Nov 17 2023

Pokémon Oracle by KJM

an Unofficial Trading Card Divination system.

I was wandering around one of my local bookstores, People’s Book in downtown Takoma Park, browsing while I waited for a free Tarot reading when I spotted this zine nestled amidst other esoterica. People’s Book, btw, is the only local store I know with an entire zine section, so mad props to the owners for recognizing this oft-overlooked corner of publication!

Being a bit of a Pokemon fan and an even bigger fan of Tarot, I felt I had to buy this zine to take home and peruse. Readers, it is a delight. The slender volume tells you exactly how you can use Pokemon cards in place of a Tarot or Oracle deck to get in touch with your intuition, using the pictures, types and movesets, among other descriptors, to find answers for the questions you’re not really sure how to resolve otherwise.

Alas, then, that I should get home and discover that the only Pokemon cards easily accessible to me are the ones my eldest got from our coolest neighbor at Halloween. I’ve bought that kid at least two full decks in his lifetime so far, but those were the only ones I could find (which may not be entirely his fault: my aunt has been living with us since August and LOVES to rearrange things.) Since the only cards I had available to me were mostly dark and ghost types, it didn’t feel like I was giving myself the most comprehensive reading, especially as I was trying to do the bespoke Pokeball spread included in the book. So I turned to the distributor of the Pokemon Oracle, Twenty Two Zines — whose website offers professional readings by Pokemaster Lynn Sueker — for help!

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/11/17/pokemon-oracle-by-kjm/

Nov 16 2023

Challah Day by Charlotte Offsay & Jason Kirschner

This delightful picture book shows, in rhyming verse, the joys of baking challah together as a family in anticipation of Shabbat (or really any occasion!)

A charming family of four plus a corgi get together to bake their recipe for challah, showing how teamwork and not taking things too seriously help them not only make a delicious meal — featuring the traditional braided bread of the title — but also host loved ones around the table. While the family and traditions are unabashedly Jewish, the messages of working together as a family and taking joy in cooking and dining together are universal.

The expressive, slightly retro illustrations perfectly complement Charlotte Orsay’s lively verse, tho I’ll admit that the former restaurant industry professional in me blanched when the dog gripped one end of the challah dough for the kids to braid. I did really love how the kids took care to help their parents with tasks, and even amuse each other while their parents were busy cooking and cleaning. It’s a wonderful lesson in being proactive for young (and even some older!) readers.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/11/16/challah-day-by-charlotte-offsay-jason-kirschner/

Nov 14 2023

Chaos Terminal by Mur Lafferty

Alas that I did not receive this book in time to pitch it for work, as I had with its predecessor Station Eternity, the first book in the Midsolar Mysteries. As that latter was my favorite book of 2022, I knew I had to sneak this into my reading schedule sooner than later, and am so glad I did!

This is not, weirdly enough, simply because it’s the excellent sci-fi murder mystery that it is. It’s not even because of the amazing Tina, whom I adore. No, it’s because Mur Lafferty threw in some free therapy there when Mallory Viridian, our heroine, is getting one of her suspects, Reggie, to explain why he’s being so awful to his husband Max. Mal listens with calm neutrality, then gently dissects what Reggie is doing, in a way that made me (the Max in the relationship) better understand that I am not the problem. So if you, too, want a dose of free therapy with your classic mystery in space, then you absolutely need to read this terrific novel.

Even if you’re not as desperately in need of therapy as I am, I do recommend this book, with the caveat that maybe you want to read Station Eternity first. There’s a lot of interesting backstory to Mal and her abilities that is first explored and explained in SE, and finding out retroactively just isn’t as fun. That said, there may be spoilers for SE in the rest of this review, as these are now treated as established facts in Chaos Terminal, so consider yourself warned.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/11/14/chaos-terminal-by-mur-lafferty/

Nov 12 2023

Memories of Starobielsk by Jozef Czapski

Here is how I last introduced a book by Jozef Czapski:

World War II in Europe began when Nazi Germany invaded Poland in the early days of September 1, 1939. Sixteen days later, the Soviet Union invaded Poland from the east. Less than three weeks later, the Nazis and the Soviets had conquered all of Poland. They divided the country between them according to the secret protocols of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. Jozef Czapski (pron. “Chop-ski”) was over 40 when this war came; he had previously served in World War I, been a pacifist for a time, thought better of it and fought against Soviet Russia when it invaded Poland in 1920. Between the wars, he had lived in Paris and pursued painting, his true passion.

Memories of Starobielsk by Jozef Czapski

In the campaigns of September 1939, Czapski was captured by the Soviets. Memories of Starobielsk begins with the titular autobiographical sketch of some 40 pages. He describes the aftermath of his capture, his march with fellow prisoners of war across parts of occupied Poland and into the Soviet Union, his time in the camps of Starobielsk (near Kharkiv) and then Gryazovets (near Vologda), and the gradual emptying of the camp in the spring of 1940, as the captive Polish officers were told they were being sent back home, whether to the German or Soviet occupation zones. But readers have known from the memoir’s first paragraph that their fate was a worse one. “At the time that it was cleared on April 5, 1940, the camp of Starobielsk held 3,920 Polish officers, together with several dozen civilian prisoners and about 30 officer cadets and ensigns. Of these men, 79 survived. I am one of them.” (p. 1)

“Memories of Starobielsk” could just as well be titled “Memorial for Starobielsk,” for Czapski uses his words to build a monument to the men whose lives ended out of the sight of the rest of the world soon after they were transported out of that camp. Though most of “Memories” is devoted to recalling the men as individual human beings, Czapski takes time in his opening pages to note what the massacre of 20,000 officers from Starobielsk and two other similar camps meant to the Polish Army.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/11/12/memories-of-starobielsk-by-jozef-czapski/

Nov 11 2023

The Portable Door by Tom Holt

I hope The Portable Door is a cracking good movie — it’s an Australian feature released in early 2023 — because the premise is terrific. Young graduate Paul Carpenter lands a job at the venerable London firm of J.W. Wells & Co., though even after the job interview he’s not entirely clear what it is that the business does. His first days on the job spent sorting printouts of impenetrable spreadsheets into chronological order leave him none the wiser. His office-mate Sophie Pettingel is equally in the dark. The place is odd, no doubt, and gets odder when the objects of their sorting attention are switched from printouts to items in the disordered basement strongroom. Share certificates from 1901 are a little odd, financially speaking; a map purporting to show King Solomon’s Mines is definitely odder; an unpublished manuscript from Marcel Proust pushes the odd-meter up into the red zone.

The Portable Door by Tom Holt

And then there is the part of the premise from the back cover: “It seems that half the time [Paul’s] bosses are away with the fairies. But they’re not, of course. They’re away with the goblins.”

So far, so fun, which is why I picked up the book: light adventure in a modern world where bits of magic work, unbeknownst to most of the populace, plus a humorous approach. I think a movie version might be the very thing, because it would have a chance to clean up the book’s pacing, which really broke down for me. The strongroom scene happens nearly a third of the way through the book, and the characters are still very much in the dark about what the firm does, and what that might mean for them. The first real explanation from senior partners in the firm doesn’t come until almost halfway through the book, and it was around then that I began to think that the book’s business would not get wrapped up by the final chapter. And indeed, The Portable Door is the first in a series of eight books to date that are concerned with J.W. Wells & Co., though nothing in the presentation of The Portable Door — including the long list of Tom Holt’s books opposite the title page — so much as hints at the continuation. The immediate questions of the book do get resolved, hurriedly and somewhat haphazardly in my view.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/11/11/the-portable-door-by-tom-holt/

Nov 09 2023

The Strange Beast Tarot by Shing Yin Khor

Bit of a disclaimer: while acclaimed author Shing Yin Khor and I have never met in person, I am an active part of their Space Gnome Discord, and genuinely love all the stuff I’ve bought of theirs!

Which, ofc, includes their latest creation, the Strange Beast Tarot deck. I got in on it at the crowdfunding stage, and snagged as well the Strange Beast Tarot Zine, which includes essays on Tarot and original games to play with this deck or any other. I was actually pretty surprised by how moved I was by Taliesin Jaffe’s essay on The Four Tools, as represented by the four suits of the deck. If you use the Tarot to help guide your intuition in personal problem-solving the way I do, it will definitely resonate.

To be perfectly honest tho, my favorite way to use Tarot cards is in playing games. There are seven original Tarot-based games included in the zine, written by authors as renowned as Sarah Gailey, Amal el-Mohtar and Caro Asercion. Some of the games are specific to the Strange Beasts, while others can use any available Tarot deck. Some games are storytelling/role-playing, while others involve trick-taking and scoring. It’s a wonderful breadth of expression and play that I’ve never seen before with any Tarot product (tho the Sefirot board game does come close.)

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/11/09/the-strange-beast-tarot-by-shing-yin-khor/

Nov 07 2023

Watership Down: The Graphic Novel by Richard Adams, James Sturm & Joe Sutphin

Watership Down is a seminal book in the life of most young readers, and one I remember with great fondness from my own childhood. Re-reading it as an adult produced a slightly different, admittedly lesser experience, that I talked about briefly here. So how, I wondered, would experiencing it as a graphic novel change my perspective on the book again, if at all?

Turns out that adapting the book to a graphic format is a shockingly good way of bringing me back to the magic of my initial childhood reading experience, untarnished by a more adult absorption in the text’s every word. I can’t be the only adult who goes back to read a favorite tome from their youth only to be confounded by how many more words there are in it than remembered? Or perhaps I am merely an impatient first-time reader, gobbling up words by the yard in pursuit of story instead of savoring each passage in its fulness, as I’m more likely to do on a re-read. It is also fairly rare for me to remember words on a page: instead, the books that linger in my memory remain there as vivid pictures and the feelings they evoke. Bigwig, for example, will always be a bad ass, both objectively and in my mind, tho darned if I can remember a single word he’s ever said.

So this reinterpretation, if you will, helped refocus my memories of the book and underscore things I probably hadn’t appreciated on my last re-read as an adult. A large part of this comes ofc from the creators’ decision to illustrate so much of the proceedings. That old saw of a picture being worth a thousand words helps in condensing Richard Adams’ initial prose to its most important parts, displaying the most impactful scenes in a way that suits (my perhaps idiosyncratic memory of) the material. I was definitely far more affected by sadness upon reading this than I had been my last go-round, tho less due to Bigwig this time than to the trials that befell Hazel.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/11/07/watership-down-the-graphic-novel-by-richard-adams-james-sturm-joe-sutphin/

Nov 05 2023

Eve’s Hollywood by Eve Babitz

Two things about Eve Babitz and Eve’s Hollywood after she’s gotten done with her dedication that’s eight pages and more names than I cared to count, along with dedicating the book to freeways, sour cream, the girl with the coke, and the color green, plus “the one whose wife would get furious if I so much as put his initials in.” The first is that she loves Los Angeles and is not about to let anyone call it a wasteland, not when she can tell childhood stories of Stravinsky and Charlie Chaplin and Bertrand Russell, her first time eating figs at the house of the violinist Joseph Szigeti, or Edward James who came to America “to see his ‘deah friend, Lawrence’ which meant D.H., but Lawrence soon died so Edward and [Aldous] Huxley drifted West to L.A.” (p. 8) and he later designed the World’s Fair Pavilion with Dali. Whom Babitz introduced to Frank Zappa much, much later.

Eve's Hollywood by Eve Babitz

The second is that readers who pick up the book expecting titillation will find very little of that; readers who pick up the book expecting name-dropping will find quite a bit of that; and both may well miss that Babitz is a terrific writer, in total command of form and pacing. She’s not afraid of two-page anecdotes, if that’s all it takes to tell her tale. The Central Market gets a paragraph on page 142; Cary Grant gets three lines, not quite a haiku, on page 269. But she’s also a collage artist, and she brings that same sensibility to assembling her “confessional novel,” so the small pieces break up the longer ones, giving readers a moment to pause, or they set up an impression that Babitz is making across several pieces. She was Stravinsky’s goddaughter, and despite how much she says she avoided music, she still absorbed a lot about composition. And her voice is contagious. So that’s three things.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/11/05/eves-hollywood-by-eve-babitz/

Nov 02 2023

Derek Boshier: Reinventor edited by Helen Little

Holy wow, y’all, I think I fell in love, at least a little bit, with this artist here.

Even given my acknowledgement of my vulnerable state of mind at present, it was so refreshing to read of the thought processes of a person and artist so much after my own heart. Derek Boshier was born in 1937 in the United Kingdom. Post-WWII Britain was a time of social upheaval, and the then young boy was thrust from his working class background into middle class schools by government edict. Motivated by his art master to apply to art school instead of returning to his working class roots and becoming a butcher, young Derek swiftly became part of Britain’s Pop Art pantheon alongside David Hockney, R. B. Kitaj, Allen Jones and Peter Phillips.

A scholarship to India changed much of his worldview. Losing all the works made during this stay allowed the young man to embrace optimistic fatalism, and to begin a lifelong process of reinvention. Derek Boshier: Reinventor chronicles all this via a collection of essays and an interview that spans his entire career, accompanied by plates of most of his significant pieces (one notable exception is Airmail Letter, 1961, which is mentioned more than once in the text, making its exclusion something of a puzzle.) It is utterly fascinating to watch his evolution as an artist, from Pop to sculpture to film and back to paint again, and from criticizing the American influence on Britain to criticizing the myth of America from its very heartland.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/11/02/derek-boshier-reinventor-edited-by-helen-little/

Oct 31 2023

Whisper Of The Woods by Ennun Ana Iurov

I thought I’d bend my own scheduling rules and do a quick graphic novel twofer, reading and reviewing this for the last official day of Spooky Season, and I’m so glad I did!

First, let’s talk about how creator Ennun Ana Iurov is actually Romanian, living in Romania and writing this brilliant little cautionary tale (with lettering by Micah Myers.) I loved her work in Needle And Thread, and am glad she’s bringing her classic anime aesthetic, with gorgeous slips into full-on horror, into a story all her own.

The story itself is about a young American named Adam. He and his best friend Vlad have been planning on exploring the haunted locations of Vlad’s homeland together, but when he arrives at Vlad’s Romanian home, he finds only Vlad’s mother, in tears. Apparently, her son had up and taken himself to Vastea, a small town on the edge of Hoia-Baciu, a vast forest with a grim reputation. She hasn’t heard from him since.

The police can do nothing: Vlad is a grown man of seemingly sound mind who can go wherever he wants. Adam, believing that there’s no way Vlad would have gone without him, decides to pursue his friend into the forest, skipping over all the other attractions they’d planned on seeing first. Getting to Vastea is an ordeal in itself, and readers will sense that this will likely not end well when Adam’s first reaction to finding scorched circles in the grass outside the village is to try to erase them instead of, say, asking how they came to be.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/10/31/whisper-of-the-woods-by-ennun-ana-iurov/