Jan 24 2018
Wladimir Kaminer left Moscow for Berlin in 1990, and since then he has lived and chronicled the life of a Russian in the German capital. In roughly two dozen books, beginning with Russendisko (Russian Disco, first published in 2000), he explores with droll humor what it’s like to make a new life in a changing …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/01/24/goodbye-moskau-by-wladimir-kaminer/
Jan 22 2018
Tim Moore is a British travel writer, and two of his previous books involved long-distance stunt bicycle rides. One of them was a more or less straightforward ride along a route taken by the Tour de France. Fair enough, who has taken a bike tour and not wondered what it would be like to attempt …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/01/22/the-cyclist-who-went-out-in-the-cold-by-tim-moore/
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/01/04/taking-stock-of-2017/
Jan 03 2018
What a lovely start! In The Wee Free Men, the thirtieth Discworld book and the second explicitly marked as intended for young adults, Terry Pratchett introduces Tiffany Aching, a young witch who would go on to feature in four more novels, including Pratchett’s last. Likewise, he introduces a new setting, a rural area known as …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/01/03/the-wee-free-men-by-terry-pratchett/
Jan 02 2018
Mission Child begins on the other side of the Prime Directive. The first-person narrator, Janna, is a member of a renndeer-herding clan on a world that isn’t Earth but that was colonized by humans at some point in the unspecified past. Settlement took place long enough ago that an indigent species has been re-engineered to …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/01/02/mission-child-by-maureen-f-mchugh/
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/12/25/seasons-greetings/
Dec 22 2017
Time for some short takes, to mostly clear the desk for the coming year. The Inexplicables by Cherie Priest. In the fourth of her five Clockwork Century novels, Priest takes a stab at telling her story mostly from the point of view of an unsympathetic narrator. Rector Sherman is an addict, hooked on the “sap,” …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/12/22/wrapping-up-2/
Dec 08 2017
What has stayed with me in the months since I read The Ballad of Black Tom? The sense of teeming New York in the 1920s, the deft characterizations of the divides among black and white, the delicious irony of seeing an H.P. Lovecraft tale told from a black point of view. The story is eventually …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/12/08/the-ballad-of-black-tom-by-victor-lavalle-2/
Dec 07 2017
Listening in on Conversations with Stalin involves stepping back into numerous vanished worlds: one in which Communists were imprisoned by kings’ secret police forces; where Communism is new and for large numbers of people a source of hope; where the inner workings of the Soviet Union are largely unknown; where Yugoslavia exists as both a …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/12/07/conversations-with-stalin-by-milovan-djilas/
Dec 07 2017
In A Taste of Honey Kai Ashante Wilson tells a love story spanning decades in a fantastic world that looks much like the ancient Mediterranean. One of the lovers is a soldier from an empire that resembles Rome, the other is a young member of a noble house in a North African polity. (I don’t …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/12/07/a-taste-of-honey-by-kai-ashante-wilson/
Al Singh
Doug Merrill
Doreen Sheridan
John Pitzel
Lars N. Goldschlager
Laura Eilers
Professor X
Robert Maedgen
Sylvere Ap Leanan
The Shire