Writer, editor, translator, project manager, reformed bookseller. Currently based in Berlin, following stints in Moscow, Tbilisi, Munich, Washington, Warsaw, Budapest and Atlanta. Previously blogged at A Fistful of Euros, though that is now largely lost to link rot.
Most commented posts
- The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison — 9 comments
- White Eagle, Red Star by Norman Davies — 7 comments
- Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovitch — 7 comments
- Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire — 6 comments
- The Stone Sky by N.K. Jemisin — 6 comments
Author's posts
Butler to the World begins with an American academic paying a visit to Oliver Bullough. Leading up to the publication of Moneyland, and even more since, Bullough has been writing about financial corruption, and particularly the ways that advanced, rule-of-law democracies have been helping corrupt rich people around the world keep and protect their ill-gotten …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/05/08/butler-to-the-world-by-oliver-bullough/
I came to Heisser Sommer prepared not to like it. A book by a male author in his forties, looking back on his glorious youth twenty years previous. That Timm chose not to use quotation marks for characters’ speech added to my annoyance. Worse, it’s set in the overexposed late 1960s, featuring a male protagonist …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/05/07/heisser-sommer-by-uwe-timm/
It would have worked, too! As the back cover of Meddling Kids says, in 1977 the Blyton Summer Detective Club unmasked the Sleepy Lake monster, a low-life fortune hunter who put on a funny suit to scare people away while he searched the grounds of the Deboën mansion for the gold hoard that was rumored …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/05/06/meddling-kids-by-edgar-cantero/
By reading the Murderbot series all out of order (2-5-6-1-3, with 4 lined up to read soon) I’ve not experienced its coming to terms with its freedom or its engagement with other non-humans as a story of continuous progress. On the other hand, knowing a bit more about where Murderbot is headed — including its …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/05/03/rogue-protocol-by-martha-wells/
What an exciting bunch of finalists! I’ve read precisely none of the finalists in the first four fiction categories (I had put The Witness for the Dead by Katherine Addison on my nominating ballot and am sorry to see it was not among the top six), also none of the finalists for Best Related Work, …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/04/17/hugo-finalists-2022/
The first great virtue of the 20-volume “München erlesen” (Selected Munich, with a bit of a pun on the German word for reading) series is the simple fact of its existence. There are not many provincial capitals that could support a literary series that runs to 20 books, let alone one with the quality of …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/04/02/reading-munich-munchen-erlesen/
A Trail Through Time is the fourth book about Madeleine Maxwell and St Mary’s Institute for Historical Research where the historians investigate major historical events in contemporary time — “It’s time travel, OK” — and follows closely on the events of A Second Chance. The title of this book refers to the ability of its major antagonists, …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/03/21/a-trail-through-time-by-jodi-taylor/
In How the Word is Passed, Clint Smith recounts his visits to seven locations as part of what he calls in the book’s subtitle “A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America.” Monticello Plantation. The Whitney Plantation. Angola Prison. Blandford Cemetery. Galveston Island. New York City. Goréee Island (Ghana). Along with a prologue in …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/03/19/how-the-word-is-passed-by-clint-smith/
For about the first eighty percent of Wir sind Gefangene (We Are Prisoners), my assessment of the book was that I could see why it was a sensation in the 1920s but couldn’t see much to recommend it for readers of the 2020s. It begins with Graf is at school in the small Bavarian town …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/03/18/wir-sind-gefangene-by-oskar-maria-graf/
A rare blunder by Erast Fandorin, Imperial Russia’s foremost detective, puts him on the trail of an assassin and revolutionary in the summer of 1914, a trail that leads to Baku, oil-spattered boomtown and possible crucible of a plot against the very order that Fandorin upholds. The city itself is a bubbling pool of money, …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/03/13/black-city-by-boris-akunin/
Al Singh
Doug Merrill
Doreen Sheridan
Emily Lauer
John Pitzel
Lars N. Goldschlager
Laura Eilers
Professor X
Robert Maedgen
Sylvere Ap Leanan
The Shire