Howling Frog Books

Shopping for a Better Country: Essays by Josip Novakovich Josip Novakovic* is originally from Croatia--well, when he lived there it was Yugoslavia--and he has lived in the US and various other places in Europe since college.  These essays are collected from many years of writing, and though they certainly feature exilic themes and travel, they are about all sorts of things, really. I like the way Novakovic writes; matter-of-fact and taking everything as it comes.  I liked that he consciously refused to judge countries based on short visits. He writes about his mother and his family--he has a son who plays the cello--about people he has met on travels, and about the difficulties of Russian airports or traveling to Croatia during and after the war there. A couple of bits I liked: An old man near my hometown claimed that he had no need to travel.  He had lived in eight countries and in one house.  He remained faithful to the previous regimes, and thus felt like...

Oops, this post got a bit lost.  For the Dewey Readathon I thought I'd try to spend some time on a couple of essays.  I wound up choosing a giant book of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s writings and speeches, and read several.  They were excellent, but now it is far too long since I read them!  This is just a note for the Essay Challenge.

  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of...

Carlyle in 1848 "On History," by Thomas Carlyle A little while ago I was thinking I would try to read some old, classic-type essays for my Essay Challenge.  I picked out a little Shelley, a little Browning, I'm thinking about Coleridge....and then I thought "Aha!  I will read something by the grand-daddy of them all, the most Victorian writer that ever was: Carlyle."  Carlyle was so respected, so beloved (so controversial!), all those Victorians just thought he was super.  I decided that I would figure this out and read some Carlyle, so I checked a "Selected Works" volume out and picked out a few things to try. I read a short early essay called "On History," which is about...history.  Why we should study it, who should write it, how excellent it is that history is currently a popular subject of study (in 1830, that is).   History is the most important kind of writing, and yet it is impossible to write an accurate history, because we c...

The Chemical History of a Candle , by Michael Faraday First I have to tell you about my copy of this book.  It's a discard from one of the local elementary school libraries and it's pretty old.  I must have gotten it from my mom, and who knows where she picked it up.  When I started reading it, there was a slip of paper pasted inside the cover that says, "This book purchased under the National Defense Education Act (NDEA) Science Pilot Project for 1962-63 school year."   How cool is that?  Sputnik gave me a book! Michael Faraday, the great scientist, lived and worked at the Royal Institution for most of his adult life.  In 1825 he started an annual Christmas tradition of giving a series of lectures for children.  This tradition continues today and you can even watch them online now .  The Chemical History of a Candle was one such series, and was transcribed and printed in 1861. It's a neat little book to read.  Faraday was clearly b...

The Souls of Black Folk , by W. E. B. DuBois  In 1903, W. E. B. DuBois published this collection of essays to portray the character of black people in America and the conditions they struggled against.  He says: Herein lie buried many things which if read with patience may show the strange meaning of being black here in the dawning of the Twentieth Century.  This meaning is not without interest to you, Gentle Reader; for the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line. DuBois calls the color line "the Veil," meaning that the real lives of black people are lived behind a veil that ensures that white people will never see their true feelings.  Each chapter is headed by a verse from a white poet and a phrase of music from the oldest black songs, in order to show that the races have equal artistic genius.  DuBois has a lot to say about old songs, especially the ones he considers to be most authentic. The early essays are set as response...