Sep 07 2025
In Cetaganda Miles Vorkosigan, who is all of 22 years old, is sent to represent his home world of Barrayar at the funeral of the Cetagandan Dowager Empress. Accompanying him is his cousin Ivan Vorpatril, who is not much older. Cetaganda possesses a sprawling empire, by the terms of the Vorkosigan series, “eight developed planets …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/09/07/cetaganda-by-lois-mcmaster-bujold/
Sep 06 2025
Ivan Vladislavić paints his Portrait with Keys: The City of Johannesburg Unlocked in a pointillist style, dividing up not quite 200 pages of main text into 138 anecdotes and observations, each of which shows some aspect of his life in the city in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The sections are numbered, enabling the …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/09/06/portrait-with-keys-by-ivan-vladislavic/
Sep 01 2025
I never did finish writing my review of Ancillary Mercy, the final book of Ann Leckie‘s Imperial Raadch trilogy, but here is part of its beginning: Presger Translator Zeiat may be my favorite character in science fiction from 2015. I’ll have to think about it a little while more to be sure, but she is …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/09/01/translation-state-by-ann-leckie/
Aug 30 2025
The first two pages of The Kite Runner establish that as a child in Kabul in 1975, the first-person narrator witnessed or did something life-changing, something that so indelibly marked him that he carried it into the novel’s present day, which is December 2001. The summer of that year the narrator, who is living in …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/08/30/the-kite-runner-by-khaled-hosseini/
Aug 16 2025
The battle lines of the Italian campaign in World War II have moved northward from the outskirts of Florence. In a villa once owned by the Medici and then the Jesuits, lately used as a hospital by the Allies, two people remain. One is a nurse, a young Canadian woman who has been tending soldiers …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/08/16/the-english-patient-by-michael-ondaatje/
Jul 20 2025
Officially, I’m taking a break from reading for the Hugo Awards this year. I’ve found participating in the Hugo process as a reader and voter wonderfully rewarding, not least because it has introduced me to authors I would have completely missed otherwise, but I’m also a conscientious voter, and that means I try to read …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/07/20/hugo-awards-2025-best-short-story/
Jul 12 2025
METAtropolis brings together five stories set in a nearish-future United States that’s mostly come undone amid climate catastrophes and other less-specified degradations. The anthology began as an audio-only collection. John Scalzi put it together, and worked with the other authors — Jay Lake, Tobias S. Buckell, Elizabeth Bear, and Karl Schroeder — to create a shared …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/07/12/metatropolis-edited-by-john-scalzi/
May 25 2025
Kassandra tells the tale of the fall of Troy in a first-person flashback narrated by Cassandra herself. At the time of the telling, she has been in Greek captivity and is on her way to her execution. Cassandra was the daughter of Priam, the king of Troy, and his wife Hecube. Long before this novel’s …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/05/25/kassandra-by-christa-wolf/
May 18 2025
I purchased A Perfect Day to Be Alone on the strength of Doreen’s review. The book is, as Doreen described, short, quiet, absorbing, surprising and, in the end, memorable. A young Japanese woman named Chizu is the first-person narrator, and she tells her story over a bit more than a year as she manages her …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/05/18/a-perfect-day-to-be-alone-by-nanae-aoyama-2/
May 07 2025
Lois McMaster Bujold originally conceived of Shards of Honor and Barrayar as one novel. She was writing her first novel and did not have a firm grasp on how much should fit between the covers of one book. As she writes, “My writing career has been on-the-job training throughout, and this was no exception.” (p. …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/05/07/barrayar-by-lois-mcmaster-bujold/
Al Singh
Doug Merrill
Doreen Sheridan
Emily Lauer
John Pitzel
Lars N. Goldschlager
Laura Eilers
Professor X
Robert Maedgen
Sylvere Ap Leanan
The Shire