Howling Frog Books

  The Splendid Century: Life in the France of Louis XIV, by W. H. Lewis I've always been terrible at French literature and history, and I find them intimidating.  So I'm quite proud of reading this description of life in the 17th century under the reign of Louis XIV, the one who called himself the Sun King and moved the court from Paris to Versailles.  It's not at all a difficult or heavy-duty tome, but a lively and fascinating overview of a society, perfect for someone like me. Warren H. Lewis was C. S. Lewis' brother and, in later life, acted as his secretary and wrote books about French history.  But before that he made his career in the army, serving as a supply officer from 1914 until his retirement in 1932.  He therefore knew about everything there was to know about military logistics, especially horses, and this really comes through in his chapters about the French army -- and even his judgement of Louis' character, who he describes as so obsessed with de...

 Hans Christian Andersen Fairy Tales , World Edition, 4 vols. A while back I decided I wanted to find the best edition of HCA's tales possible, and I came up with this: a 1959 four-volume set issued at Odense, which is where HCA was born.*  It's a very satisfying set, with little, fat hardbacks perfect for holding in your hand.  Each one has a different portrait in the front.  They're illustrated with the original drawings by Vilhelm Pedersen, who HCA chose himself, and the final volume has illustrations by Lorenz Fr ø lich, who continued the work after Pedersen's death.  I don't know that this is a complete and exhaustive collection of HCA's tales; he wrote a lot of things that weren't exactly fairy tales or poems or plays, so it would be difficult to make a complete list.  I did notice that "The Daisy" is not in this set. I'm not sure how the stories are arranged; it's not by date (I checked) and almost all of the most famous stories are ...

  Robin Redbreast, by David Lack I read an old Slightly Foxed issue, which always adds to my TBR list, and this book sounded intriguing and fun.  It's a complete collection of folklore, literary references and poetry, and historical mentions of....robins!  Mostly just in the UK, where robins were popular and beloved -- while over on the continent, they were often hunted and eaten.  Now the European robin and the American robin are two totally different species, so if you're American, you have to think of a different bird. David Lack wrote an entire book observing the life of the wild robin, and this was by way of being a fun but scholarly collection of literary and cultural robins,   We start off with legends about robins, because there was a belief that robins would come and reverently cover the face of anyone they found dead in the forest -- especially if the person had been murdered.  And then, why are robins always boys, culturally married to wren...

 No Name, by Wilkie Collins  Wilkie Collins was incredibly prolific, but this is one of his 'great four' novels, along with The Woman in White, Armadale, and The Moonstone .  So now I just need to read Armadale and I'll have the set!  No Name is set in the late 1840s but was written in 1862 and serialized in All the Year Round .  It gets very exciting as it develops, and I enjoyed it a lot.  If you're interested in Victorian 'sensation' novels, this should be on your list. The Vanstones are a happy and fairly wealthy family.  Mr. Vanstone is the most amiable and generous of men; his wife, a loving and gentle woman, but weighed down with a  dangerous late pregnancy.  Their two daughters are very different: Norah, in her mid-20s, a responsible and gentle brunette, and Magdalen, an energetic and mercurial 19 with unusual light grey eyes. Ruin strikes when Mr. Vanstone is killed in a railway accident and the shock brings on labor and death to ...

 The Fifth Science, by Exurb1a  This one kid at work has been telling me about the books he's reading, which is fun.  He said he really likes this author (who seems to live in Bulgaria and is also a YouTuber sometimes), and the ebook was cheap, so I thought I'd give it a go.... Here we have a set of 12 short stories, set from the beginning of the Aerth Empire (that is, humans) until after the fall of said empire.  They don't have continuing characters or planets, anything like that, but are vignettes from various points in time and place, often thousands of years apart.  From these stories we get glimpses of the Empire, the development of truly intelligent machines and the splitting of humans into myriads of different societies, and the eventual development of the fifth science: the ability to make ordinary matter intelligent.  Humans inject stars with intelligence, and what will happen then?  Since human history, on the whole, tends to be on the brut...

 ...17!    That means I'll be reading Wilkie Collins' No Name , a dramatic 1862 mystery about the complexities of illegitimacy and inheritance.  It's supposed to be one of his greats, up there with The Woman in White and The Moonstone, both of which I have read twice.  So this ought to be fun!

 The Observant Walker: Wild Food, Nature and Hidden Treasures on the Pathways of Britain, by John Wright Oh, this book was a delight.  As we know, I'm now a devotee of the Ridgeway, and so I've been collecting books about walking in Britain (and other places) for a while.  There are a lot of them, so I'm not planning to be exhaustive!  I actually got this book on the Ridgeway hike, when we were staying in Wallingford.  There was a bookshop, and I asked what she would recommend if I liked books about walking in nature, but I don't like Robert MacFarlane . That stumped her a little bit but she recommended John Wright, and him I like! Wright is all about the plants.  He likes to walk around and drive everyone else crazy by spending all his time carefully studying the plants and fungi and lichens he sees.  (And if the lichen is in London, he'll lie in the gutter to get a good photo.)   He and Tolkien would have a grand time standing in one plac...