Howling Frog Books

I'm a few days early, but I'm going to wrap things up now. The Year of Feminist Classics Challenge: I read nearly all the selections, but opted out of God Dies by the Nile, The Second Sex , and the academic anthology (I looked at it!). I'm pretty satisfied with that even though I don't get to tick all the boxes, but the real point is that I got to read a lot of great books and enjoyed them very much. A Vindication of the Rights of Women by Mary Wollestonecraft So Long a Letter by Mariama Ba The Subjection of Women by John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor Mill A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf God Dies by the Nile by Nawal Saadawi The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf Ain’t I a Woman? by bell hooks Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism Anthology Gender Trouble by Judith Butler Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde Victo...

On Her Majesty's Secret Service , by Ian Fleming 10: Pick A Method: Pick a method for finding a book from the choices listed below (used in previous versions of the challenge). Random Bestseller. Go to Random.org and, using the True Random Number Generator, enter the number 1950 for the min. and 2010 for the max. and then hit generate. Then go to this site and find the year that Random.org generated for you and click on it. Then find the bestseller list for the week that would contain your birthday for that year. Choose one of the bestsellers from the list that comes up, read it and write about it. I wanted to do this option just for fun, and ended up with the NYT best seller list for November 3, 1963. There were several neat books on the list (plus a Peanuts collection), but my library didn't have most of them. Then there was this James Bond novel. I'm not a big fan of Bond movies, and I've never read any of the books, so I thought maybe I should, in ...

Pnin , by Vladimir Nabokov 1: Staff Member’s Choice: Go to a bookstore or library that has a “Staff Picks” section. Read one of the picks from that section. I did the last option first and the first option last! I had to cheat a bit on this one; the bookstore in my city doesn't have a Staff Picks section, but the library has a couple of troughs in the front with fiction and non-fiction. It's not exactly a Staff Picks section, but it's all I've got. I found Pnin in the fiction trough. Pnin is not exactly a novel, nor is it quite a collection of short stories. The stories were originally published serially in The New Yorker , and written as a sort of antidote to the difficult work of writing Lolita . Professor Pnin is comical, hapless, confused, and noble. Like many ex-patriate Russians of his generation, he mourns a Russia that is completely gone, and he spends years searching for a place he can feel at home. Once he seems to reach his goal, it looks...

Plain Kate , by Erin Bow 3: Blogger’s Choice: Find a “Best Books Read” post from a favorite blogger. Read a book from their list. I looked at Bookshelves of Doom's best books of 2010 list and chose Plain Kate . I have to say, this is the best YA book I've read in a long time. The writing is just wonderful, the story is great, the characters are real--it's much better than your average YA title. It's something of a fairy tale, with a Slavic feel to it. I don't want to go into the whole complicated story, because I wouldn't do it justice. Just trust me here. 10/5/11: Plain Kate just won the Canadian Children’s Literature Award! Now you have another reason to read it.

The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science, by Richard Holmes 4: Critic’s Choice: Find a “Best of the Year” list from a magazine, newspaper or professional critic. Read a book from their Top 10 list. The New York Times Book R eview put Age of Wonder on their Top Ten List for 2009 . It's a very long book, and suffers from the flaw (common to modern non-fiction) of exhaustiveness. Otherwise, though, it's a very interesting book that covers an amazing period in scientific development. The late 18th- and early 19th-century era saw great developments in astronomy and chemistry. Botanists and zoologists began to go out around the world on collecting trips. People started to seriously experiment with electricity and chemicals. Everyone was talking about the implications of scientific discoveries; the Romantic poets wrote essays and poems about the new questions people asked. Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein , which aske...

The Pedant and the Shuffly , by John Bellairs 6: Book Seer Pick: Go to The Book Seer and follow the instructions there. Read a book from the list it generates for you. I had just finished reading John Bellairs' The Face in the Frost , so I entered that title in hopes of finding a similarly fun Gothic writer, but all the Book Seer returned was a list of Bellairs titles. I've read all of them, except for The Pedant and the Shuffly , which I've always kind of wanted to read, so I got hold of that. It's quite a short little oddball fairy-tale type story--the closest thing I can think of is James Thurber's The 13 Clocks . The evil wizard Snodrog the Pedant has a habit of collaring people who pass by his house, whereupon he uses his horrible logic to convince them they don't exist. They either disappear or become Flimsies, stained handkerchiefs forced to do his evil bidding. Then one day his designated victim brings a Shuffly along, and the fun begins. I was a l...

Elegance , by Kathleen Tessaro 8: Which Book Pick: Go to Which Book and use the software to generate a list of books. Read a book from that list. I asked for a fun book and this is what I got. Sort of chick-lit, it's about Louise, who is unhappy about her sad-sack life and her empty marriage. She finds an old 50's book titled A Guide to Elegance ( evidently a real book !) and starts to revamp her life. As she pulls herself together, she has to start confronting her issues--and there are a lot of them, starting with her husband, who is in denial that he's gay. Louise has her ups and downs as she tries to straighten out her life with the occasional aid of her trusty book on elegance. I liked the book OK and it had some really really funny bits, but I was a bit surprised at how many issues Louise had to dig up and deal with. She's a mess, and that's kind of unexpected for the way it started out. So it wasn't as light as I had been hoping for. (Al...

Seeing Voices: a Journey into the World of the Deaf , by Oliver Sacks 5: Blurb Book: Find a book that has a blurb on it from another author. Read a book by the author that wrote the blurb. The last book I read for this challenge was The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time , which had a blurb from Oliver Sacks on it, so I figured I would find an Oliver Sacks book for the next book in the challenge. I always enjoy his books, so I had to find one I've never read! Seeing Voices is a short chronicle of deafness and how sign languages have come to be understood as languages in their own right. The book was published in 1989, just as deaf people were really getting going as a group; the book culminates at Gallaudet University (a deaf college) in Washington DC, where thousands of students protest in favor of a deaf university president, and achieve their goal. Sacks talks a lot about the newest neuroscience research into deafness and sign language, and it's fascinating. B...

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time , by Mark Haddon 9: LibraryThing Pick: Go to LibraryThing’s Zeitgeist page . Look at the lists for 25 Most Reviewed Books or Top Books and pick a book you’ve never read. Read the book. (Yes … you can click on MORE if you have to.) I picked this title from the 25 Most Reviewed Books list, and yep, it was the only one I hadn't read that I was willing to read. I'd heard lots of good things about this book, but had never felt like I particularly wanted to read it. And it turned out that I liked the book a lot. It's a novel written from the perspective of a 15-year-old boy with fairly severe autism as he tries to solve the mystery of who killed his neighbor's dog. His naivete and inability to understand the world (which he finds overwhelming, scary, and illogical) bring you in. It's easy to be fond of Christopher. At the same time, it's easy to understand that his parents--who are very ordinary people--find ...

The Russian's World: Life and Language , by Genevra Gerhart The Twentieth Wife , by Indu Sundaresan These are both for the Take a Chance Challenge #2: Loved One’s Choice: Ask a loved one to pick a book for you to read. Well, my mom and I trade books all the time, and my husband wouldn't recommend anything, so I did something a little different. I posted on facebook that if anyone recommended a book to me, I would pick one and read it by the end of March. I got lots of great recommendations back, and several of them are on my TBR list, but two I got right away. My sister-in-law, Katya, recommended The Russian's World --and she should know, since she is Russian. Then there is The Twentieth Wife , recommended by Meghan, my friend in homeschooling and Bollywood ventures. Katya was actually horrified to find that I had to make do with the first edition of The Russian's World , from 1974. She refuses to endorse it, since she's never read it and it's 40 years o...

Are Women Human? by Dorothy Sayers This choice was generated by "What Shall I Read Next?" , a website that will recommend books to you based on the last thing you read. I entered War in Heaven, by Charles Williams, and this short book of Sayers essays was on the list, which consisted mainly of titles by Inklings. The title is, of course, a bit ironic. There are only two essays in the book, both asserting that women are simply human beings, just as men are, and that therefore they should be treated no differently. Each has personhood as an individual, and assigning classifications is utterly pointless except for the most transient purposes. The essays are nicely witty and pointed in the usual Sayers style, and very worth reading. I'd never heard of them before, so I'm glad that the Take a Chance challenge pointed me to the book. Maybe for my next choice for this challenge, I ought to try to move out of England!

The Mystic Grail: the Challenge of the Arthurian Quest, by John Matthews This is my first 'Take a Chance' book, and it was #10 on the list: "R andom Book Selection. Go to the library. Position yourself in a section such as Fiction, Non-Fiction, Mystery, Children. Then write down random directions for yourself (for example, third row, second shelf, fifth book from right). Follow your directions and see what book you find. Check that book out of the library, read it and then write about it." I picked that option because most of the rest require you to pick the title before you get to the library, and I was already there. I went to the non-fiction section and decided to go to the second-to-last aisle, left-hand shelf, secon d-to-last section. I thought I would choose the smallest book in that section, because I knew it was going to be history and I didn't want to get a gigantic tome. Good thing too, because it turned out to be the section on the modern British roya...

Here's a funny one that appeals to the part of me that always chooses a mystery present instead of stealing a known one at a gift exchange, even though I lose out every time . The Take a Chance Challenge gives you 10 different ways to randomly choose a book to read: The concept of the challenge is to take chances with your reading by finding books to read in unusual or random ways. I’ve listed 10 different ways to find books below. Feel free to complete at many as you want. However, anyone completing all 10 challenges by December 31, 2011 will be entered in a prize drawing to win a book of their choice from Amazon. The challenge will run from January 1, 2011 until December 31, 2011. Crossover books from other challenges is fine. You can read books in any format. On January 1, 2011, I will post pages for each of the 10 challenges so you can link up your completed posts. The 2011 Challenges 1: Staff Member’s Choice: Go to a bookstore or library that has a “Staff Pick...