Dec 16 2022
What an absorbing, educational and ultimately devastating graphic novel depicting the artist’s own journey with cancer, from diagnosis through treatment until her own untimely end. Catherine Pioli never got sick or injured as a child, so thinks she’s finally outrun her long streak of good health when her back and shoulder pain get so bad …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/12/16/down-to-the-bone-a-leukemia-story-by-catherine-pioli/
Dec 03 2022
Once I got into it — this winter, after failing last winter — this went by fast, and why not, it’s a collection of short autobiographical, ostensibly seasonal snippets from a Norwegian author who’s often mentioned as a potential Nobel laureate. As an object, the edition of Winter that I have is a lovely book: thick …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/12/03/winter-by-karl-ove-knausgaard/
Oct 26 2022
Czeslaw Milosz has a captivating mind. In Native Realm he invites readers to join him on what his subtitle calls “A Search for Self-Definition,” and is a journey from the wooded interior of what is today Lithuania, where he was born into a family of Polish-speaking gentry, through his young adulthood in interwar Warsaw, past …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/10/26/native-realm-by-czeslaw-milosz/
Oct 15 2022
If not for Donald Fucking Trump, Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch would have had a long, distinguished and inspiring career serving the United States of America that nevertheless remained practically unknown outside the circles of her work. Perhaps she would have been best known for providing a crucial piece of local knowledge when the embassy in Mogadishu …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/10/15/lessons-from-the-edge-by-marie-yovanovitch/
Sep 09 2022
Author Christina Soontornvat wasn’t sure whether anyone would care about her experiences with middle school, but was eventually persuaded to write about one of the most cringe episodes of her own pre-teen career in this wryly moving graphic novel. I’m so glad she did. It’s not easy being one of the few Thai people in …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/09/09/the-tryout-a-graphic-novel-by-christina-soontornvat-joanna-cacao/
Apr 13 2022
I make it a habit of avoiding memoirs published by men in their 30s, so never got around to reading Wil Wheaton’s Just A Geek, despite it seeming squarely in my wheelhouse. Reading this annotated version drove home to me how wise that policy continues to be, despite the many interests the author and I …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/04/13/still-just-a-geek-an-annotated-collection-of-musings-by-wil-wheaton/
Mar 18 2022
For about the first eighty percent of Wir sind Gefangene (We Are Prisoners), my assessment of the book was that I could see why it was a sensation in the 1920s but couldn’t see much to recommend it for readers of the 2020s. It begins with Graf is at school in the small Bavarian town …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/03/18/wir-sind-gefangene-by-oskar-maria-graf/
Feb 28 2022
Well, that was certainly… something. In all frankness, it felt very much like reading the screed of a 1980s British academic, who is quite erudite but also monomaniacal about a particular subject, in this case popular culture of primarily English extraction. Whether we’re reinterpreting Dickens through the (honestly valid) lens of pornography or skewering various …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/02/28/please-miss-a-heartbreaking-work-of-staggering-penis-by-grace-e-lavery/
Dec 17 2021
Hrm, well, if I’d known this was essentially a memoir by a woman in her 40s, I would have probably skipped it (as I do for memoirs by men in their 30s, and for roughly the same reasons.) I feel that the 40s are a bad age for a woman to try to do a …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/12/17/spilexm-a-weaving-of-recovery-resilience-and-resurgence-by-nicola-i-campbell/
Sep 30 2021
I love dance books, and often find them a source of luminous prose and inspiration. Couple this with the true story of a stateless ballet dancer who grew up and performed in war-torn Syria, and who is active in dancing and advocating for peace and for the rights of refugees worldwide, and I absolutely had …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/09/30/dance-or-die-from-stateless-refugee-to-international-ballet-star-by-ahmad-joudeh/
Al Singh
Doug Merrill
Doreen Sheridan
John Pitzel
Lars N. Goldschlager
Laura Eilers
Professor X
Robert Maedgen
Sylvere Ap Leanan
The Shire