Howling Frog Books

Ali and Nino, by Kurban Said I am now so, so far behind in my posts, but I really want to talk about these books... Ali and Nino is widely considered to be the Azerbaijani novel; it's a movie and everything.  And indeed, it was a fascinating read and a good novel!  It was originally written in German and published in Vienna in 1937.  Sheer luck brought it back into prominence (instead of complete oblivion) after World War II.  But...who was Kurban Said?  It's a mystery!  At least, it was a mystery for a long time.  My edition says that Kurban Said was probably a writing team comprised of an Austrian baroness, Elfriede Ehrehfels, and Lev Nussimbaum, a Jewish man born in Baku who converted to Islam and had to flee to Europe during the Russian Revolution.   After Hitler took power, he moved from Germany to Austria, where he became an intimate of the baroness' circle.  Wikipedia has a very different opinion and says that at least hal...

Sigrid Undset Four Stories by Sigrid Undset Long, long ago I read Sigrid Undset's Kristin Lavransdatter books and liked them fine, and I wanted to try something else she'd written, so I picked up this volume of four short stories.   The cover was not very promising as it said "Four touching, evocative, compassionate stories of 'little people' in modern Norway."  By modern they mean in the 20th century; the stories have no specific chronological settings, but they seem to me to be set before 1930, with at least one before World War I.   The book was published in 1959. "Selma Brøter" is about a single lady office worker -- a spinster -- who observes and becomes involved in her younger co-workers' romance. "Simonsen" is about an aging workman whose son finds him embarrassing. "Thjodolf" concerns a sailor's wife whose only baby died at birth.  She fosters a little boy and becomes deeply attached to him, but then ...

The Green Face, by Gustav Meyrink Getting back into the swing of things -- I hope -- I'll start with a book I actually finished a while ago.  (As I type, the carpet guy is stretching the carpet, which seems to mean getting the edges in place.  Everything in the house is now so chaotic that there is very little for me to actually do except sit at the computer!  I already did the dishes.) I've been meaning to read this novel for so long, but I only had it on Kindle, and I'm not very good at reading books on my phone.  This book turned out to be quite hard to get into; it starts off with a man going into a shop with a strange sign that is nearly unreadable on a phone.  But, as I mentioned a month or so ago, I found a paper copy at the giant research library I visited in July, and I read the first few chapters there, which helped me get into it.  Then I read a lot on the plane home, which got me about halfway through.  Progress was quite slow after th...

Agricola and Germania, by Tacitus I've been meaning to read Tacitus (well, the easy bits) for some time, but what kicked me into gear was the book on my shelf all about the influence of Germania on European culture and history.  I am allowed to start reading it after I write this post! Tacitus is considered the best Roman historian -- at least, he's the best we've got!  We certainly don't have everything he wrote.  Large chunks are missing from one of his longer works.  I read two really short things; a life of Agricola, Tacitus' father-in-law, and this sort of tour of the territory of Germania, which was most of Northern Europe. The largest part of Agricola's biography covers his time as governor of Roman Britain.  It has a short description of Britannia, and of how Agricola extended Roman rule right up to the Pictish territory; I think this is as far as it ever got, up to the Firth of Forth.  There are famous stories in here.  This is how we...

The Teacher of Cheops, by Albert Salvadó Literary works by Andorran writers that are translated into English are not thick on the ground, since the principality of Andorra only has about 77,000 people (according to a quick check on Wikipedia).  My town has more people than that, and it has several authors -- but I bet none of them are translated into another language.  So I lifted a page from Ann Morgan's "Year of Reading the World" list , and read Albert Salvadó, who has one novel translated into English from the original Catalan.  And it's a historical novel about ancient Egypt! This is the life story of Sedum, born into slavery, whose single goal in life is to become free and bequeath that freedom to his children.  He becomes a junior accountant for the Pharaoh Huni and becomes free while still a young man.  Surviving the intricacies of Pharaoh's court is tricky even for a junior accountant, but Sedum rises during Snefru's reign, even becoming a tuto...

Here's another of my traditional challenges: Gilion at Rose City Reader's European Challenge .  I hope this will help me knock out some of the countries in my Reading All Around the World Project!    Here are the basics: THE GIST: The idea is to read books by European authors or books set in European countries (no matter where the author comes from). The books can be anything – novels, short stories, memoirs, travel guides, cookbooks, biography, poetry, or any other genre. You can participate at different levels, but each book must be by a different author and set in a different country – it's supposed to be a tour. (See note about the UK, below.) WHAT COUNTS AS "EUROPE"?: We stick with the standard list of 50 sovereign states that fall (at least partially) within the geographic territory of the continent of Europe and/or enjoy membership in international European organizations such as the Council of Europe. This list includes the obvious (the U...

Memoirs of the Crusades, by Geoffroy de Villehardouin and Jean de Joinville I've had this kind of ancient Everyman paperback book on my shelves forever, and it's high time I got around to reading it.  The trouble is, while I love medieval literature, I find war stories -- that is, accounts of battles -- to be fairly boring, so it was hard to pick up.  But really, these memoirs were pretty fun to read and contained some entertaining moments amid the incredible misery of Crusader life.  Neither Villehardouin nor de Joinville are all that interested in recounting miseries; they skim over a lot of that.  Being in charge probably helped that part too. Both of these men were French (Franks, in their terms), and highly placed in their homelands and in the crusading hierarchies.  They served in different crusades and went to completely different locations, and neither of their crusades accomplished the stated goal of conquering Jerusalem (again). Villehardouin wa...

The Sibyl, by Pär Lagerkvist I actually read this short novel a few weeks ago, on the way to Portland, but life has moved so fast that I haven't gotten around to blogging it yet.  It was easy to forget about, since the book disappeared from our AirBnB house -- perhaps it was a lovely present for the next person to come along?  I didn't mind losing it; it was an ancient paperback that my brother had left behind, and I was going to put it into the Little Free Library anyway. The one I lost.  Not very beautiful; I won't miss it. This was a very strange novel, I thought.  Near the oracle at Delphi, presumably sometime before about 500 AD, an aged sibyl lives up on the mountain with her son.  A man comes to visit her, asking for a prophecy, and tells his story; fearing bad luck, he told a man condemned to crucifixion not to lean on his wall to rest.  The man cursed him with immortality -- we have here the Wandering Jew of legend,* who complains against ...

I can never resist this one!  Tour challenges are my favorite.  I would sign up for other continental tours if anybody offered....anyway, Rose City Reader is offering her usual , and since I was a little disappointed to only hit 12 countries in 2017, I'm going to aim for more in 2018: Welcome to the 2018 European Reading Challenge – where participants tour Europe through books.  And have a chance to win a prize. Please join us for the Grand Tour! THE GIST:   The idea is to read books by European authors or books set in European countries (no matter where the author comes from). The books can be anything – novels, short stories, memoirs, travel guides, cookbooks, biography, poetry, or any other genre. You can participate at different levels, but  each book must be by a different author and set in a different country  – it's supposed to be a tour. (See note about the UK, below) I always sign up for the Five-Star level, and then I secretly h...

Here is a whole set of books I've read from various countries in the last few weeks.  Most of them will show up in my Reading All Around the World list, and one I picked for August's Women in Translation event, which I nearly missed!  Most of these were also on my original 20 Books of Summer list (which currently stands at 17!  No way will I finish that list in the next week, but I read quite a few other books too). Lyrics Alley, by Leila Aboulela  (Sudan) : This novel of a wealthy and powerful family in 1950s Sudan is a tapestry of interwoven lives.  The patriarch, Mahmoud Bey, is a forward-looking man invested in bringing infrastructure and wealth to his country.  His son, Nur, is about to marry a cousin and they are very much in love, but a tragic accident leaves Nur paralyzed and depressed.  The family dynamics are complex and sometimes disastrous. Nur has to break through the weight of expectations and pity in order to forge a new life and id...

The Go-Between , by L. P. Hartley The first line will be familiar to all: The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. Leo, now well into his 50s, opens up a box of memories and tells the story of the summer of 1900, when he turned 13.  It was first a sort of awakening, and then a life-changing trauma.  As Leo remembers his lost innocence, he also wonders whatever became of the people involved... Leo goes to stay at a country house with a much wealthier school friend, and since Marcus' older sister is engaged to the local baronet, there is a constant social whirl around her.  She enlists Leo as a messenger in her secret romance, and it all ends in disaster. This is a really famous novel, considered a classic of the 20th century, but it mostly did not enchant me.  Its exploration of the emotional and mental life of a young teen boy did not reel me in.  It was fine, but I did not love it, and I was ready to be done well before it was ov...

Marie Grubbe , by Jens Peter Jacobsen This post is about a 19th-century Danish novel you've almost certainly never heard of.  But stick around till the end for a real surprise... J. P. Jacobsen is virtually unknown in the English-speaking world, but he was quite important in European literature.  I studied his more famous second novel, Niels Lyhne , in college, and re-read it a few years ago.   In that post, I gave a little background, and here it is again for your convenience:  ... a major classic of the late 19th century -- for literary middle-Europeans interested in Romanticism and Naturalism.  Thomas Mann and Rainer Maria Rilke considered it to be among the greatest of novels.  Henrik Ibsen and Stefan Zweig cited Jacobsen as an influence.  Both Zweig and James Joyce even wanted to learn Danish so they could read this novel in the original!  But J. P. Jacobsen remained obscure in the English-speaking literary world, and Niels Lyhne...

Girl at War , by Sara Nović In 1991, Ana is a happy, rough-and-tumble girl of ten.  She and her best friend Luka get up to all sorts of things in their beloved city of Zagreb.  When the Yugoslavian civil war breaks out, things slowly deteriorate until Ana's family is caught up directly into the war. Ten years later, Ana is a college student in New York with a lot of secrets.  She hasn't told anyone about her past, but she finds that she can't leave it behind her, so on a whim, she goes back to Croatia and hopes to find her old friend.  There, she tries to figure out how to confront and absorb the things that happened to her -- which we only discover as she re-lives them. This is a really absorbing YA novel that is part historical fiction (for an actual YA -- to me it feels immediate) and part coming-of-age, even though Ana is actually an adult.  Having been through what she has been, she had to grow up fast, but is also a bit stuck. Her story, for the mo...

Rose City Reader is hosting her annual European Reading Challenge !  Since I have a large pile of books from various countries to read, I'm signing up.  (I'm also going to do a reading map, which I haven't done in a few years, since Google has made it a coherent process again.)  Gillion says: Welcome to the 2017 European Reading Challenge – where participants tour Europe through books.  And have a chance to win a prize. Please join us for the Grand Tour! THE GIST: The idea is to read books by European authors or books set in European countries (no matter where the author comes from). The books can be anything – novels, short stories, memoirs, travel guides, cookbooks, biography, poetry, or any other genre. You can participate at different levels, but each book must be by a different author and set in a different country – it's supposed to be a tour. (See note about the UK, below) WHAT COUNTS AS "EUROPE"?: We stick with t...

If on a winter's night a traveler , by Italo Calvino Suddenly I'm turning into someone who really likes surrealist post-moderny literature.  How did that happen? If on a winter's night a traveler is one of the famous landmark postmodern novels.  Start reading it and you find that you're reading about yourself reading If on a winter's night a traveler .  First 'you' settle in to read, and then you get the first chapter of the story, but it breaks off; your book is misprinted.  Back to the bookstore you go in search of a sound copy, where you meet Ludmilla, another reader.  And every time you think you've found a whole copy of a book, it turns out to be the first chapter of a different and completely unrelated novel.  Chapters of your quest to find a whole book alternate with these first chapters, so that the entire reading experience turns into an exercise in frustrated desire (for stories, and, progressively more obviously, for women). There are s...

A Time of Gifts: On Foot to Constantinople: From the Hook of Holland to the Middle Danube , by Patrick Leigh Fermor In 1933, an 18-year-old Patrick was thrown out of school and decided that he might as well go on a walking tour of Europe.  He set off to walk to Constantinople.*  As a much older man, he sat down with his memories and diaries to write out the story in a three-part set.  This is the first volume; I have the second waiting; and the third was never finished but it was published posthumously so I will read it too. Since I cannot think of anything much more wonderful than to walk across Europe (can you?), I was instantly hooked.  And truly, I enjoyed this so much!  Fermor throws the people he met, scenery, history, art, strange stories, and all sorts of things into his book--and in many cases he's talking about a world that is now gone.  Most of this volume is spent in Germany, and Nazism is just getting started.  It has little foothold a...

My desk is inundated with books from 3 different libraries and my own shelves.  I'm going to have to continue with the mini-reviews! Fathers and Sons , by Ivan Turgenev -- I enjoyed this so much, but I finished it right when I lost energy to blog.  Now all the impressions are dim.  But here we have two young men, Arkady and his good friend Bazarov.  Bazarov has been a controversial figure since the day he stepped on to the page; he's a Nihilist who claims to believe in nothing.  He wants to smash all of society, clear the ground so that a new and better world can be built from scratch, but he has little to say about what that world should look like.  Sort of proto-communist and scientific--Bazarov likes science, though not very much.  Then he falls in love, which he can't deal with at all.   Turgenev is showing us the generation gap he experienced.  I loved it, but I can't tell you too much about it in a mini-review. Shadow on the Mounta...

My mojo is still lost, but I really miss my blogging.  I think it's just tiredness; homeschoolers mostly get really tired around about February, and I've been pulling back on online/bloggy stuff to conserve energy, I guess.  Anyway, I'm going to borrow a strategy from Ekaterina and throw out some mini-reviews, or I will never get out from under the pile of books I have!  Come to think of it, I'm pretty sure I have forgotten some by now.  I gave one to my daughter to read and now I don't know what it was. Not Without Laughter , by Langston Hughes -- I started this near the end of February, actually.  It's a great novel about a boy growing up in Kansas, and all his family members.  I enjoyed it very much and still want to read more Harlem Renaissance books, but I had to return the volumes to the library.  (That has been happening to a lot of my library books lately.) Call the Midwife , by Jennifer Worth -- The BBC series was based on the memoir, ...

Rose City Reader's 2013 Challenge actually extended to the end of this month, so as to give space for wrapping up anything that needed finishing--a great idea, I thought.  Now it's time for the final post and count.  Here are the different countries I visited.  Many of them got several books, really.  I ended up reading maybe 4 books set in Poland, for example, and I don't even know how many UK titles.  And for this purpose, I can only count one UK book, not separate titles for Scotland, England, Wales, and NI.  So here it is: Five Billion Vodka Bottles to the Moon, by Iosif Shklovsky (Ukraine) Anna Karenina, b y Lev Tolstoy (Russia)   The Middle Window, by Elizabeth Goudge (UK) Portrait of a Lady, by Hen ry James (Italy) Sister Queens, by Julia Fox (Spain)    Zaremba, or Love and the Rule of Law, by Michelle Granas (Poland) T he Red and the Black, by Stendhal (France)  The Trial, by Franz Kafka (Austro-Hungary/Czech Re...

Eirik the Red and Other Icelandic Sagas , ed. Gwyn Jones I've had this little old collection of sagas sitting on my bookshelf for years--longer than I had realized, in fact, since inside it I found a receipt from Black Oak Books (now sadly closed), dating from 1995.  I probably bought it on a date with the guy who is now my husband.  Like the Tolstoy  book I just read, it's an old hardbound Oxford World Classics title from the 1960s, very small and engaging, but with the price cut out of the book jacket. This is a collection of  eight sagas about Icelandic people--mostly their feuds--and one "saga of times past."  The historical sagas are careful-sounding records that give lots of detail about exactly where farms were and just who owned them, and the stories contained in them all sound like the Hatfields and the McCoys.  A feud will start with something small and escalate very fast, until it all ends in someone's manor going up in flames with everyone...