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 …
Tag: Humor
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/10/23/bless-me-father-by-neil-boyd/
Oct 01 2018
From Page To Screen: A Simple Favor
I likened reading Darcey Bell’s A Simple Favor to enjoying a bananas smoothie of noir tropes and modern mom issues, and will extend that simile to say that I wasn’t sure how much I liked the aftertaste, but was pleased to have read it ahead of seeing the movie starring Anna Kendrick, Blake Lively and …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/10/01/from-page-to-screen-a-simple-favor/
Sep 14 2018
From Page To Screen: Crazy Rich Asians
I’m not one of those snobs who always insists that the book was better than the movie adaptation. In my experience as a pop culture connoisseur, particularly in our modern era, book and movie are often on a similar level to one another. Gone Girl, for example, was excellent in both forms, though that likely …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/09/14/from-page-to-screen-crazy-rich-asians/
Jul 18 2018
Viva Warszawa by Steffen Moeller
Quite by accident, Steffen Möller has found himself one of the most famous contemporary Germans in Poland. He moved there in the mid-1990s for no particularly profound reasons — looking for work, looking for things to be slightly different, looking into a society that was changing rapidly, looking at a place that was at once nearby …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/07/18/viva-warszawa-by-steffen-moeller/
Jun 27 2018
An Interview With G. S. Denning, author of My Grave Ritual
Q: Every series has its own story about how it came to be conceived and written as it did. Reading A Study In Brimstone, I figured this series would mostly be a light-hearted spoof, so have been greatly excited by how it has developed into an intriguing, complex ongoing narrative with the release of My …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/06/27/an-interview-with-g-s-denning-author-of-my-grave-ritual/
Jun 09 2018
The 13 Clocks by James Thurber
I am sure that I picked up The 13 Clocks because of the positive things that Neil Gaiman said about it among his reviews in The View from the Cheap Seats. I don’t have that text to hand just now, but I do have the introduction that he wrote to Thurber’s tale, even though he …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/06/09/the-13-clocks-by-james-thurber/
Jun 06 2018
Space Opera by Catherynne M Valente
Woof, and I thought LIFEL1K3 was gonzo. The good: I really loved the fact that the two main (human) heroes are both British Muslims tho of vastly different stripes. Catherynne M Valente does a killer job of imagining a future world and, particularly, a future England capable of producing a band as genre- and gender-bending …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/06/06/space-opera-by-catherynne-m-valente-2/
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/06/04/my-grave-ritual-warlock-holmes-3-by-g-s-denning/
Jun 03 2018
Space Opera by Catherynne M. Valente — The B Side
In her “Liner Notes” to Space Opera, Catherynne Valente thanks, “however obliquely … Douglas Adams, or at least his ghost, who looms somewhat benevolently over all science fiction comedy.” He did more than just hover over my review, he provided the framework of the lead paragraph and set the tone for much of the rest …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/06/03/space-opera-by-catherynne-m-valente-the-b-side/
Jun 01 2018
Space Opera by Catherynne M. Valente
Space Opera, I think, is wild. Really wild. You just won’t believe how strangely, weirdly, mind-bogglingly wild it is. I mean, you may think it was wild when Finnish heavy metal dudes in monster costumes won a continent-wide contest with “Chanson” in the name, but that’s just peanuts to Space Opera. After a while the …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/06/01/space-opera-by-catherynne-m-valente/