Howling Frog Books

 I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, by Jason Pargin I found the title and cover a bit irresistible, even though I haven't gotten around to reading more of the John Dies at t he End series .   Abbott, your basic failing-to-launch guy with a Twitch channel, hates driving for Lyft.  Arriving at a Circle K to pick up a client for a trip to the LA airport, she shows him an old roadie box covered in stickers and offers him $200,000 in cash if he will drive her and it to Washington, DC in four days.  He's not allowed to see inside the box, he can't tell anyone, he must leave all trackable devices behind, but she promises it's not heroin and he'll have enough money to live on his own!  And so they head off to the highway. Within a few hours, an ex-FBI officer, a biker thug, Abbott's dad, and the entirety of Reddit are on their tail and rumors are spreading faster than wildfire.  The box contains a dead body -- an alien -- a nuclear bomb -- a...

  De Rerum Natura (The Way Things Are, or On the Nature of Things), by Titus Lucretius Carus, trans. by Rolfe Humphries I didn't really know quite what I was getting into with this book, but it worked out great.  Thanks to Tom the Amateur Reader, I got an excellent translation that I enjoyed a lot.  I won't claim to have understood it particularly well -- for that I'd need a whole deep dive and probably a class -- but for a basic first read, I'm calling it a success. So here we go... We don't know all that much about Lucretius, except that he was a Roman poet and philosopher, upper-class, and this is the only surviving of his works.  He was born around 99 BCE and died, at 44, in 55 BCE.  St. Jerome said he went mad from a love potion and killed himself, which seems to be inaccurate, but the slander stuck around for centuries, right up to the modern era.  Our poem was very nearly lost, but a single surviving copy was found in a German monastery in the early ...

 The Let Them Theory, by Mel Robbins This was my book club book!  I think we all agree that while the book could easily be half the length, the thesis is an important one that is particularly useful to people like us -- women socialized to make everyone else happy (whether they like it or not).  Also, you can really tell that Mel Robbins is a motivational speaker with a podcast.  Which I might listen to. All it boils down to is -- let people do what they're going to do, and don't worry about it so much.  Then decide what it is that you need to do, and do that. So if (as in her example) your teen kid wants to go for tacos in a tuxedo in the rain without a coat, just let him do that without fussing.  If people are judgemental, that's okay.  The only person you can control is yourself, so what are you going to do with yourself? Useful interludes include: What if I'm feeling envious of everybody else?  What if my life is a disaster?  What if some...

 Some Desperate Glory, by Emily Tesh On a small asteroid, a tiny remnant of humanity cling to their ideology.  Earth was destroyed in the Majo War, and most of the human survivors live on one world of the massive, peaceful, and multispecies Majoda civilization that is managed by the Wisdom, a millenia-old transdimensional artificial intelligence.  But on Gaea Station, these survivors live an extremely Spartan existence dedicated to revenge. Valkyr has spent her life training as a soldier, just like her twin brother Mags, just like every Gaean child.  Now her group is up for assignment; each girl will be given a lifetime job in a section of Gaea to keep it running.  Kyr and her brother, as warbreeds, are excellent soldiers and both expect to be assigned as such, but Mags doesn't want it and Kyr discovers that she's expected to spend her life bearing children in Nursery, what with her valuable genetics and all.  The capture of a majo serves as the catalyst th...

 Happy March Magics!  Back in July of 2024, I joined a group of Diana Wynne Jones fans in reading the complete works, in publication order.  You can see the host at her blog!   She gave us a schedule and we dove in.  This has been such a fun project for me, and a real lifesaver during some rough times. It's very enlightening to read the books in order, because I could see her writing talent developing.  Every so often she would hit a new level of descriptiveness, of plot layering, of subtlety.   Themes come up and into focus, and get several treatments before subsiding in favor of some new theme.  So for example, Homeward Bounders (arguably her most tragic story) and Time of the Ghost (most horrifying) were written right next to each other.  What does that say about what she was thinking at the time? Reading so continually also brings out characteristics that last across many books, such as a love of joyful, possibly destructive, chaos...

 The Strange House, vols 1 and 2, by Uketsu  This is at least a trilogy, but so far only the first two have been published.  Uketsu is an odd Japanese artist/ Youtuber /author, whose videos and books have made something of a splash.  As far as I can tell, no one admits to knowing who Uketsu actually is -- the artist is always masked. The unnamed narrator is asked to investigate an unusual floor plan for a house that previously belonged to a married couple with a child.  This doesn't seem like something she knows much about, so she asks an architect friend who is into the occult; maybe he can come up with something.  Kurihara studies the floor plans, notes its oddities, and spins the craziest, most macabre theories you've ever heard.   Then they connect this house to the inhabitants' previous home, which also seems odd.  And a woman claiming to be the wife of a murder victim shows up, asking for help.  Everything just gets more complex i...

 I've had these sitting on the desk for a while, and I'm just going to take them all off at once.  These were all books on my TBR shelf that I finally got around to reading! The Stones Are Hatching , by Geraldine McCaughrean :  It's 1919, and Phelim and his sister live deep in the countryside.  Phelim is on his own when all the old folktales rise up at once and hit him -- the domovoy and the glashans take over the house, call him Jack o'Green, and tell him to hurry up and save them all from the Stoor Worm, as the Black Dog attacks from outside.  Phelim is to travel cross-country and gather up his allies: the Maiden, the Fool, and the Hobby-Horse -- but the trouble is, he's never been told any of the stories.  He hasn't a clue how to navigate a world gone back to every superstition come alive, and he can't understand why everyone thinks it's his job to defeat the Stoor Worm.  It's a well-told tale of discovering the world and himself. The Thorn Ogres ...

 4!   That gives me  The Nature of Things , by Lucretius...a classic of Roman philosophy.  It's a poem, but I have a vague idea that the Penguin Classics hardcover at the library is in prose.  So wish me luck, and if there's a better translation out there that you know of, let me know!     

 Wow, it's the 40th Classics Club Spin !  You know the drill, or you can see it at the site.  They'll pull the number on Sunday morning, and we'll have until April 11th to finish the book.  Here are my titles:  No Name, by Wilkie Collins Peter the Great's African, by Pushkin  The Beggar's Opera, by John Gay The Nature of Things, by Lucretius Second-Class Citizen, by Buchi Emecheta Life and Fate, by Vasily Grossman (this would be quite a feat!) Sybil, by Disraeli The Leopard, by di Lampedusa  Phineas Finn, by Anthony Trollope   The Obedience of a Christian Man, by William Tyndale   Sagas of Icelanders (aiming for 50% by the due date) 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  Two Years Before the Mast, by Richard Henry Dana  Amerika, by Kafka Polyhistor Solinus   The Tale of Sinhue (ancient Egyptian poetry)   Eichmann ...

 Disobedient Women: How a Small Group of Faithful Women Exposed Abuse, Brought Down Powerful Pastors and Ignited an Evangelical Reckoning, by Sarah Stankorb I've been paying quite a lot of attention to the evangelical world for the last year or so, so this title naturally caught my attention.  Stankorb, a journalist, grew up on the edges of this world, and chronicles the efforts of many people over a long time to bring attention to problems of ecclesiastical abuse.  Evangelicals, in their efforts to build parallel institutions that would allow Christian families to live largely in bubbles insulated from the dangerous outside world, didn't really build in any safeguards -- after all, this was supposed to be their safe space.  Since every institution (schools, businesses, churches, Little League teams, whatever) is vulnerable to predators who seek to use it for access to victims, safeguards are always important.  And in these parallel institutions, children were t...

 Letters From My Mill, by Alphonse Daudet I came across this some months ago while weeding the French literature at work. We had a lot of ancient copies of modernist plays that needed replacing.   I took it home to get around to, but Fanda got there a lot faster than I did.  I'm completely unfamiliar with Daudet; as we know, French literature is my weakest point.  This was his first published work, in 1866, and it became a popular success, and it remained a favorite of his. The conceit is that Daudet has rented a disused windmill, where he often goes for holidays or perhaps to live for periods of time.  The first few pieces are written as letters to friends in Paris, telling charming stories of the Avignon countryside -- some are cast as local incident, and some as legend.  After a while, we get reminiscences of former days in Paris or Algeria, or stories told by sailors. On the whole it's charming, though the Algerian stories I could do without. ...

Xenophon's Anabasis (Landmark ed.) I love looking at the Landmark editions, but I'm not so great at actually reading them, unless they are Herodotus.  But my sister was here over winter break and she inspired me to pick up something more serious than I've been reading lately, and so I have now read the Anabasis .  I enjoyed it a lot, too!  I'm not that great at reading about warfare, because I find it tedious, but reading about soldiers stuck in enemy territory and trying to get home is much more interesting. So here's the background: It's 401 BC, and Xenophon, a young and elite Athenian, decides to go along with a company of 10,000 Greek mercenaries to the Persian Empire.  He's not actually in the military, but his friend says 'if you get in good with Cyrus, you'll be in great shape for a career!' and so he goes along.  Cyrus is challenging his older brother Artaxerxes for the Persian throne, and he's promised good pay to these mercenari...

  All in Her Head: The Truth and Lies Early Medicine Taught Us About Women's Bodies and Why It Matters Today, by Elizabeth Comen Elizabeth Comen is an oncologist specializing in breast cancer, and as she worked with her patients, she came to realize just how badly our medical system is set up -- for everyone, but particularly for women.  Looking back into history, she collected evidence and traced stories illustrating how attitudes and beliefs have come down to us and are still hanging around. Dr. Comen works through chapters dedicated to systems of the human body, starting with skin, bones, and muscles, right through to nerves, hormones, and reproduction.    (While the entire book is enraging, this guarantees that the intensity will ramp up and the  most enraging material will probably be at the end.)  Readers will probably be familiar with quite a few of the stories already -- Ignaz Semmelweis' failed attempts to get doctors to wash their hands, the horri...

 I have quite a pile of random children's books on my TBR shelf, and I've been going through them, so here are three at once! The Children of Noisy Village, by Astrid Lindgren : This qualifies as a minor classic, not as popular as the Pippi Longstocking stories, but a lovely book describing a Swedish country childhood in about the 1950s.  Lisa lives in the middle farmhouse of three, and since there are six lively children in those three farmhouses, it's known as Noisy Village.  Lisa and her two brothers, the two sisters on one side, and a boy (plus infant sister) on the other -- they all get up to mischief and fun every day.  Lindgren takes her children through most of a year, describing summer, Christmas, birthdays, and spring.  This would be a great read-aloud for a child 5 and up. Nicobobinus, by Terry Jones : It was the Terry Jones on the spine that caught my eye.  What kind of children's book would he write? It would be guaranteed to be silly and all o...

 Wild: Tales From Early Medieval Britain, by Amy Jeffs    After I read Storyland , I wanted to read Wild ; I really wondered what kind of stories Jeffs would collect into this book.  This one is shorter, and also I think takes more liberties with the material, and the result is intriguing.   Jeffs takes some of the more obscure poems from things like the Book of Exeter, or panels of the Franks Casket, often melds a couple of them together, and turns them into short tales.  So we read of the Sorrow of Hos -- Hos is named in a real manuscript, and Jeffs gives her a story fitting the existing clues.  "The Wanderer" is adapted a bit and told from the perspective of Grendel. I enjoyed these short tales and the explanations Jeffs provided of how she came to write them.  The illustrations, again linocuts, and this time not so plentiful, were also very good.

 The Mythmakers: The Remarkable Fellowship of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, by John Hendrix I recently read Hendrix' Faithful Spy , and now I've got his latest -- a chronicle of one of the most world-influencing friendships of the 20th century.  And I'm here to tell you, it's great stuff, a lovely biography/tribute to both men.  This is a graphic novel suitable for age 10 and up, but is equally absorbing for adults.  Give it to the Middle-Earth and Narnia fan in your life! Hendrix gives short biographies of each before they meet, and then he gets detailed, providing lovely illustrations in teal, lavender, and gold.  But there's just one problem; what they mostly did was talk, and that doesn't make for exciting reading.  So Hendrix introduces two metanarrating avatars: a wizard and a lion, who explain myth and epic, provide commentary upon the relationship, and generally facilitate the reader's experience, like a Greek chorus in a play.  The two s...

Hello to 2025!  Guess what, I've been reading up a storm!  It's been lovely!  Impossible Creatures, by Katherine Runnell I heard this middle-grade story, from the UK, described as comparable to Diana Wynne Jones, so I tracked down a copy to see.  While, naturally, it cannot compare in my mind, I do have to say that this is an excellent, primo-grade fantasy story, with as imaginative and intense an ending as anyone could hope for.  Highly recommended! Christopher, whom all critters love, is reluctantly headed to Scotland to stay with his grandfather for a while, as his dad has to travel for work.  But he finds that his grandfather is another animal-attractor, and it's because they're hereditary guardians of a portal... Mal loves to fly in her flying coat, which was given to her (along with her name) at birth by a seer.  Flying makes her easy to spot, and a murderer is after her.... The two meet as Mal escapes through the portal, begs for Christopher's h...