Nov 30 2018
Connie Willis at her best tells tales of engaging characters in surprising situations and then lands an emotional blow that can still be felt a decade or more later. I can’t, offhand, think of another author who has done what Willis does two-thirds of the way through Passage. When she’s merely very good, Willis can …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/11/30/crosstalk-by-connie-willis/
Nov 29 2018
“Will no one rid me of this turbulent queen?” is something that Elizabeth I of England does not ever quite say in Schiller’s five-act verse drama, Maria Stuart, but the sentiment lurks behind practically everything that she does say. The play begins with Mary, Queen of Scots, under house arrest in Fotheringhay, the place that …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/11/29/maria-stuart-by-friedrich-schiller/
Nov 28 2018
Oof, I did not expect The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps to end as a tragedy, nor when it did. Looking back, though, I am not at all sure that the ending is a tragedy, at least from the perspective of the principal characters. Glancing at my review of Kai Ashante Wilson’s other novella set in …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/11/28/the-sorcerer-of-the-wildeeps-by-kai-ashante-wilson/
Oct 23 2018
Bless Me, Father turned out to be just the thing for an autumn weekend afternoon. It’s short, light, breezily written and genuinely funny in places, which I hadn’t entirely expected — despite the recommendation that landed it in my set of books to read — from a book published forty years ago about events twenty years …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/10/23/bless-me-father-by-neil-boyd/
Oct 21 2018
Every now and then, I like to read a book that is of interest mainly to specialists. Malte Rolf’s work uses the parades and other mass events in the Soviet Union as a lens for examining how that society developed over the course of its existence. Celebrations reveal a great deal about a society — what …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/10/21/soviet-mass-festivals-1917-1991-by-malte-rolf/
Oct 15 2018
Here is Ursula K. Le Guin on life in pre-Roe America: My friends at NARAL asked me to tell you what it was like before Roe vs. Wade. They asked me to tell you what it was like to be twenty and pregnant in 1950 and when you tell your boyfriend you’re pregnant, he tells …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/10/15/words-are-my-matter-by-ursula-k-le-guin/
Oct 14 2018
You know what would be really scary? A novel written from the point of view of one of the women who believed wholeheartedly in the tenets of the Republic of Gilead, who rejoiced in the work they were doing, who revelled in her role as helpmeet, as implementer of God’s will on an earth that …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/10/14/the-handmaids-tale-by-margaret-atwood/
Oct 14 2018
It often happens that the very best books are hardest to write about. I discovered TNC’s blog fairly early in his tenure at The Atlantic, and I made sure to keep coming back. Time zones — I lived in the South Caucasus at the time, even further from US schedules — meant that I missed much of …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/10/14/we-were-eight-years-in-power-by-ta-nehisi-coates/
Oct 13 2018
The Shepherd’s Crown is the end, and no way around it. The forty-first and last Discworld novel. After “The End” on page 328 there’s nothing more but what readers imagine might still happen on the Disc. Rob Wilkins, Pratchett’s chief assistant, writes in an afterword that The Shepherd’s Crown was “not quite as finished as …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/10/13/the-shepherds-crown-by-terry-pratchett/
Oct 12 2018
Precious and Grace begins with Mma Ramotswe, founder and proprietor of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, reflecting on the people in her life: people who are late, others who are still with us; family, particularly her husband Mr J.L.B. Matekoni; friends and colleagues, from the formidable Mma Potokwani who runs the local orphanage to …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/10/12/precious-and-grace-by-alexander-mccall-smith/
Al Singh
Doug Merrill
Doreen Sheridan
John Pitzel
Lars N. Goldschlager
Laura Eilers
Professor X
Robert Maedgen
Sylvere Ap Leanan
The Shire