Howling Frog Books

Sixpence in Her Shoe , by Phyllis McGinley I don't actually know that much about the mid-century American poet Phyllis McGinley, except that she won a Pulitzer Prize.  And she wrote this book, which is about "the world's oldest profession," housewifery, specifically as practiced in modern America.  Three sections on Wife, House, and Family organize a selection of chapters/essays, many of which ran in the Ladies' Home Journal or other magazines in the 1950s, and were then collected and edited into a book in 1960. McGinley's thesis here is that the domestic calling is an honorable one, not to be despised -- not even by intelligent and educated women -- which can be blended, or not, with a profession, as the individual woman prefers.  Every so often she is clearly rebutting Betty Friedan. It's a fun and refreshing read.  McGinley is a witty, humorous writer, and I love reading books about housekeeping.  (I'm not quite so good at the actual housekee

The Palm-Wine Drinkard and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, by Amos Tutuola Woohoo, I have done it!  I honestly did not think I would be able to finish 20 of the books on my list.  I added some extras, especially when I went off to Illinois and suddenly had access to new stuff, but I was hoping to get 20 from my actual list.  I finished on August 27, so about 6 days before the deadline.  Woot!  Well, on to our novel... Amos Tutuola was born in 1920 in Nigeria; according to his account, he was a good student and had a great interest in his Yoruban culture's folktales.  He became a good storyteller in school, and so years later when he saw magazine ads for books of African tales, he realized he could do that too.  He wrote his first book, The Palm-Wine Drinkard and his Dead Palm-Wine Tapster in the Deads' Town, in a short span of time in 1946, but then wasn't sure what to do with it.  After seeing a magazine ad for a publisher that solicited manuscripts, he sent it off to

Purge, by Sofi Oksanen This was a pretty harrowing novel, folks.  It was interesting, and well-written, but I don't think I'll be revisiting it and it should maybe come with a warning on the cover. Aliide Truu, an old woman, lives in her farmhouse on the edge of the Estonian forest.  It's 1992, and an unknown young woman shows up in front of her house.   Zara is running from the terrifying men who captured and trafficked her, but she also has a reason for searching out this particular house. Neither of the women want to tell their stories, but they each need to find out who the other is.  The reader, meanwhile, is given access to chapters of their histories; Aliide remembers successive waves of German and Soviet occupation, her sister's marriage to the man Aliide loved, and just what she did to survive , and to get what she wanted.  Zara grew up in Vladivostok, surrounded by her mother's and grandmother's memories and fears.  When she wanted to earn money

The Lais of Marie de France I didn't know anything about Marie de France, and I wanted to find out, so here we go.  Marie is the earliest French woman poet we know of, and she was writing in the late 1100s.  It seems that she was born in France and then moved to England, and we do not know her real name.  She just said (in Old French) "My name is Marie, and I am from France," and that's what we've got.  Scholars have looked at several Maries of the day, but there is no certain identification.   She was almost certainly known at the court of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, and her poems were popular in  aristocratic social circles. Marie wrote "lays," that is, narrative poems of a few hundred lines each, and they were based on Breton tales.  We have twelve of these stories.  The majority of them are about knights who fall in love with ladies, or vice-versa, and how they evade one or more spouses in order to carry on affairs.  One lay tells an epi

The Opal and Other Stories, by Gustav Meyrink Here's another book I found at the university library.  I actually looked for The Green Face , because although I have that on my Kindle, I've been finding it difficult to get into.  I figured if I got started with the physical book, maybe I could then read the rest on Kindle.  Well, I didn't only find The Green Face -- right next to it was this collection of short stories that doesn't seem to be in print any more in the US (you can get it on Kindle though).  So I grabbed that and read it...and I did get enough time to read the first few chapters of Green Face as well, and my plan worked.  I'm now well into that novel. So this is a collection of Meyrink's early short stories, written right at the beginning of the 1900s, before he wrote any novels.  (His later novel, The Golem , is what made him famous.  I've now also read Walpurgisnacht. )  At this time, he's trying and failing to make a living as a

My ILL edition The Blue Hills , by Elizabeth Goudge (also known as Henrietta's House ) This is another book in the Torminster world, which begins with City of Bells and continues with Sister of the Angels .  As far as I know, none of the Torminster books are in print, which is a great pity and somebody should fix it.  This story is another one that is almost, but not quite, a children's story, and it has the same cast of main characters, with Henrietta and Hugh Anthony in the middle of a crowd of others.  Torminster is a fictional version of Wells in Somerset. Hugh Anthony is home for the summer, and it's his birthday.  He wants to have a picnic up in the hills, and invites all the nicer old folks that he knows, having been surrounded by other boys for too long.   Each member of the party is asked what their birthday wish is, and they mostly wish for improbable things...and yet as the members of the party all get lost on the way to the picnic, each of their wishes

Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets: An Oral History, by Svetlana Alexievich Wow, this book is...an achievement.  Alexievich won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and it was well-deserved.  It's not a regular book of history; it's more like a monument, really. What Alexievitch does -- has been doing for well over twenty years -- is interview people and transcribe their stories.  Mostly just ordinary people, and the stories are not edited much.  They're just set down.  The result is very immediate; you can almost see the people as they speak. Many of the people in this book are elderly, and tell of long Soviet lives.  Others are quite young and may not even remember Soviet life. There's a former Soviet officer, who offers the rather stunning information that a good 70% of the Soviet economy was militarized, and in his opinion that was only correct.  They weren't about to convert tank factories into factories for toasters!  They had to be ready at all times.

Arthurian Romances, Tales, and Lyric Poetry: the Complete Works of Hartmann von Aue This is a long-held goal of mine, to read the complete works of Hartmann von Aue!  I did, some time ago, get hold of a (terrible) copy of Poor Heinrich, which is how I found out about this medieval German knight and poet.  I shall now quote my own blog post for background: If you were here for my Arthurian literature project of 2014, you know that the mania for knightly romances and Arthurian tales spread through Western Europe in the 1100s.  I read French and German tales as well as English ones.  There were three great German poets of the courtly romance: Wolfram von Eschenbach wrote Parziva l , and Gottfried von Strassburg wrote Tristan , but before them came Hartmann von Aue, who introduced the idea into Germany in the first place in the 1190s.  He has not become nearly as well-known in English as the two later poets... This volume contains Hartmann's four narratives in presumed o

Malgudi Days: I, by R. K. Narayan Here's another find from the great big university library.  This one just caught my eye as I was walking along; I didn't even look for it.  This shelf held several books published in India, in English.  (Actually, the library was crammed with Indian literature, but most of it wasn't in English.)  This was just a collection of the twelve Malgudi stories that had been turned into episodes of the TV series. I'd read a couple of these stories before, but most of them were new to me.  I read the Penguin collection of Malgudi Days just a few months ago, but this was a different thing with little overlap. I particularly remember a story about a little boy terrified to sleep away from his grandmother...and when he's forced to sleep alone, he accidentally catches a burglar and becomes a hero.   Another story features a family that promised to sacrifice their little boy's hair if he survived a dangerous...and now, twenty years

In Search of Lost Books, by Giorgio van Straten This was just this fun little volume -- originally written in Italian -- about famous, or less-famous, lost books -- some of which might still be out there somewhere.  As, for example, the early works of Hemingway; his first wife was bringing them to him in a suitcase, and she just hopped out of the French train for a second to buy a Perrier.  When she got back, the suitcase was gone, and it was never recovered. I was happy to see the story of Bruno Schulz, whose short stories I have read .  He was a Polish Jew, and so during World War II he hid the manuscript of his great life work novel with some Gentile friends.  Schulz was murdered by a Nazi officer who was annoyed with the Nazi officer who was keeping Schulz as a slave.  And the manuscript disappeared in the war and has never been found. There's a chapter on Lord Byron's memoirs -- deemed too scandalous for publication, they were probably burned by the publisher.  One o

Paradise of the Blind, by Duong Thu Huong This is truly an amazing novel; beautifully written and hard to put down.  It was also banned in Vietnam and the author imprisoned for her writing, which was -- even in a time that was supposed to be welcoming to dissent -- too directly critical for the government's pleasure.  As a young woman, Duong was part of the North Vietnamese Communist Party (she was exactly the age to be a young enthusiast during the war), but became disillusioned and spent the 1980s writing and speaking about what she had witnessed.  She was expelled from the Party and imprisoned for a while, and then released and simply not allowed to travel for years.  In 2006 she moved to Paris, where she still lives today. Hang, a young woman living in Russia as an 'imported worker,' receives a telegram summoning her to Moscow to see her uncle, a cadre leader.  As she travels on the train, she ponders on her family's history in episodes that jump around in time,

The Golden Skylark , by Elizabeth Goudge During my week away, I was living in a great big university library, so naturally I went and hunted up books I didn't have access to at home.  Most of them were for work, but I did sneak in a few fun books for when my brain couldn't think about academic research any more!  I looked up Elizabeth Goudge in the catalog and was quite thrilled to see two or three titles I'd never read.  This was the one I picked to read. The Golden Skylark is a collection of short stories, and the dedication -- to a girl "who loves England" -- is a clue to the theme.  All of the stories take place in Great Britain. There are historical stories about famous people, starting with "The Golden Skylark," about the poet Shelley as a young man and the origin (I presume fictitious) of his skylark poem.  There is a story about Sir Thomas More and his children at the time of More's arrest, and another about a teenage Princess Elizabe

Kalpa Imperial: The Greatest Empire That Never Was, by Angelica Gorodischer, trans. by Ursula K. Le Guin I'd really been looking forward to this, and it did not disappoint.  Angelica Gorodischer is an Argentinian writer, and has published quite a bit, but this is her first book to be published in English.  This book was originally published in two parts, in the early 1980s.  Each part is a collection of stories. Most of the time, the stories are told by an old storyteller -- but not always.  Some are different.  All purport to tell small parts of the extremely long history of the Empire, which has existed in various forms for thousands of years.  There are dark ages, many dynasties, and waxings and wanings of power. The first story actually tells of the complete destruction of the Empire in what you might call prehistoric times, since all knowledge was lost for quite some time.  People lived in a new stone age until one young man ventured further into the old ruins than anybo

Midnight Riot (Rivers of London), by Ben Aaronovitch Accidentally, but appropriately, Summerbook #13 is the one with spooky magic! I've been wanting to try this series out for a long time, but it's a British series that has not made a big appearance in the US.  So when I found a somewhat battered copy in the really neat SF/F used and new bookstore, Borderlands Books, in San Fransisco , on the evening that we went to the Chills concert (definitely one of the highlights of the year!).  Anyway, I saved it for a special fun read. Peter Grant is a London constable, hoping to be a detective.  (We'd call him a rookie cop.)  He and his comrade Leslie start to look into a mysterious murder which seems to have been witnessed by...a ghost?  Soon Peter is swept into an unknown tiny branch of the Force that deals in supernatural crimes, headed by Inspector Nightingale, who is a wizard.  It will be Peter's job to learn magic -- lots of it -- and simultaneously negotiate with t

The Claverings, by Anthony Trollope Now that my big paper is pretty much done, I can write proper blog posts again!  I read The Claverings on the bus between Chicago and Champaign, and then on the way back again.  I finished it in O'Hare airport, waiting for my flight.  And what a lovely read it was -- so absorbing that I didn't want to put it down! This is one of Trollope's individual novels; not part of a series.  It was written in 1864, and did not appear until 1866-67, serialized in the Cornhill Magazine . (Imagine, a novel all finished and not being written even as it was being published!) Harry Clavering is the son of a clergyman who is cousin to a baronet -- on the edges of, but not part of, the nobility.  Harry has been brought up to be a rich, idle clergyman too, but he decides to buck authority and become an engineer, building bridges and railroads.  He also wants to marry the lovely Julia Brabazon, sister to the baronet's wife; but Julia, though she lo

Where did I go, what did I do, and how could it possibly have anything to do with women in translation??  Well, it's a little tricky to explain, but several months ago I applied for a "summer lab" on internationalization in community colleges.  I was not at all sure what I was getting into, but it seemed like it might be fun, so why not?  I'd figure it out as I went along, right? The lab was at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, which I mostly knew as the premier school for librarians.  It is in fact a huge university where a lot of research happens, and the International and Area Studies folks wanted to foster internationalization in community colleges.  (Internationalization, which my husband usefully pointed out to be can be abbreviated i18n, is the rather common-sensical idea that it's a good thing for students to get some amount of global perspective in their educations.  Also, yay study abroad.)  So the theme was to come up with some sort of i