Howling Frog Books

 18!  This gives me a doozy that I've long wanted to read: The Well at the World's End , by William Morris .  It's a knightly adventure through trackless forest, an imitation of Malory and of Spenser, I'd say.  Sir Ralph decides to search for, guess what, the Well at the World's End, and has many adventures along the way, often about the Castle of Abundance and so on.  I got an ebook from Gutenberg and it's looking pretty lengthy, being divided into four books of many chapters each.  PLUS Morris went for the full Victorian/Howard Pyle style, observe this random paragraph: Therewithal they gat to horse and rode away through that stony land, wherein was no river, but for water many pools in the bottoms, with little brooks running from them. But after a while they came upon a ridge somewhat high, on the further side whereof was a wide valley well-grassed and with few trees, and no habitation of man that they might see. But a wide river ran down the midst of...

 It's time for the 45th Classics Club Spin!  You know the rules, so here's my list:  Amerika, by Kafka Thus Were Their Faces, by Silvina Ocampo Peter the Great's African, by Pushkin Lives, by Plutarch (vol I) Sybil, by Disraeli   Eichmann in Jerusalem, by Hannah Arendt   The Leopard, by di Lampedusa Life and Fate, by Vasily Grossman (this would be quite a feat!) Conjure Tales, by Charles Chesnutt Polyhistor Solinus    Folktales collected by Afanas'ev (vol I of 3)   Sagas of Icelanders (aiming for 50% by the due date)   The Law and the Lady, by Wilkie Collins The Burning Plain, by Juan Rulfo The Beggar's Opera, by John Gay Sport of the Gods, by Paul Dunbar Phineas Finn, by Anthony Trollope The Well at the End of the World, by William Morris The Tale of Sinhue (ancient Egyptian poetry) The Once and Future King, by T. H. White Hoping for: Once and Future King or Plutarch.  Nervous about: Life and Fate!  It's a brick! What do you thin...

 The Poetic Edda: Stories of the Norse Gods and Heroes , trans. by Jackson Crawford This was fun!  I read a couple of poems per day.  These are the oldest sources we have for information about the Norse gods, and they're kind of cryptic.  It helps to have a little bit of context and background information, which Crawford provides, but not too much; he doesn't overdo it. The first poems are mostly about Thor, Odin, and Loki.  In one, Loki shows up and creatively insults everyone, and they just have to put up with it because Odin has sworn to always drink with Loki.  (The swearing of oaths seems to be a popular, and dangerous, pastime while drinking.)  Odin goes in disguise to a giant and they have a contest of wisdom.  One poem is just good advice from Odin.  In another, Odin and Thor insult each other across a ford.  I particularly liked a complicated poem about "the escape of Voland the smith," who ended up as Wayland in Britain.  ...

 9! A watery nine for the ICY NORTH SEA This gives me The Poetic Edda  to read by July 5th .  I'm excited about it.  I read the Poetic Edda long ago in college, but somehow that book has disappeared.  (Maybe I gave it to my sister?)  But recently I was listening to a podcast I enjoy, and the guest was an Old Norse specialist who had published a new translation of the Poetic Edda , and I was intrigued, so I ordered it.  If you're not familiar, the Poetic or Elder Edda is a collection of Old Norse poetry that is the oldest source we have for Norse mythology.  It was actually written down from oral sources a couple of hundred years after the conversion to Christianity, so on the one hand, it's not quite as primary a source as we would wish, but on the other, by then the writers don't seem to have been worried that the old beliefs would have a resurgence, so there isn't a bunch of editorializing about the horrors of paganism. The poems seem to have ...

 Hooray!  I've been looking forward to this Spin.  You know the rules, so here's my list:  Amerika, by Kafka Thus Were Their Faces, by Silvina Ocampo Peter the Great's African, by Pushkin Lives, by Plutarch (vol I) Sybil, by Disraeli   Eichmann in Jerusalem, by Hannah Arendt   The Leopard, by di Lampedusa Life and Fate, by Vasily Grossman (this would be quite a feat!)  The Poetic Edda Polyhistor Solinus    Folktales collected by Afanas'ev (vol I of 3)   Sagas of Icelanders (aiming for 50% by the due date)   The Law and the Lady, by Wilkie Collins The Burning Plain, by Juan Rulfo It is Acceptable (Det Gaar An), C. J. L. Almqvist   The Obedience of a Christian Man, by William Tyndale Phineas Finn, by Anthony Trollope The Well at the End of the World, by William Morris The Tale of Sinhue (ancient Egyptian poetry) The Once and Future King, by T. H. White   Since summer is coming up, I could tackle something pretty major this...

 Two Years Before the Mast, by Richard Henry Dana Jr. Wow, this is a fascinating account.  No wonder it was hugely popular in its day!  It's not well-known now, and I didn't really know what I was getting into, but I sure enjoyed this memoir of life at sea in the 1830s. In 1834, Richard Dana was a law student at Harvard, and he contracted measles, which damaged his eyesight; he couldn't read at all.  He decided that the way to recover his health would be to sign on as a regular sailor to a merchant ship and spend a couple of years at sea.  He entered service on the Pilgrim , which was headed to California -- in the days when Alta California was a sparsely-populated area of Mexico and the back of beyond.  No Panama Canal, no railroad, and no overland journeys from the United States yet.  The financial interest in California was for cattle hides from the herds run by the Spanish missions, brought to the coast largely by the Native peoples being used as ...

 TWO!     That gives me a doorstopper of a maritime memoir, Two Years Before the Mast by Richard Henry Dana.  Dana spent two years of the 1830s sailing from the East Coast to California by way of Cape Horn.  So I'm hoping for penguins!  He published his account in 1840.  We'll see how it goes...I don't really know much about this one. I'll report back at the end of March!

Huzzah, it's time for the 43rd Spin!   You know the rules, so let's get to the list:   Eichmann in Jerusalem, by Hannah Arendt Two Years Before the Mast, by Richard Henry Dana  Amerika, by Kafka 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) Stories of Washington Irving Life and Fate, by Vasily Grossman (this would be quite a feat!)  The Poetic Edda   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 The Once and Future King, by T. H. White Peter the Great's African, by Pushkin 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)  My preference would be Polyhistor, Poetic Edda, or the sagas.  Or the fairy ta...

 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 ...

 ...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!

 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, ...

 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...

 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...

  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 ...

 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 ...

 The Ring of Bright Water, by Gavin Maxwell When I opened this book and started reading, I was a little taken aback when the introduction to the trilogy edition explained that all three books had been edited down in order to become the trilogy.  I didn't sign up for that!  I wanted the whole thing!  But then it turned out that complete editions of the first book are no longer easy to get; they've long been replaced by this shortened trilogy version.  And so, resigned, I decided to read the first part of the book and then see how it was going before committing to all three books.  And I did really enjoy Ring of Bright Water , but I don't think I'm going to continue. Read on to see why. Gavin Maxwell, wanderer and general nature guy, had tried running a shark-hunting business on the Scottish island of Soay.  He'd gone back and forth to the Middle East a few times, for what exactly he does not say, but writing seems to come into it, and probably also gen...

 THREE!   This means I'll be reading Ring of Bright Water , by Gavin Maxwell , a classic of nature writing.  The copy I have is actually the trilogy, so we'll see how far I get.   See you on December 18th!     

 Hey it's that time again, my favorite time -- it's Spin time!   You know the rules, so here we go: No Name, by Wilkie Collins Second-Class Citizen, by Buchi Emecheta Ring of Bright Water, by Gavin Maxwell The Tale of Sinhue (ancient Egyptian poetry)   Eichmann in Jerusalem, by Hannah Arendt   Hunger, by Knut Hamsun 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 It is Acceptable (Det Gaar An), C. J. L. Almqvist  Two Years Before the Mast, by Richard Henry Dana  Amerika, by Kafka Peter the Great's African, by Pushkin  The Beggar's Opera, by John Gay The Nature of Things, by Lucretius Polyhistor Solinus Lives, by Plutarch (again, aiming for part, not the whole) I'm still in a mood for ancient British literature, or at least something saga-ish ...