Howling Frog Books

 Nightingale Wood, by Stella Gibbons Who among us does not love Cold Comfort Farm ?   If you don't, it's probably because you haven't read it.  This one is less well-known, but it's still a fun read, if not the perfect comedic gem that is CCF.  Nobody could pull that off twice, after all. The Withers are an upper-middle-class family near a village, and their life is completely stultifying.  The two adult daughters are repressed and not allowed to do anything much; all Madge wants is a dog to love, and Tina wants...well, a life.  Into the house comes Viola, the young widow of the oldest son.  She was, horrors, a shopgirl, and she hasn't really got anywhere to go.  Is she, too, going to see her youth wasted in the desiccated atmosphere of the Wither home? Through winding byways, walks through the wood, and heartbreak, each member of the family eventually comes to find their own version of happiness.    It's a nice read, a pleasant 193...

Chesterton's Gateway, by G. K. Chesterton, compiled by Ethan Nicolle I often listen to a comedic book podcast called The Book Pile , which features two guys, Kellen Erskine and David Vance.  Erskine is a full-time comic, and we knew him as a teenager with floppy 90s hair, so we're always interested in how he's doing.  Vance is a writer -- he's written sketches for a different comedy group I follow.   They're fun to listen to! A little while ago they had a comic-book artist on the show, Ethan Nicolle, to talk about this book he'd put together.  (I have never read any of Nicolle's comics; my husband likes him.)  So he talked about how he'd gotten really into reading Chesterton, and even had a couple of discussion groups.  But he found that most people who wanted to read Chesterton would pick up Orthodoxy , and he didn't think that was a good place to start; Chesterton was mainly an essayist and it's better to start with essays.  So he'd put tog...

 The Wheel of Ice, by Stephen Baxter    This was a fun one that has been sitting on my TBR shelf for a long time; I got it from the donation table, of course.  It's a Second Doctor story (the one who looks like Moe), to my surprise, and features companions Zoe (future math genius from a space colony) and Jamie (18th century Scotsman). The Tardis senses a hole in time and lands on an early Saturn mining colony, to the crew's surprise.  What is wrong here?  The kludged-together colony, called the Wheel of Ice, is precarious, and is solely focused on mining a rare mineral from the moon Mnemosyne.  The children born here have to work as miners, too, and they're being accused of sabotage, though they insist that elusive little blue critters they call Blue Dolls must be the ones doing it.  Has the Wheel got gremlins? It's a great story, and pretty complex, with roots reaching back to 19th century London, not to mention a relic of a civilization lost bil...

 I haven't been able to do much reading (my poor neglected summerbooks!), because I've been having adventures all over the place.... My good friend Melanie wanted to do a hot-air balloon trip for her birthday, and her husband was like 'no way' so I said I'd do it and she asked all her friends.  We got a total of just three -- Melanie, her friend Bryn (who lives near Seattle) and me.    We set out from Chico with many snacks, and dilly-dallied our way down to Tahoe.  There was no hurry, so we stopped a few times.  We went to Donner Pass and walked through the disused railroad tunnels above Donner Lake.  That was super fun, and I highly recommend it.   There are four tunnels along the hillside, with space between them.  Parts are blasted rock and other parts have been smoothed out with concrete, and a whole lot of the space is covered in graffiti.  There's still snow melting in June, so it was pretty drippy, and the four...

 11!  Take a look at your Spin list , find #11, and read that. This means that I'll be reading  Buchi Emecheta's   Second-Class Citizen .  It's been a while since I read one of her books, so that will be great!  Emecheta is probably my favorite Nigerian author.  Second-Class Citizen was published in 1974, her second novel and the one that brought her fame.  It's semi-autobiographical, and is a sequel to the earlier In the Ditch .  I've written about a few Emecheta novels before: The Joys of Motherhood,   The Slave Girl, and The Bride Price (which was my Spin #21 title).  They are all wonderful, so do give them a try.  PS I just got back from over a week of running around the West.  I had a great time and I'm tired!    

 Huzzah, it's time for another CC Spin, my favorite event!  You know the rules, so here's my list: The Leopard, by di Lampedusa  Phineas Finn, by Anthony Trollope The Well at the End of the World, by William Morris   The Law and the Lady, by Wilkie Collins It is Acceptable (Det Gaar An), C. J. L. Almqvist  The Duchess of Malfi and The White Devil, by John Webster   The Obedience of a Christian Man, by William Tyndale No Name, by Wilkie Collins Peter the Great's African, by Pushkin Stories of Washington Irving Second-Class Citizen, by Buchi Emecheta Life and Fate, by Vasily Grossman (this would be quite a feat!) Sybil, by Disraeli Polyhistor Solinus   The Tale of Sinhue (ancient Egyptian poetry)   Eichmann in Jerusalem, by Hannah Arendt Lives, by Plutarch (vol I)   Sagas of Icelanders (aiming for 50% by the due date) Two Years Before the Mast, by Richard Henry Dana  Amerika, by Kafka  Lucretius worked out really well last time and I...

 The Case of the Perjured Parrot, by Erle Stanley Gardner  A millionaire real estate mogul is found in a remote hunting cabin, shot dead, with a screaming parrot next to him.  Was it his estranged wife?  The gambling mafia?  His stepson?  His...new wife?  (Wait, what?)    I needed to read this particular Perry Mason story for one reason: the back cover matter.  Read that and tell me whether any librarian could resist the hilarity of a collection of guns at a public library, like a 1950s Library of Things .  The actual story does clarify that the gun collection is part of a small museum at the library; it's not the kind of collection where you can check items out.  It's still funny! This story features a remarkable amount of parrot-switching.  There are THREE parrots in total, all alike except for one tell-tale detail, and the victim, the murderer, and Mason play musical parrots with them.  In fact I'm not at all...