African-American students on my teams, however, had to wait around for an “activity bus” that did not even leave Lakeside until seven p.m., ensuring that they were rarely home and able to start studying until after nine p.m. Crazily, students who sought out extra help from a teacher or stayed after school to use the library weren’t even permitted to ride the activity bus and had to find their own way home…
To this day, when I hear people judge students on the basis of their test scores, I think of my sleep-deprived African-American classmates as we geared up to take English or math tests together. We may have been equal before God, but I had three more hours of sleep, vastly more time to prepare, and many more resources at my disposal than those who were part of the busing program. (p. 35)

It wasn’t just schools.

Mum and Eddie [Power’s stepfather] saw similar bigotry at Emory University, where they had taken up their jobs as nephrologists. When Eddie attempted to recruit a talented Haitian-American doctor who had graduated from Harvard Medical School, one of his colleagues expressed his opposition, telling Eddie, “Down here, they park cars.” (p. 36)

Power has taken a large and difficult issue — racial discrimination in American schools and workplaces, legacies of a past that is far from passed — and shown how it works in daily life, and implicitly challenged readers to think about how it may have played a role in their lives, what roles it is probably still playing. The whole book is like that. It’s engaging, it’s full of great and funny stories, but it’s also clear throughout that Power sees many ways in which the world could be better, and she’s dedicating her life to helping bring some of those ways to fruition.

The Education of an Idealist by Samantha Power

Power got a big career break when, after graduating from Yale in 1992 (another place we may well have mutuals), she went to work for Mort Abramowitz who was then president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She wanted to work for Foreign Policy, Carnegie’s prestigious journal, and was disappointed to wind up an intern in the president’s office. She feared a gopher role, not quite realizing that she would have a close-up view of the intersection between think tanks and policy in Washington.

Mort was the first person I came to know who had helped make foreign policy at such rarified levels, and over time he would drill into me a simple truth: governments can either do harm or do good. “What we do,” he would say, “depends on one thing: the people.” Institutions, big and small, were made up of people. People had values and people made choices. (p. 52)

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Dec 29 2023

The Hanging Tree by Ben Aaronovitch

Peter Grant, one of two official wizards of the London police force, owes his life to Lady Tyburn, one of the genius loci of the city’s numerous rivers. So when she wakes him with a pre-dawn phone call to say that one of her daughter’s friends has had an accident — the “fatal” is unstated but implied — and that she wants him to keep her daughter from being implicated in the investigation, he answers as he promised. “Yes ma’am, no ma’am, three bags full ma’am.” She adds that Nightingale, his supervisor in both policing and wizarding, is not to know. Peter replies that Tyburn has made herself crystal clear. And then calls Nightingale immediately.

The Hanging Tree by Ben Aaronovitch

“I rather think I’d have to have taken an interest in any case,” said Nightingale once I’d briefed him. “Still, I shall endeavour to adopt a façade of ignorance until such time as you need me.” He paused and then said: “And you will let me know when that moment arrives.” It was not a question.
“Yes sir,” I said, and hung up wondering why everyone felt the need to be so emphatic at this time of the morning. (p. 2)

Given Peter’s task of keeping someone unimplicated in a police investigation, he can’t exactly go digging through computerized records to find out what is already in the system about the incident, so he calls Detective Constable Guleed, who he knows is doing night shift for Homicide Assessment that week.
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Dec 28 2023

System Collapse by Martha Wells

System Collapse has a great ending, possibly the best yet in Martha Wells’ wonderfully engaging Murderbot series. I emphasize that because I was a little lost at the beginning of the short novel, though that was mostly my fault. The story in System Collapse picks up immediately after the end of Network Effect, which was the second Murderbot story that I read. In the intervening two years, I read four more novellas in the series, so the setup was not fresh in my mind and had been overlaid by other stories with the same characters. In that regard though, I partly mirrored the state that SecUnit — the more friendly and more common name for Murderbot — finds itself in at the novel’s beginning. Something redacted has happened to render some of SecUnit’s memories unreliable, something that has slowed its reactions, and muddled its thinking.

System Collapse by Martha Wells

SecUnit, a team of humans from Preservation, and the ship Perihelion — dubbed Asshole Research Transport, ART, by SecUnit — are all still on a planet that has proved hostile along unexpected vectors. They are still near a site of alien contamination that they narrowly escaped in Network Effect. They still want to evacuate a colony of humans who have been cut off from the larger starfaring civilization while all remain free of the contamination. And there is still a team from the Corporation Rim who also want to evacuate the colonists, but as a means of gaining indentured laborers. If they wind up killing SecUnit and company on the way to that KPI, that’s just business, right? Effective, efficient, but nothing personal. The colonists, for their part, have just encountered two groups presenting wildly different versions of the universe outside of the only world they have ever known. Should they trust either?

Then SecUnit and the humans it’s working with find out that there is potentially another settlement up near the massive engines that are terraforming the planet. Those interfere with scans, sensors and long-distance communications so thoroughly that the only way to find out for sure is to send a detachment to go and look. The group that may have settled there was a splinter and did not want to be in contact with the main colony, so they selected a location to keep themselves incommunicado. Ignoring them would leave them open to the planet’s alien contamination, which could then potentially spread beyond the planet. Not really an option, then, and most of System Collapse is about what happens when SecUnit and a small team go up to have a look-see.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/12/28/system-collapse-by-martha-wells/

Dec 27 2023

Just SNOW Already! by Howard McWilliam

This book is an utter delight! Just SNOW Already! masterfully combines straightforward prose with the slyest, most charming illustrations to tell an entirely different, layered tale of anticipation and of (hopefully) not neglecting all the wonderful things already taking place while you’re waiting for something “better” to happen.

Our unnamed protagonist is a young boy who shares the big eyes and bangs of my own youngest child. He really, really wants it to snow, as there is nothing more fun, in his opinion. His sister is less enthused, but gets ready to go outside to play with the neighbor while our young hero waits more or less patiently inside for snow. He runs to the window every so often, looking hopefully up at the grey skies… and absolutely missing all the intriguing and delightful things actually unfolding on the street in front of his house.

While the words themselves are already pretty great, balancing the narrator’s dramatics against his family’s more measured responses, it’s the illustrations that really shoot this book into the stratosphere. The multiracial family is terrific representation, and the street scenes are full of rich, wordless story. I loved how the narrator’s sister was busy living life while her brother pined, tho the book also provided a very valuable lesson on other ways to cope with anticipation.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/12/27/just-snow-already-by-howard-mcwilliam/

Dec 26 2023

The Narrow Road Between Desires by Patrick Rothfuss

The last time there was a new book by Patrick Rothfuss to write about, The Frumious Consortium was a new project,and Laura reviewed The Slow Regard of Silent Things faster than the rest of the crew. She had strong ideas and took issue with common views coming out of fandom. She set the naysayers straight:

The Narrow Road Between Desires by Partick Rothfuss

This is not a book about doing; this is a book about knowing, about being aware of all the small things in your life and how important they are. When Auri takes the time to deeply contemplate exactly where an object should be placed and which direction it should be facing and how it should be touched, she is understanding that object, and through it, herself. In essence, how it should fit into the world, just as we all must fit into the world.

Laura found her ways to fit into the world, and now the rest of us have to find ways for the world to fit without her in it. I would love to know what she thought about The Narrow Road Between Desires, not least because it is another novella that’s skew to Rothfuss’ larger works, both in its characters and its time. The main character of The Narrow Road is Bast, a male fae who also appears in The Name of the Wind and The Wise Man’s Fear. His name was familiar, but that was about all because I’ve only read the other two books once each, and that about a decade ago. So the beginning of The Narrow Road felt like it was aimed at readers with much more recent experience with the world and the characters, or who were already deeply invested in the setting and hungry for anything fresh from Rothfuss. While I could admire the writing and the construction, I was not, initially, all that caught up in the story.

On the one hand, The Narrow Road is the story of a day in Bast’s life, from the time in the early morning when he tries to sneak out of the inn where he works and gets caught through midnight when all of the day’s plots have been wrapped up and he returns to the inn, only to be quizzed by the keeper on the day’s events. On the other hand, it’s not just any day; it’s midsummer, the longest day, when this fae strikes several bargains and keeps up his end of them, to various reactions from the humans with whom he has bargained.

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Dec 25 2023

Merry Christmas

Luke 2:1-14, Old English:

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 2023

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/2023/12/24/thats-dickens-with-a-c-and-a-k-the-well-known-english-author-3/