Howling Frog Books

 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...

 Okay, I know I haven't been around much!  I'm still working on recovering my reading mojo, and much of it has been going into the year-long Diana Wynne Jones project, which has just five more titles to go.  (I just realized I forgot to incorporate them into my summer list, though I would really only count Reflections as a longer read.) But!  Anyway!  I decided I'd like to do the 20 Books of Summer event, and that event has moved!  It's now being hosted by AnnaBookBel and Emma at Words and Peace .  Check out the fun new graphics!  There's a bingo card, and a Mr. Linky, and all your favorite summer stuff.  The rules:   The #20BooksofSummer2025 challenge runs from Sunday June 1st to Sunday August 31st   The first rule of 20 Books is that there are no real rules, other than signing up for 10, 15 or 20 books and trying to read from your TBR.   Pick your list in advance, or nominate a bookcase to read from, or pick at whim from ...

Strange Pictures , by Uketsu This is a prose novel, not a graphic novel, but it still revolves around pictures.  We have four short stories, each of which involves a mystery about one or more hand-drawn pictures -- some by children, some by adult artists.  In the end, the narratives fit together to solve a larger mystery about a very quiet serial killer -- a story that has lasted decades.  It was a good read, on the fast and easy side. We start with an abandoned blog discovered by two students who think there's a puzzle involved.  The writer starts off happy and excited that his wife is going to have a baby, and is then grief-stricken when she dies during childbirth.  Three years later, he erases most of the entries, posts a cryptic note, and the blog ends.  Who is the note addressed to?  What of this little family?  Through three more seemingly unrelated stories, the solution eventually comes out.        The Strange House, vo...

 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 ...