Howling Frog Books

 No Name, by Wilkie Collins  Wilkie Collins was incredibly prolific, but this is one of his 'great four' novels, along with The Woman in White, Armadale, and The Moonstone .  So now I just need to read Armadale and I'll have the set!  No Name is set in the late 1840s but was written in 1862 and serialized in All the Year Round .  It gets very exciting as it develops, and I enjoyed it a lot.  If you're interested in Victorian 'sensation' novels, this should be on your list. The Vanstones are a happy and fairly wealthy family.  Mr. Vanstone is the most amiable and generous of men; his wife, a loving and gentle woman, but weighed down with a  dangerous late pregnancy.  Their two daughters are very different: Norah, in her mid-20s, a responsible and gentle brunette, and Magdalen, an energetic and mercurial 19 with unusual light grey eyes. Ruin strikes when Mr. Vanstone is killed in a railway accident and the shock brings on labor and death to ...

 The Fifth Science, by Exurb1a  This one kid at work has been telling me about the books he's reading, which is fun.  He said he really likes this author (who seems to live in Bulgaria and is also a YouTuber sometimes), and the ebook was cheap, so I thought I'd give it a go.... Here we have a set of 12 short stories, set from the beginning of the Aerth Empire (that is, humans) until after the fall of said empire.  They don't have continuing characters or planets, anything like that, but are vignettes from various points in time and place, often thousands of years apart.  From these stories we get glimpses of the Empire, the development of truly intelligent machines and the splitting of humans into myriads of different societies, and the eventual development of the fifth science: the ability to make ordinary matter intelligent.  Humans inject stars with intelligence, and what will happen then?  Since human history, on the whole, tends to be on the brut...

 ...17!    That means I'll be reading Wilkie Collins' No Name , a dramatic 1862 mystery about the complexities of illegitimacy and inheritance.  It's supposed to be one of his greats, up there with The Woman in White and The Moonstone, both of which I have read twice.  So this ought to be fun!

 The Observant Walker: Wild Food, Nature and Hidden Treasures on the Pathways of Britain, by John Wright Oh, this book was a delight.  As we know, I'm now a devotee of the Ridgeway, and so I've been collecting books about walking in Britain (and other places) for a while.  There are a lot of them, so I'm not planning to be exhaustive!  I actually got this book on the Ridgeway hike, when we were staying in Wallingford.  There was a bookshop, and I asked what she would recommend if I liked books about walking in nature, but I don't like Robert MacFarlane . That stumped her a little bit but she recommended John Wright, and him I like! Wright is all about the plants.  He likes to walk around and drive everyone else crazy by spending all his time carefully studying the plants and fungi and lichens he sees.  (And if the lichen is in London, he'll lie in the gutter to get a good photo.)   He and Tolkien would have a grand time standing in one plac...

 My favorite thing is still happening ; it's time for the 42nd Spin!   You know the rules, so let's get to the list: The Leopard, by di Lampedusa  Phineas Finn, by Anthony Trollope The Well at the End of the World, by William Morris The Tale of Sinhue (ancient Egyptian poetry)   Eichmann in Jerusalem, by Hannah Arendt Lives, by Plutarch (vol I) Sybil, by Disraeli Polyhistor Solinus    Folktales collected by Afanas'ev (vol I of 3)   Sagas of Icelanders (aiming for 50% by the due date) Two Years Before the Mast, by Richard Henry Dana  Amerika, by Kafka  Complete tales of Hans Christian Andersen   The Law and the Lady, by Wilkie Collins It is Acceptable (Det Gaar An), C. J. L. Almqvist   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 Life and Fate, by Vasily Grossman (this would be quite a feat!)  My preference would be Polyhistor, ...

 The Book: A Cover-to-cover Exploration of the Most Powerful Object of Our Time, by Keith Houston Well, I did manage ten books of summer, but I failed to write about the last one.  And I've been very slow with my reading in the last month or so.  As far as I can tell, I've been under enough stress that I don't have a lot of brainpower left over for reading; there are lots of big, heavy tomes on important topics that I want to read, but I mostly take refuge in stitching and fluffy reading.  Of course, I also spend too much time doomscrolling!  I'm trying to spend more energy and time in the real world, but we all know how difficult that can be.  ANYWAY.... I purchased this fun history of books for the library at work several years ago, but didn't plan to read it.  Then Robin Sloan, author of Moonbound , said he'd had a lot of fun with it, and I thought I'd give it a whirl.  It is a fun read!  Of course I know quite a bit about the history of...

The Deorhord: An Old English Bestiary, by Hana Videen This followup to The Wordhord was a lovely read.  Videen uses her wordhord format to write a bestiary, explaining how medieval people loved to used animals as examples of Christian ideas.   Plus I always enjoy learning about Old English words, because they are often cognate with both modern English and with Danish.  Deor (animal), which in English evolved into deer , is also related to Danish dyr  (animal). Videen has sections of everyday animals, 'wonder' animals (such as elephants), creatures that especially symbolized good and evil, and just plain mysteries.  The good animals are the lion, deer, phoenix, and panther, and the evil ones are the whale, snake, dragon, and wolf.  The mysteries are usually taken from Alexander the Great's writings about his conquest of India; one sounds kind of like a crocodile, except that it has a head like the moon and also crocodiles were well-known.  Another...

 Jewish Space Lasers: the Rothschilds and 200 Years of Conspiracy Theories, by Mike Rothschild Well I sure can't resist THAT title.  I love the Jewish Space Lasers meme/joke.  And it does make a good tail end to this history, which is really about over 200 years' worth of vicious conspiracy theories/anti-Semitism, in which the Rothschilds formed a convenient scapegoat but had nothing much to do with any of it.  Almost anyone would have done. A couple of things first: Mike Rothschild is no relation, not that anyone into conspiracy theories believes that, but he even tells a little bit of his own family history.  I read and loved his previous book, The Storm is Upon Us , about the QAnon stuff.  And, if you are unfamiliar with the origin of the phrase "Jewish Space Lasers," it dates back to 2018, when Marjorie Taylor Greene (not yet as prominent in politics as she is now) tweeted, blaming the Camp Fire on Rothschild-owned weather-controlling lasers from spac...

Android Avenger/The Altar of Asconel (Ace Double)  I thought I would kick things off right and read an Ace Double from my recent haul.  I chose Android Avenger because I had a copy before, but it had mildew damage and had to be tossed.  I was bitter.  But I got another chance! Android Avenger is not that great.  It's the stinker of the two.  In 2017, the world is carefully regulated to avoid neurosis -- defined as anything the authorities deem even slightly abnormal.  Neurotics get executed, so everyone is very careful indeed to look calm and content, and to avoid those scans as much as possible.  Our narrator, Norman, thinks he's just an ordinary guy, until the day he suddenly loses control of himself and starts running inhumanly fast and murdering people he's never seen before.  He discovers that he's a tool of the man who plans to take over society -- an easy task now that everything is controlled by central computers.  Can Norman a...

 Second-Class Citizen, by Buchi Emecheta It's no wonder this is the novel that won Emecheta fame.  It's just so well-written!  It wasn't easy to read, because Adah is having a very rough time, and yet I couldn't put it down; it sucked me right in. Adah is an insignificant daughter of a family who was expecting a son, but -- even after her father dies and she has to go live with others -- she is determined to get an education and do well for herself.  As a young woman she obtains a well-paid position in Lagos, and that means that she is desirable as a wife, because she can pay for a husband's education.  She is married off to Francis (this is the late 1960s), and her ambition is to get her family to Britain, where she can get more education and become a librarian.  So first she funds Francis' trip to go there and become a lawyer, while she stays in Lagos and has a baby.  And despite all opposition, she gets herself and her little family to London. Londo...

 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...