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
I should say two things right up front about Europe in Winter. First, intermittently during a bicycle tour across one of Europe’s smaller polities that steadfastly refuses to disappear completely is both the right and wrong way to read this book. Wrong, because it surely deserves closer attention that I was sometimes able to give …
Continue reading
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/09/14/europe-in-winter-by-dave-hutchinson/
The summer of 1927, to be precise. The summer that Charles Lindbergh flew across the Atlantic, that Babe Ruth returned to form and led the New York Yankees to dominate baseball, a summer that Calvin Coolidge didn’t have much to say (not that that was unique to 1927), the summer that Sacco and Vanzetti were …
Continue reading
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/09/13/one-summer-by-bill-bryson/
In Naomi Novik’s Uprooted, things are not as they seem. She and her first-person narrator tell readers that from the novel’s very beginning: “Our Dragon doesn’t eat the girls he takes, no matter what stories they tell outside our valley.” Nor is the valley’s Dragon a dragon — “he may be a wizard and immortal, …
Continue reading
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/09/12/uprooted-by-naomi-novik/
A friend whose son plays the French horn was struck by the quality of Jasper Rees’ writing and sent me a copy of A Devil to Play, thinking that I would enjoy this memoir of renewing acquaintance with a musical instrument abandoned in Rees’ final years of school, and of course she was completely right. …
Continue reading
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/07/22/a-devil-to-play-by-jasper-rees/
Technology is rising on the Discworld, as surely and erratically as the morning light from the Disc’s sun. Moving pictures appeared briefly in Moving Pictures, but the unreality that they involved kept them from securing a lasting place among the entertainments for the people of Ankh-Morpork. In more recent books, the semaphore “clacks” have come …
Continue reading
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/07/14/the-truth-by-terry-pratchett/
Raven Stratagem picks up right where Ninefox Gambit left off, with the star-spanning hexarchate facing threats from within and without: internal heretics who threaten to disrupt the tight control of time that enables faster-than-light travel and other sufficiently advanced technologies, external aliens bent on conquest. A swarm sent by Kel Command, the highest authority of …
Continue reading
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/07/04/raven-stratagem-by-yoon-ha-lee/
“Of interest mainly to specialists” is one of those phrases that reviewers often use to suggest, however gently, that a book is terribly dull and that no one outside of a select audience should read it. With a subtitle that reads The Middle Kingdom and its Neighbors, 10th-14th Centuries, China Among Equals is clearly aimed …
Continue reading
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/07/02/china-among-equals-edited-by-morris-rossabi/
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 …
Continue reading
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/06/29/hugo-voting-2017/
This Census-Taker, by China Miéville, did not add up for me. If it were not a Hugo finalist, if I had not read and liked close to half a dozen of his other works, I would have pronounced the Eight Deadly Words and set the book aside. Miéville is aiming for the mythic, but mythic …
Continue reading
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/06/21/this-census-taker-by-china-mieville/
Two things stand out for me about Postwar, by Tony Judt. First, it is a stupendous historical synthesis that aims to tell a mostly political history of all of Europe — East and West, North and South — from 1945 through its publication in 2005. Second, I should have been writing reflections about it as I …
Continue reading
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/06/16/postwar-by-tony-judt/
Al Singh
Doug Merrill
Doreen Sheridan
Emily Lauer
John Pitzel
Lars N. Goldschlager
Laura Eilers
Professor X
Robert Maedgen
Sylvere Ap Leanan
The Shire