Nov 15 2020
I read Between the World and Me a lifetime ago, in early summer when it was strange to leave the neighborhood again after so many weeks of stillness. It is a hard book, not because of the difficulty of language or of its concepts, but because of the hardness of its subject: how to live …
Permanent link to this article: http://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/11/15/between-the-world-and-me-by-ta-nehisi-coates/
Jan 23 2020
Last February, I read 17 books in a month, which is a lot for me, if not for Doreen or Laura (or indeed Jo Walton). Now, I seem to be on the opposite side of that coin. Of the three books I finished in December, one I skimmed a great deal of, one was quite …
Permanent link to this article: http://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/01/23/wintry-slowness/
Aug 10 2019
I remember enjoying these assessments of the Hugo Awards when they first appeared as columns on Tor.com, and I am glad to see them collected in book form with the addition of selected comments that appeared in the discussion that followed each column. The subtitle of this collection — A Personal Look Back at the Hugo …
Permanent link to this article: http://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2019/08/10/an-informal-history-of-the-hugos-by-jo-walton/
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: http://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/10/15/words-are-my-matter-by-ursula-k-le-guin/
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: http://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/10/14/we-were-eight-years-in-power-by-ta-nehisi-coates/
Jun 29 2017
I’ve finished marking up my Hugo ballot for 2017, and I’m satisfied with where my votes have gone. That doesn’t mean I have finished reading everything that’s on the ballot — far from it — but I have done enough in each work that I am going to read to have a sense of how …
Permanent link to this article: http://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/06/29/hugo-voting-2017/
Dec 20 2015
For those of us in love with the history of Architecture, there are a myriad of scholarly works, photo essays, and the like, many of which are unexceptional reading. But, if there was a book that introduced “out of the box” thinking to 20th century architectural concepts, this is probably it. A classic from 1981, I imagine most …
Permanent link to this article: http://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/12/20/from-bauhaus-to-our-house-by-tom-wolfe/
Dec 18 2015
I really enjoyed her fiction work, so in comparison, this collection of essays seems fairly bland. It’s okay if you want to read the musings of a young, single white American woman living in New York City, but it’s nothing groundbreaking, distinctive or even particularly memorable. There’s some humor to it, but I didn’t find …
Permanent link to this article: http://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/12/18/i-was-told-thered-be-cake-by-sloane-crosley/
Permanent link to this article: http://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/05/27/to-be-read-1/
Jan 28 2015
I’m about a quarter of the way through Truth and Fear (concurrent with more Discworld, The Iliad – to see whether it captures me the way The Odyssey did, and in a modern translation since I bounced right off of Chapman’s, and probably some other things that rise to the surface of the to-be-read piles), …
Permanent link to this article: http://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/01/28/vlast-and-cool-and-dangerously-sympathetic/
Al Singh
Doug Merrill
Doreen Sheridan
Ed Ott
John Pitzel
Lars N. Goldschlager
L.M. Davenport
Laura Eilers
Maou Tsaou
Professor X
Robert Maedgen
Sylvere Ap Leanan
The Shire