Feb 22 2021
Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, Poisoner of Underpants, Autocrat of Some of the Russias, in Gessen’s reckoning probably the son of a secret policeman, was born in Leningrad in 1952. Like any proper villain — but also like anyone born in that place in that year — he has a tragic backstory. Hitler’s army completed its encirclement of Leningrad …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/02/22/the-man-without-a-face-the-unlikely-rise-of-vladimir-putin-by-masha-gessen/
Feb 14 2021
Yes, Boromir failed. But he was far from alone. Denethor failed in sending a war leader on a mission meant for a diplomat. Aragorn and Gandalf failed to give him his due, and after that they failed to recognize that they were freezing out their proud companion. Despite their supposed wisdom, they did not see …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/02/14/the-two-towers-by-j-r-r-tolkien/
Feb 07 2021
Nobel laureate, Polish literature, what’s not to like? It turns out that for me the more relevant question was what’s to like? Tokarczuk’s first-person narrator and protagonist, Janina Duszejko lives alone in a small group of houses on a plateau in southern Poland, hard up against the border with the Czech Republic. Most of the …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/02/07/drive-your-plows-over-the-bones-of-the-dead-by-olga-tokarczuk/
Feb 02 2021
Kid One first fell in love with this book as an elementary school student, a Protestant child living in an Orthodox country enjoying a very Jewish story. And what’s not to like? Hershel of Ostropol wanders into an unnamed Central European village on the first night of Hanukkah expecting celebration and hospitality. Instead, he finds …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/02/02/hershel-and-the-hanukkah-goblins-written-by-eric-kimmel/
Jan 23 2021
Well this time around — the first in at least eight years — I read the Tom Bombadil chapter, and I’m glad I did. I had gotten in the habit of skipping it, so it had lodged in my mind as both much longer — turns out the chapter is only 15 pages — and far duller …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/01/23/the-fellowship-of-the-ring-by-j-r-r-tolkien/
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/01/02/taking-stock-of-2020/
Dec 31 2020
How would a sword-and-sorcery author who basically wanted to have a hell of a lot of fun write in the twenty-first century? They’d write like Tamsyn Muir does in Gideon the Ninth, I think. “In the myriadic year of our Lord—the ten thousandth year of the King Undying, the kindly Prince of Death!—Gideon Nav packed …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/12/31/gideon-the-ninth-by-tamsyn-muir/
Dec 23 2020
Like the protagonist of Neuromancer, William Gibson is an artiste of the slightly funny deal. In The Peripheral the first slightly funny deal is between some people in England who hire some other folks in a small-town part of Appalachia in the US. The English contingent wants the people across the pond to fly a …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/12/23/the-peripheral-by-william-gibson-2/
Dec 06 2020
Bro! As has been said before, Beowulf is a poem that forces translators to show their style from the very first word. That word in the original is “Hwæt,” an Old English attention grabber, and how translators render it tells a lot about what’s coming in the rest of the poem. Will the version lean …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/12/06/beowulf-translated-by-maria-dahvana-headley/
Nov 15 2020
I read Between the World and Me a lifetime ago, in early summer when it was strange to leave the neighborhood again after so many weeks of stillness. It is a hard book, not because of the difficulty of language or of its concepts, but because of the hardness of its subject: how to live …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2020/11/15/between-the-world-and-me-by-ta-nehisi-coates/
Al Singh
Doug Merrill
Doreen Sheridan
Ed Ott
John Pitzel
Lars N. Goldschlager
L.M. Davenport
Laura Eilers
Maou Tsaou
Professor X
Robert Maedgen
Sylvere Ap Leanan
The Shire