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
When I read for the Hugos, I like to write a full review for each novel and novella that I finish, but I also like to finish all of my reviews from a given calendar year by the end of that year, and so here I am. There’s not a whole lot of December left, …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/12/21/hugo-awards-2024-wrapping-up/
For most of my time reading Mrs Dalloway, I wrestled with the eight deadly words: I don’t care what happens to those people. The novel begins with a relatively famous opening line, “Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.” It tells stories of numerous people on one day in midsummer London of 1923, …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/12/14/mrs-dalloway-by-virginia-woolf/
Any book about current events eventually becomes a book about history, and a bit of a historical object itself. If it’s a good one, its insights will transcend the immediate period of its writing, illuminating its subject over a longer period, showing readers how the long term looked at a particular time. Michael Thumann’s Das …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/11/17/das-lied-von-der-russischen-erde-by-michael-thumann/
Sir Robert Carey is the very model of an Elizabethan courtier; he has skills equestrian, pedestrian and deductional. He’s met the Queen of England and he’s won the fights he chronicles, in England and in Scotland, and some in Lands Debatable. He’s well acquainted, too, with matters barely ethical; he understands corruption, both the venal …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/11/16/a-season-of-knives-by-p-f-chisholm/
The same friend who, ages ago, recommended I read Dorothy Dunnett suggested I pick up books by P.F. Chisholm, and this is how bookish friendships are sustained over decades. We don’t always like the same things — Little, Big left her cold — but she seldom goes astray when she says she thinks I will like …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/11/03/a-famine-of-horses-by-p-f-chisholm/
After two Vorkosigan books that are outliers in the larger series — Shards of Honor because it was the first; Ethan of Athos because it’s about an unusual planet — Brothers in Arms returns to what I think of as the main sequence of the saga: books about the life of Miles Vorkosigan. Brothers in …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/10/14/brothers-in-arms-by-lois-mcmaster-bujold/
What’s the difference between a very long online discussion and a labyrinth? What if the thread is started by someone called Ariadne? “I shall construct a labyrinth in which I can lose myself, together with anyone who tries to find me — who said this and about what?” (p. 1) What if the participants all say …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/10/13/the-helmet-of-horror-by-victor-pelevin/
Dr Miss Mathilde von Zahnd runs one of the most renowned, and one of the most expensive, private psychiatric clinics in all of Switzerland. The enormous fees paid by the rich clientele — in the stage notes before the play proper, Dürrenmatt speaks of moronic millionaires, schizophrenic authors, arteriosclerotic politicians — have enabled most of the …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/10/12/die-physiker-by-friedrich-durrenmatt/
And Go Like This collects nine works of Crowley’s shorter fiction that were originally published between 2002 and 2018, plus the final story “Anosognosia” — when a person cannot recognize that they have a disability because of an underlying condition — which was published for the first time in this volume. They range in length from …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/10/06/and-go-like-this-by-john-crowley/
Because of the way that Lies Sleeping ended, Peter Grant finds himself suspended, temporarily he hopes, from the London’s Metropolitan Police. Because expenses don’t stop just because a job does, he signs up to work in the security department of one of London’s biggest and flashiest IT start-ups, the Serious Cybernetics Corporation. The founder, an …
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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2024/10/05/false-value-by-ben-aaronovitch/
Al Singh
Doug Merrill
Doreen Sheridan
Emily Lauer
John Pitzel
Lars N. Goldschlager
Laura Eilers
Professor X
Robert Maedgen
Sylvere Ap Leanan
The Shire