Feb 09 2025
This slim novel — titled Une jeunesse in the French original and Young Once in English — opens as a thirty-fifth birthday celebration for Odile is winding down. She and her husband Louis have run a children’s home in a village at the foot of the Alps for a dozen years, but now that their own …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/02/09/eine-jugend-by-patrick-modiano/
Feb 08 2025
Ruthanna Emrys joins contemporary authors such as Kij Johnson, Victor LaValle and Matt Ruff in taking up the ideas and storylines of H.P. Lovecraft’s tales of cosmic horror, looking at them with twenty-first-century eyes and writing tales that wind up in very different places. Who would worship the inhuman and often malevolent gods from Lovecraft’s …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/02/08/winter-tide-by-ruthanna-emrys/
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/01/04/taking-stock-of-2024/
Dec 28 2024
I have more than a sneaking suspicion that Ben Aaronovitch wrote Amongst Our Weapons to deliver one particular joke. People who recognize the source of the book’s title will expect that some variation on the joke is coming, but they will have to wait until page 287. Nightingale delivers the setup in Latin, though he …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/12/28/three-in-the-rivers-of-london-series-by-ben-aaronovitch/
Dec 27 2024
Time for some short takes to clear the desk for the coming year. In Urs Widmer’s Der Geliebte der Mutter (My Mother’s Lover) the first-person narrator tells the story of his mother’s life, beginning with the death of her lover, many years after her own death. Erwin died as he lived best, leaning over a …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/12/27/wrapping-up-4/
Dec 25 2024
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 …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/12/25/merry-christmas-4/
Dec 24 2024
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 …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/12/24/thats-dickens-with-a-c-and-a-k-the-well-known-english-author-4/
Dec 22 2024
What was good about Landschaften nach der Schlacht (Landscapes After the Battle)? Well, it’s short. It’s also written in short sections, which I tend to appreciate when I’m reading in German. Looking through the table of contents, I don’t think that I see any sections longer than five pages; most of them are two or …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/12/22/landschaften-nach-der-schlacht-by-juan-goytisolo/
Dec 21 2024
When I read for the Hugos, I like to write a full review for each novel and novella that I finish, but I also like to finish all of my reviews from a given calendar year by the end of that year, and so here I am. There’s not a whole lot of December left, …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/12/21/hugo-awards-2024-wrapping-up/
Dec 14 2024
For most of my time reading Mrs Dalloway, I wrestled with the eight deadly words: I don’t care what happens to those people. The novel begins with a relatively famous opening line, “Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.” It tells stories of numerous people on one day in midsummer London of 1923, …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/12/14/mrs-dalloway-by-virginia-woolf/
Al Singh
Doug Merrill
Doreen Sheridan
Emily Lauer
John Pitzel
Lars N. Goldschlager
Laura Eilers
Professor X
Robert Maedgen
Sylvere Ap Leanan
The Shire