Howling Frog Books

 The Road to Roswell, by Connie Willis This was such a fun read!  Connie Willis is now in her 80s, and this is her last novel to date, published in 2023.  I've had a copy waiting to be read for a while now.  I wasn't sure what to expect, but what I got was Willis reveling in chaos and many of her usual trademark strategies until everything comes together in a precarious but satisfying ending. Francie is headed to the wedding of her college roommate/BFF's wedding in Roswell.  Serena has a penchant for odd guys, and this one is a UFO nut.  Francie considers it her job to figure out if Serena really wants to marry him or not, and back her up either way.  So she arrives in Roswell in the middle of a UFO festival and rolls her eyes at the crowds of people who believe in alien abductions, since those are obviously not real.  So she's quite surprised when an alien does, in fact, abduct her. This alien looks kind of like a tumbleweed and is totally silent...

  Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, by Robin  Wall Kimmerer Yep, I'm ten years late to the party, but I got there!  This book made a huge splash some years ago, and rightfully so.  I'm going to hand it to my youngest, who will love it. Robin Wall Kimmerer is a botanist and a member of the Potawatomi Nation, and comes at the natural world with two perspectives that merge into one, and that were never really that different to begin with.  Her point, which she makes over and over with various stories and ecological histories from several places in the United States, is that the Indigenous peoples of North America had (and still have) massive scientific and ecological knowledge about their environments, gained through centuries/millennia of practical experience in cultivating abundance and working with local resources.  When colonizers arrived, they simply assumed that the Native peoples were ignorant, an...

 Doing well so far!  I'm deep into a more serious book, but in the meantime I enjoyed TWO children's books from the UK that probably qualify as minor classics and which I quite enjoyed. Knock Three Times! by Marion St. John Webb: this 1917 fantasy tale reminded me of E. Nesbit in its Edwardian tone with humorous asides, but it was weirder.  Nine-year-old twins Molly and Jack receive birthday presents from an aunt, and while Jack gets the paint box he'd hoped for, Molly gets a very disappointing pincushion shaped like a grey pumpkin.  But!  That night, Molly sees the pumpkin grow and roll away out of the house.  She and Jack follow it through a tree portal into the Possible World -- a pleasantly bucolic and magical land, where the inhabitants are horrified to hear that the Grey Pumpkin is back.  That Pumpkin contains an evil wizard who once menaced the kingdom, and who was imprisoned in a regular pumpkin (it turned grey from his wicked soul) and dispos...

 How to Survive in the Woods, by Kat Rosenfield    I enjoyed Rosenfield's last novel, You Must Remember This , so I grabbed this new one when it was published a couple of months ago.  It's a suspense/thriller sort of thing, not exactly a mystery, but sort of, and we get the flashbacks that explain Emma's backstory as we go through the main plot. Emma is annoyed that when she decided to kill herself, she was found in time to save her life, and so when charismatic Lucas takes charge of her, she goes along -- after all, her own choices haven't been so great, and maybe it's better if she contains herself within the bounds he sets.  Emma is the founder and CEO of a hot wellness company, with money and power; and she lets Lucas take over. As he becomes ever more controlling and abusive, she meets up with Lucas' ex-girlfriend/business partner, Taylor, who understands exactly what's going on.  And when the three of them decide to hike the hardest part of the Appala...

  The Great Shadow: A History of How Sickness Shapes What We Do, Think, Believe, and Buy, by Susan Wise Bauer  My old homeschooling guru, SWB, has also written quite a bit of history, and when she got to the Renaissance she was struck by how very many ways there were to die gruesomely back then:  I was writing about the rise and fall of kingdoms, the quest of rulers for power, the growth of new nations—but I kept getting distracted by people dying. Not just people dying, because we all will. But the ways in which they died. The historical characters I was writing about died of the most mundane afflictions. People died of splinters, sore throats, pimples, earaches. They died of abscesses in their tonsils, of eye infections, of sore knees and infected toenails. They died of stomach aches and coughs and fevers and (my personal obsession) anal fistulas. (That would be Henry II, father of Richard the Lionhearted.) And these deaths are recorded with almost no comment. I was f...

 9! A watery nine for the ICY NORTH SEA This gives me The Poetic Edda  to read by July 5th .  I'm excited about it.  I read the Poetic Edda long ago in college, but somehow that book has disappeared.  (Maybe I gave it to my sister?)  But recently I was listening to a podcast I enjoy, and the guest was an Old Norse specialist who had published a new translation of the Poetic Edda , and I was intrigued, so I ordered it.  If you're not familiar, the Poetic or Elder Edda is a collection of Old Norse poetry that is the oldest source we have for Norse mythology.  It was actually written down from oral sources a couple of hundred years after the conversion to Christianity, so on the one hand, it's not quite as primary a source as we would wish, but on the other, by then the writers don't seem to have been worried that the old beliefs would have a resurgence, so there isn't a bunch of editorializing about the horrors of paganism. The poems seem to have ...

 If there's anybody left reading my blog, we all know that I've been in a major reading slump since the beginning of 2024 and I'm not having a lot of success clawing my way out.  I'm happy to say that I have made some progress recently, even though my reading didn't get as far as posting.  Besides my usual diet of fluffy mystery and childhood favorites re-reads, I whipped through Project Hail Mary (a re-read) after seeing the movie, and I recently finished the very depressing Black Pill: How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society, and Capture American Politics , by Elle Reeve.   I read the first part of the Once and Future King , enjoyed it so much, and have yet to pick it back up for the rest of the story.  (I've read it before, of course, and wanted to go back to it for its themes of 'Might Makes Right' vs. civilization, a very timely topic.)  And I'm currently reading Susan Wise Bauer's history of diseas...