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from 1901 are a little odd, financially speaking; a map purporting to show King Solomon’s Mines is definitely odder; an unpublished manuscript from Marcel Proust pushes the odd-meter up into the red zone.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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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/

Oct 30 2023

Two Graves, Vol. 1: Wish You Were Here by Genevieve Valentine, Ming Doyle & Annie Wu

Hunh, I didn’t even realize this was a volume one until I went to catalog it on my Goodreads.

So this is a weird one for me. Sometimes, after reading a book, I’ll go check out other reviewers’ opinions on the afore-mentioned Goodreads because I feel like I should maybe be having a different reaction to the book than I’m currently experiencing. General consensus is useful for seeing whether I’m reacting from a very specific mental and emotional point or whether the book is just… like that. Two Graves Vol I falls, I’m afraid, into the latter category.

More specifically, it is a very odd book that has confused obfuscation with mystery and suspense. I didn’t understand half of what was going on and why, and the few answers I did finally get in the narrative just felt anticlimactic. As of the time I’m writing this (October 1st; the book’s publication date got pushed back, if you’re seeing this review much later than that,) I’m going through a pretty bad emotional period, where an unexpected betrayal has caused me to constantly question my own judgment. Fortunately, the opinions of other reviewers assured me that I am far from alone in feeling mystified by the choices made in this book.

With that settled, I can actually talk about Two Graves without thinking I’m doing it a disservice by possibly being partial or obtuse. The story is about a young woman named Emilia who’s gone on a road trip with Death. She can’t die, at least not until she carries her mother’s ashes from California to the Atlantic. But she can inflict pain and worse, not just on the wicked whose paths cross hers but also on Death himself. Through all this, the unlikely pair are being tracked by a trio of mysterious Hunters determined to stop them.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/10/30/two-graves-vol-1-wish-you-were-here-by-genevieve-valentine-ming-doyle-annie-wu/

Oct 29 2023

What Abigail Did That Summer by Ben Aaronovitch

All three Rivers of London novellas that have been published to date — The Furthest Station, The October Man, and now What Abigail Did That Summer — have left me wanting more, which is a fine recommendation for books that are meant as light, if occasionally spooky, entertainment. The stories all take place in and around London, in a world where magic works, but where practitioners are rare, not least because magical practice without training has a tendency to produce irreparable brain damage. The narrator of most of the series is Peter Grant, a young police officer of West African and Caribbean descent, but the summer of this novella’s title was for him Foxglove Summer, so he is off-stage and Aaronovitch gives readers Peter’s ferociously precocious cousin Abigail as the first-person narrator.

What Abigail Did That Summer by Ben Aaronovitch

Abigail has, in previous books, seen ghosts and thus been let in on the true nature of Peter’s police work. In her early teens, she’s become something of a regular at the Folly, the two-person unit officially responsible for what other police officers sometimes call “weird bollocks.” She is building her own relationship with Thomas Nightingale, the Detective Chief Inspector in charge of the Folly, who is also England’s strongest remaining wizard.

One level of the novella’s mystery is for readers to figure out what Abigail was doing that summer because the first chapter has her in an interview room in the Holmes Road police station navigating questioning with a combination of native intelligence, teen obstreperousness, and the inside knowledge that comes from having a cousin like Peter. It’s not going all that well, “this one’s already giving me the squinty-eyed look that adults always give me after meeting me for more than five minutes.” (p. 3) There are missing children, including someone named Simon; Abigail knows something that the police do not; and she is not telling. What’s going on?

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/10/29/what-abigail-did-that-summer-by-ben-aaronovitch/

Oct 28 2023

The Destroyer of Worlds by Matt Ruff

Reader, I was invested. Possibly even enthralled. At one point, I thought “Matt Ruff, if you XXXXX, I am throwing this book right out of the train window, and possibly Lovecraft Country too as soon as I get home and put my hands on my copy.” Not because the event would have been cheap or manipulative — it would have been completely in keeping with both the character and the world that Ruff shows; indeed its possibility was foreshadowed in an early chapter — but because I had come to like the character enough that if this particular horror had come to pass, I don’t think I would have been able to finish the book. Like I said, I was invested.

The Destroyer of Worlds by Matt Ruff

The Destroyer of Worlds is a sequel to Lovecraft Country, bringing back most of the earlier book’s characters, and develops others more fully. Where Lovecraft Country was a collection of linked stories that were complete in themselves but formed a larger narrative, The Destroyer of Worlds is a conventional novel, with short chapters that move among the points of view and threaded plots of the cast of characters. The ensemble of protagonists are Black friends and relatives from the South Side of Chicago. After a pre–Civil War prologue, the main story opens with Montrose Turner and his grown son Atticus traveling south to visit the site of the plantation their ancestor escaped from to mark the centennial of that momentous family event. George Berry, Montrose’s half-brother and publisher of The Safe Negro Travel Guide, Ruff’s fictional counterpart to The Negro Motorist Green Book, “begged off at the last minute.” (p. 13) Meanwhile, George’s wife Hippolyta and their son Horace plus Hippolyta’s friend Letitia Dandridge are on a trip of their own, driving out to Las Vegas, partly on business for the Guide, partly on a secret errand that ties back to events in Lovecraft Country.

Both sets of travelers get more than they bargained for. While there are supernatural terrors in the setting of Lovecraft Country and The Destroyer of Worlds, for Black people in 1957 America the powers that enforce white supremacy are every bit as frightening and often more immediate. Both sets of travelers have run-ins with local law enforcement. Atticus and Montrose spend a little too long observing a North Carolina chain gang, and one of the nearby police officers turns out to be a rural sheriff who appeared in Lovecraft Country. That situation goes downhill fast, and soon guns are blazing. Hippolyta, Horace and Letitia get pulled over at the Nevada border for a surprising reason that shows not every white officer is bad every time, but of course they could be, and there’s no way for a Black person to know in advance whether an encounter with the law might destroy their own world.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/10/28/the-destroyer-of-worlds-by-matt-ruff/

Oct 26 2023

Magical History Tour Vol 13 – Marie Curie: A Life In Science by Fabrice Erre & Sylvain Savoie

I continue to be impressed by the breadth, depth and humanity Fabrice Erre and Sylvain Savoie show in their long-running series on famous historical figures and events.

This thirteenth volume of the children’s illustrated series focuses on Marie Skłodowska Curie, who did so much and fought so hard to be able to help people and, along the way, get the recognition she so rightfully deserved. I, like so many others, know that she battled the sexism that sought to deprive her of an education, opportunities and career in order to become a Nobel-prize-winning scientist twice over. I know that her research into radioactivity and celebrated discovery of radium eventually led to her death by leukemia. But there was so much more that I didn’t know about this fascinating, complicated, heroic woman before reading Mssrs Erre & Savoia’s excellent biography, and so much I’m grateful to have been able to learn from the best and most accessible history series on the market today.

Framed as a conversation between level-headed, knowledgeable teenager Annie and her much more impulsive younger brother Nico, the book begins with the latter complaining that there’s nothing left to discover in all the world. Annie, ofc, points out that we cannot know what we do not know, which leads to a discussion of science and, specifically, Marie Curie.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/10/26/magical-history-tour-vol-13-marie-curie-a-life-in-science-by-fabrice-erre-sylvain-savoie/