Sep 13 2026
“But life works in such a way that social progress and a better future can only be achieved if a certain number of people are willing to pay the price for their right to have their own beliefs. The more of them there are, the less everyone has to pay. And the day will come …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2026/09/13/patriot-by-alexei-navalny/
Sep 12 2026
The title translates as On Censorship, and over the course of his life, Chinese artist Ai Weiwei has encountered it far more than most people. (The book was originally published in English; I received this edition as a birthday present. It was translated into German by Luca Groß, and it reads both smoothly and clearly.) …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2026/09/12/uber-zensur-by-ai-weiwei/
Dec 09 2025
We have a terrific excerpt for you today, dear readers, from a debut novelist who isn’t afraid to explore the bleeding edge of espionage! Long-time readers will know that I’m a sucker for a mythological retelling, especially in a new and unexpected genre. M B Courtenay’s A Spy Inside The Castle riffs off the myth …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/12/09/a-spy-inside-the-castle-by-m-b-courtenay-excerpt/
Oct 09 2025
One of these days, I’ll like a piece by Ai Jiang, but today is not that day. I’m just so baffled by her writing, and in a way that doesn’t even make me want to lay the blame at her feet necessarily. This is actually one of the few, perhaps only, times that I’ve questioned …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/10/09/a-palace-near-the-wind-by-ai-jiang/
Oct 06 2025
Yes, it is absolutely ludicrous to have a vigilante whose main weapon is a bowling ball, but he’s out there fighting neo-Nazis and we 100% need more of that nowadays! And it isn’t just some cut-and-dried good guy vs generic white nationalists story either. There’s a lot of nuance in this book, as well as …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/10/06/the-holy-roller-volume-one-by-andy-samberg-rick-remender-joe-trohman-roland-boschi-moreno-dinisio/
Aug 11 2025
This post concludes my year of reading all of Diana Wynne Jones’s books! After her death in 2011, Earwig and the Witch was published the same year, and a collection of her nonfiction writing was published in 2012. Much more recently, Moondust Books has published collections of her plays and poems! In this post I’ll …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/08/11/a-year-of-diana-wynne-jones-wrap-up/
Jun 23 2025
Oh, huh, I didn’t realize that this second book in The Web Of The Spider series would have a different protagonist than the first one, but it makes sense! In Rise Of The Spider, our narrator was young Rolf, who watched with growing horror as the Nazi Party’s hatefulness infiltrated not only his beloved hometown …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/06/23/threat-of-the-spider-by-michael-p-spradlin/
Mar 10 2025
with Lisa Dickey. Subtitled Lessons for Anyone Who Wants to Make a Difference. Despite being fairly politically informed, I wasn’t super familiar with Governor Gretchen Whitmer until the news of her attempted kidnapping and murder made national headlines. Even then, her policies didn’t (and still don’t, as most if not all of my Midwestern friends …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/03/10/true-gretch-young-adult-edition-by-gretchen-whitmer/
Mar 02 2025
Agreeing with Anne Applebaum tends to worry me. Her book Gulag is well regarded (Pulitzer Prize, for example), but I found that the closer it got to the present day and events that I knew a fair amount about, the more tendentious and rightward-slanted I thought her account. That made me uncertain about the earlier …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/03/02/autocracy-inc-by-anne-applebaum/
Feb 12 2025
featuring the art of Tracy Chahwan, Ganzeer, Ghadi Ghosn, Omar Khouri, Sirene Moukheiber, Hicham Rahma and Enas Satir. Hoo boy, readers, what a book. If you’re as unfamiliar with current events in the Middle East and North Africa as I am, then this book is likely to be a jarring experience for you, as Yazan …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2025/02/12/lebanon-is-burning-and-other-dispatches-by-yazan-al-saadi-et-al/
Al Singh
Doug Merrill
Doreen Sheridan
Emily Lauer
John Pitzel
Lars N. Goldschlager
Laura Eilers
Professor X
Robert Maedgen
Sylvere Ap Leanan
The Shire