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/

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/

Galaxy: The Prettiest Star by Jadzia Axelrod & Jess Taylor

Minor disclaimer: Jadzia and I are friends via the Space Gnome Discord server. I was actually a little hesitant to read and review this because of our connection (which is dumb of me: I should always try to boost my friends!) but I’m super glad I finally found the time to.

To all appearances, Taylor Barzelay has the perfect life. Good-looking and athletic, Taylor lives with an over-protective dad (who’s also the high school and thus Taylor’s basketball coach), a rebellious older brother, a delightful younger sister and an adorable corgi. But Taylor isn’t actually the teenage boy she appears to be: she’s the Galaxy Crowned, a princess in exile hiding from the species that destroyed her home world. What better disguise than adopting a different gender and living as part of a middle-class family in a town (called Ozma!) whose planetary telescope interferes with sophisticated technology, the better to hide Taylor and her fellow alien refugees in disguise.

Unfortunately, hiding her true identity is an exercise in pure torture. While the General posing as her dad is resigned to living in hiding, and her younger sister Sally only really grew up knowing Earth, her older brother Carl is a simmering ball of misplaced rage, while Taylor herself is constantly tormented by body dysmorphia. Her tenuous commitment to the ruse is tested when new girl Kat rolls into town, a transplant from Metropolis. Kat is sophisticated and sexy and not into dudes. Will this be enough to weaken Taylor’s will in spite of everyone and everything telling her to keep hiding who she truly is?

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/12/12/galaxy-the-prettiest-star-by-jadzia-axelrod-jess-taylor/

Electric Light by Seamus Heaney

At age 62, some 35 years after publishing his first book-length collection, six years after winning the Nobel Prize for Literature, Seamus Heaney might have settled into a particular style of poetry. In Electric Light, though, Heaney forges onward. The volume features at least three eclogues (a short, pastoral poem, often in dialogue; I had to look it up), one of them a translation of Virgil. There are “little canticles,” a sonnet sequence, and at the end of the first part, “The Fragment,” a poem (or part of one?) that opens up to much more. Its final lines: “‘Since when,’ he asked/’Are the first and last line of any poem/Where the poem begins and ends?'”

Electric Light by Seamus Heaney

Sixty-two is also an age when many mentors have long since passed, and peers are starting to become fewer. Five of the second part’s eleven poems are explicitly for someone who had died, named either in a dedication or in the title itself. “On His Work in the English Tongue” is for Ted Hughes; “Audenesque” for Joseph Brodsky; “To the Shade of Zbigniew Herbert” is obvious; “Clonmany to Ahascragh” is dedicated to Rory Kavanagh (the son of a long-time friend of Heaney); and “Sruth” is in memory of Mary O Muirithe. The memorialized were friends and fellow poets, people he knew well, people he admired without having met. Most of the poems in this section that are not directly dedicated are still related to death, mourning and facing life’s end. “‘Would They Had Stay’d'” is true of so many. In “Late in the Day” Heaney recalls “The glee of boyhood still alive and kicking/In the tattered stick-man I would meet and read/A lifetime later.” His friend is still “taking it all in/And glad of another chance to believe his luck.” Heaney had another dozen years of chances to believe his luck, no small span, and yet less than one-fifth of what he had lived through then. I wonder how often it seemed late in the day to him. “Bodies and Souls” and “Seeing the Sick” continue the theme, with the latter recalling his father’s last days. “Electric Light,” the poem that ends the collection is not explicitly about death, but it is written in three-line stanzas that suggest Dante’s terza rima and an encounter with the afterlife, coming after so many elegies.

But there is plenty of life throughout Electric Light. Among the “Sonnets from Hellas,” for example, the speaker of “Castalian Spring” finds the way barred and says “Well then, to hell with that,/And to hell with all who’d stop me” but feels differently after storming onward, “with this useless/Anger draining away, on terraces/Where I bowed and mouthed in sweetness and defiance.” Another sonnet, “The Gaeltacht,” finds Heaney reminiscing and wishing “that it was again nineteen-sixty/And Barlow was alive.” The whole next stanza is more people he wishes were there, thinking “it would be great too/If we could see ourselves, if the people we are now/Could hear what we were saying, and if this sonnet … Could be the wildtrack of our gabble above the sea.”

Probably my favorite poem in the collection, “Known World,” recounts an adventurous gathering of poets in southern Yugoslavia in 1978. Heaney sketches participants and walk-on players, from the Macedonian taxi driver to Hans Magnus Enzensberger, “Sharp in a panama hat,/Pressed-to-a-T cream linen suit.” He finds common ground (bogs, actually) with “a soothsaying Dane/Of the avant-garde.” They all miss a reading that they “were meant to give/At a cement factory in the mountains” — this was socialist Yugoslavia after all — and wind up amidst a procession to a mountaintop church, celebrating the “workers’ day in memory/Of [the] General Strike. Also Greek Orthodox/Madonna’s Day.” The whirlwind ends with a Lufthansa departure: “Nema problema. Ja. All systems go.”

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/12/11/electric-light-by-seamus-heaney/

The Best of Connie Willis by Connie Willis

The Best of Connie Willis brings together her shorter works of fiction — short story, novelette and novella — that have won either the Hugo or Nebula award. That she could fill a full-sized collection exclusively with award-winners is a testament to her skill as a storyteller and to the regard science fiction fans and writers have for her work: she has won more Hugos for fiction than any other person. Willis rounds out the collection with an introduction, afterwords on each story, and three speeches — one as Worldcon guest of honor in 2006 plus two versions of the speech she gave when named as a grand master by the SFWA.

The Best of Connie Willis

The earliest is “Letter from the Clearys,” published in 1982, and the most recent is “All Seated on the Ground,” from 2007. Willis won another Hugo in 2011 for a pair of novels about time travel to England in World War II, Blackout/All Clear. Of her work published since then, I have only read Crosstalk.

One of the most characteristic Willis scenes is madcap, cross-cutting dialog, something that could have appeared in a Marx Brothers movie, or one of Billy Wilder’s comedies. Usually, an overlooked character is trying to communicate crucial information to someone in charge, and that someone is too full of themselves to listen. Missed communication of this nature is the whole scheme of Crosstalk, but it’s the kind of moment that crops up again and again in Willis’ writing. It’s also a devil to write well. The author has to manage a chaotic scene, with plausible reasons for the characters to be talking past each other, while also ensuring that not only can a reader tell who is who in fast dialog but also pick up on the information being missed, share in one speaker’s frustration, and enjoy the humor of the whole situation.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/12/10/the-best-of-connie-willis-by-connie-willis/

I Don’t Care by Julie Fogliano, Molly Idle & Juana Martinez-Neal

This sweet picture book on what it means to be a true friend is a delight for adults and children both.

The poem by Julie Fogliano tells the tale of two quite different children who don’t seem to be getting along. But as the book progresses, readers see that the kids, who seemingly began by declaring how much they didn’t care about each other, actually don’t care about aspects of each other’s lives that have no bearing on their relationship, like the sizes of their houses or the way their lunches smell. What the kids do care about is how they treat each other with kindness and consideration and respect, a wonderfully affirming lesson that gets past the superficial to talk about the meaning of true friendship.

Written in a bouncy manner that invites read-alongs, the language was perfect for my reluctant young readers, especially at bedtime when little eyes and minds are getting tired. My youngest loved snuggling with me and turning the pages as we took turns reading the poem aloud.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/12/09/i-dont-care-by-julie-fogliano-molly-idle-juana-martinez-neal/

How To Defend Your Lair by Keith Ammann

I love RPG books so much, I write my own. I also have a terrible weakness for buying more, especially if they’ll facilitate my own campaigns, whether solo or otherwise. Since most of my groups tend to play D&D (and I do a fill-in campaign for one of them. Oh, and professionally DM every so often, too,) anything that can help me sharpen my DMing skills is a must read.

So I was really psyched to get a copy of Keith Ammann’s How To Defend Your Lair. I’m not super familiar with online D&D personalities, but his credentials and endorsements are legit. I was a little taken aback by the combative tone of the introduction — hi, I’m a reader who is interested in what you have to say, not a PC to be battled — but that fortunately fades quickly, as Mr Ammann gets into the nitty gritty of what it means to design a big bad’s lair, and why you would want to invest the time and energy into doing so.

At which point, I need to make a disclaimer: if you are a vibes GM*, like me, a lot of this stuff might not be pertinent to you. I continuously ratchet difficulty levels up and down for my players because I do not think TPKs are fun and I also want them to each get their shots in before downing the bad guys. I like for my players to feel involved in combats, and to experience the terror of thinking they’re going to die (but not actually killing them.) As a GM, I feel that my job is to challenge the players but not frustrate them.

And as much as I’ve loved the hundreds of players I’ve run games for over the years, I can confidently state that most of them don’t play D&D, or any other role-playing games, in order to think. They’re there for the action, and they’re there for the drama. The fun ones are also there for the lolz. My job as the DM is to facilitate all this, to make my players feel smart and capable and like big damn heroes. I have thrown away so many puzzles and lowered the success rates of so many secrets just to make sure my tables have a good time getting through carefully constructed adventures, whether my own or others’ (I’m a big fan of running from pre-written modules.)

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/12/06/how-to-defend-your-lair-by-keith-ammann/

The Odyssey translated by Emily Wilson

The first time I read The Odyssey, I was on a bit of an odyssey myself: from Budapest to Helsinki, and thence to DC via London. It didn’t take ten years, and I didn’t feel the need to plot a bunch of murders when I reached my new home. Nor did I lose my ship and all my men, nor did people who helped me get their ship turned to stone by an aggravated gods. I think I read Robert Fitzgerald’s verse translation, and I remember being enthralled, carrying it along on day hikes in the High Tatry so that I could get in a few pages any time I stopped. But that was more than a quarter century ago, and by the time I picked up Emily Wilson’s verse translation, I had forgotten all but the barest outlines of what happens to Odysseus, and more importantly, how it happens.

The Odyssey translated by Emily Wilson

Wilson’s introductory matter prepared me well for returning to The Odyssey, and I particularly appreciated her willingness to write about her personal relationship with the poem rather than pretend to some Olympian detachment from a work of art she was investing considerable time and energy into translating again. As with Karamazov, I am under no illusion that I have anything to add to the vast literature on The Odyssey, nor did I read the book with that in mind. As much as I had any particular reason for picking up this book now, I had three thoughts in mind. First, I enjoyed The Odyssey then, what would I think so many years later? Second, I had heard a radio interview with Wilson around the time her translation was published, and I thought she had interesting perspectives. (As indeed she did, which she spelled out in the introduction.) How did they work in practice? Third, and most ambitiously, I have long thought about a reading project on modern odysseys. I have a copy of Joyce, of course, but have never made a determined effort. I also have a copy of Kazantzakis’ The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel, whose English translation was published in 1958. The front matter of my copy says it’s the sixth paperback printing, from 1966. I bought it used not quite three decades later. There are marginalia in the introduction and the first two books of the poem, along with a business card (Bailey Employment Service of Norwalk [CT]) marking, presumably, the reader’s place at page 50. Finally, I have a copy of Omeros by Derek Walcott. It’s something of a Caribbean Odyssey in terza rima. Before undertaking any of the modern versions, I needed to renew my acquaintance with their progenitor. So.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/12/05/the-odyssey-translated-by-emily-wilson/

The Spirit Level by Seamus Heaney

Usually when I am reading one of Seamus Heaney’s collections, I use a slip of paper as a bookmark and note the poems that strike me as particularly interesting or effective, so that I can have them fresh in my mind when I write about them for Frumious, or as a guide when I return to the collection. With The Spirit Level I abandoned that practice about a quarter of the way through. I was noting practically every poem. The Spirit Level was published the year after Heaney won the Nobel, and it won the Whitbread Book of the Year, and the quality of this collection shows how deserved both awards were.

The Spirit Level by Seamus Heaney

The very first lines of the collection —

Upend the rain stick and what happens next
Is a music that you never would have known
To listen for.

— show some of what Heaney is up to. He is giving readers a music they would never have known to listen for. He’s taking a novelty item, the rain stick and capturing both the sensory experience of listening to the stick and its links to greater experiences, the simple wonder of it all.

What happens next
Is undiminished for having happened once,
Twice, ten, a thousand times before.

Is Heaney talking about the sound from the stick, the experience of rain, or the wonder of life itself? Yes.

You are like a rich man entering heaven
Through the ear of a raindrop. Listen now again.

Anyone reading the poem, anyone who has heard a rain stick, or indeed rain, has been improbably given unending gifts. Just pay attention. “Listen now again.”

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/12/04/the-spirit-level-by-seamus-heaney/

Winter by Karl Ove Knausgaard

Once I got into it — this winter, after failing last winter — this went by fast, and why not, it’s a collection of short autobiographical, ostensibly seasonal snippets from a Norwegian author who’s often mentioned as a potential Nobel laureate. As an object, the edition of Winter that I have is a lovely book: thick pages, pleasing margins and layout, gorgeous occasional watercolor illustrations by Lars Lerin. I think Ingvild Burkey’s translation from the Norwegian is good; there weren’t any places where I stumbled during reading, or where the phrasing caused me to wonder what the original was. Knausgaard writes simply and directly, at least in Winter, and Burkey renders that faithfully.

Winter by Karl Ove Knausgaard

I liked the physicality of my copy of Winter, and I liked the concept: a book of short essays for each season, taking readers through a year, reflecting on changes and continuities, along with observations not necessarily prompted by the season. Winter takes in December, January and February, and is additionally framed by the expectation and then slightly premature birth of a daughter. The sections for each of the first two months begin with a “Letter to an Unborn Daughter” while February begins with a “Letter to a Newborn Daughter.” The baby turns out to be fine, by the way, and even the clubfoot that technicians thought they saw in ultrasound turned out to be a perfectly normal foot.

Some of the essays are quite good, especially when Knausgaard is observing the natural world, and winter’s effects on it. “Owls” and “Winter Sounds” from the December section, “Snow” and “Winter” from January, along with “Fish,” “Winter Boots” and “Snowdrifts” from February are all evocative and effective. They’re what I had hoped all of Winter would be like. Here is a bit from “Winter Boots” when he writes about what makes something memorable:
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/12/03/winter-by-karl-ove-knausgaard/