May 01 2023
For some readers, Galsan Tschinag’s description of hard nomadic life in the Altai mountain region of Mongolia’s furthest western reaches in the 1950s will be enough. Der blaue Himmel — which could reasonably be translated as The Blue Sky or Blue Heaven — is a fictionalized memoir of a few years in a boy’s life, …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/05/01/der-blaue-himmel-by-galsan-tschinag/
Apr 30 2023
The title of Katja Berlin’s book translates as Things for Which Women Have to Justify Themselves, and the cover shows a circle divided into four equal parts. They are labeled “Only children,” “Only career,” “Children and career,” and “No children and no career.” She is the creator of a pointedly humorous set of graphs that …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/04/30/wofur-frauen-sich-rechtfertigen-mussen-by-katja-berlin/
Apr 23 2023
An unconsidered moment of kindness sets Silver in the Wood in motion. Tobias Finch had been in his cottage during an autumn downpour when he spied “a young man in a well-fitted grey coat stumbling along the track with wet leaves blowing into his face and his hat a crumpled ruin in his hands.” (p. …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/04/23/silver-in-the-wood-by-emily-tesh/
Apr 15 2023
What’s it like to be the protagonist of a mystery series? Everywhere you go, people die. Vacation? Murder. Big social occasion? More murder. Village fête? Very murdery. Spotting the clues and solving the crime when local police are stumped does not exactly win friends either. Mallory Viridian hates it. She’s had years of practice, and …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/04/15/sation-eternity-by-mur-lafferty/
Apr 09 2023
So here I am at the end of Seamus Heaney’s major collections. I came via the sideways path, the one that starts with his Nobel lecture, which is brilliant, and has repaid many re-readings. It took me through Finders Keepers a collection of his prose, and then through his Beowulf. I no longer remember just …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/04/09/human-chain-by-seamus-heaney/
Apr 08 2023
Thirty-six seconds. That’s how long the test that sealed Chernobyl’s fate lasted. The test itself was not unreasonable, and could only be performed as a reactor — one of four in operation at the power station in 1986 — was being shut down. It was designed to provide data to understand how the reactor and the …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/04/08/chernobyl-by-serhii-plokhy/
Apr 02 2023
The October Man begins with what I have come to think of as a hallmark of Ben Aaronovitch‘s Rivers of London: a death that is in nearly equal measure grisly, fascinating and supernatural. This novella offers “a suspicious death with unusual biological characteristics.” (p. 4) The narrator’s local police liaison adds, a few pages later, …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/04/02/the-october-man-by-ben-aaronovitch/
Mar 19 2023
In Phoenix Extravagant, Yoon Ha Lee transposes the colonial history of Japanese rule in Korea to the Empire of Razan’s conquest of Hwaguk six years before the book’s beginning. Lee uses the framework to tell a story of an artist getting caught up in politics and history, only to discover they had been in it …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/03/19/phoenix-extravagant-by-yoon-ha-lee/
Mar 18 2023
I first read What It Takes in the early 1990s when its subject — the 1988 US presidential election — was, if not exactly fresh in mind, then at least not consigned to the oblivion of an election held decades ago and deemed mostly inconsequential. Cramer’s book made the election not just interesting, but riveting. …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/03/18/what-it-takes-by-richard-ben-cramer/
Mar 05 2023
How’s this for introducing the subject of your biography? Wilhelm von Habsburg, the Red Prince, wore the uniform of an Austrian officer, the court regalia of a Habsburg archduke, the simple suit of a Parisian exile, the collar of the Order of the Golden Fleece, and, every so often, a dress. He could handle a …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/03/05/the-red-prince-by-timothy-snyder/
Al Singh
Doug Merrill
Doreen Sheridan
John Pitzel
Lars N. Goldschlager
Laura Eilers
Professor X
Robert Maedgen
Sylvere Ap Leanan
The Shire