Howling Frog Books

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...

  All in Her Head: The Truth and Lies Early Medicine Taught Us About Women's Bodies and Why It Matters Today, by Elizabeth Comen Elizabeth Comen is an oncologist specializing in breast cancer, and as she worked with her patients, she came to realize just how badly our medical system is set up -- for everyone, but particularly for women.  Looking back into history, she collected evidence and traced stories illustrating how attitudes and beliefs have come down to us and are still hanging around. Dr. Comen works through chapters dedicated to systems of the human body, starting with skin, bones, and muscles, right through to nerves, hormones, and reproduction.    (While the entire book is enraging, this guarantees that the intensity will ramp up and the  most enraging material will probably be at the end.)  Readers will probably be familiar with quite a few of the stories already -- Ignaz Semmelweis' failed attempts to get doctors to wash their hands, the horri...

 The Faithful Spy, by John Hendrix It's a graphic novel biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, aimed at a YA audience!   While this story culminates in Bonhoeffer's involvement in plots to kill Hitler, and his subsequent imprisonment, it's not the sole focus of the book.  This is a biography that aims to give a full picture of Bonhoeffer's life, complete with his childhood and family, later studies, travel, and efforts to start a new kind of pastor training. The art is gorgeous -- complex and layered, but done only in scarlet, teal, and black.  Visually, this book is wonderful, but it does suffer from the size; I think it would be better in a larger size, which may have been too expensive to print or something.  The print is tiny, and I often struggled to read it. Highly recommended for an excellent angle on Germany in World War II* and a fascinating treatment of Bonhoeffer's life, plus the art.  It was really good. But I wish it was printed larger! *Alth...

 Storyland: A New Mythology of Britain, by Amy Jeffs This caught my eye when my mom and I spent a couple of hours in Foyles; I was kind of intrigued.  What do you mean, a new mythology?  So I got hold of a copy and found out.  It's a couple of years old now so this will all be old news to any British readers; Chris at Calmgrove probably beat me to this ages ago. Jeffs has taken all those old stories about the founding of Britain and British history -- from Geoffrey of Monmouth, and Wace, and Layamon, and such -- and told them as short stories or episodes.  She's had a wonderful time carving lino prints to illustrate the stories, too.   So we start with giants installing Stonehenge on an Irish mountain, and Brutus bringing his Trojans, and the Scotti, and so on.  Then there's Weland the Smith, King Leir and Cordelia, the origin of the Stone of Scone, Deirdre in Ireland, and the two dragons.  We move into the Arthurian cycle, especially stories...

 The Black Arrow: A Tale of the Two Roses, by Robert Louis Stevenson  It's Spin Day!  Did you read your book? The Black Arrow was fun.  It's set -- as the subtitle says -- during the Wars of the Roses, a chaotic and confusing time when two branches of the English nobility fought over which would control the throne.  Everybody else fought on one side or the other, and quite a few switched sides on the regular, according to who looked like winning.  This lasted decades, in patches, and was essentially a series of civil wars that took up much of the 1400s.  It ended with the death of Richard III in 1485 and the accession of Henry Tudor, a Lancastrian who married Elizabeth of York to unite the two branches.  But in this story, Richard III is a young man.  Strictly speaking he isn't even the Duke of Gloucester yet, but RLS makes him duke a little prematurely to avoid confusion. Richard Shelton, called Dick, is a teenage orphan in the care of Sir...

 How the Girl Guides Won the War, by Janie Hampton This was one of the titles that intrigued me on our last book-binge day in London.  As a former Girl Scout myself, I had to be interested in this!  How could that possibly be? Hampton confesses in her introduction that she meant to write about how awful the Girl Guides were, so hearty and colonial and tragically unhip, but was then surprised to discover that they were in fact amazing .  She doesn't cover just British Guides, but girls in many countries, and though she ranges throughout Guide history since its inception, she mostly focuses on World War II.  This makes it kind of all over the place, but it's always fascinating to read about what these girls and women accomplished! One thing to remember is that for a long time, Guiding reached up well into early adulthood and often functioned as further education back when many girls left school at 14 or 16.  You could be a Guide into your twenties, and lead ...

 Unruly: A History of England's Kings and Queens, by David Mitchell You may be familiar with the UK comedy duo Mitchell and Webb?  They're probably best known in the US by this sketch .  The one who asks, "Are we the baddies?"  is David Mitchell, and besides being a very funny comedian, he is also a history nerd, and he wrote this comedic take on the kings and queens of England, at least up to the end of the Tudors.  It's quite long enough as it is, without bringing in modernity. Mitchell is interested in the questions that humans have been working out in real time for the past several thousand years -- how do we decide who's going to be in charge, and how do we transfer power?  What is a king anyway?  So while he's narrating, amusingly, the list of kings, he's bringing out how people thought of their kings and what they did about it.   For example.  Pre-Norman Conquest, the king's sons were all eligible for the crown, and the barons wo...

 The Hard Way: Discovering the Women Who Walked Before Us, by Susannah Walker This book arrived for me while I was gone on the Ridgeway, and that's what it's about!  Sort of.  I was kind of confused about the title at first but eventually Walker moves from the Ridgeway to focus on the much less known Hard Way or Harrow Way, and it is not easy to trace.  Anyway, I helped to back the publishing of this book, pretty much on a whim, so I got a copy and my name in the back.  You can look me up. Walker seems to be about my age, and spent much of her 20s walking and even living on the Ridgeway, before settling down into marriage and a child and suddenly no more walking.  Or at least, it became far more difficult to get out to anyplace as inaccessible as the Ridgeway, which is not stroller-friendly and has hardly anyplace to park and leave the car, and she spent a lot of time thinking about how women get pulled into domesticity once they have kids, in a way that do...

 The Light Ages: The Surprising Story of Medieval Science, by Seb Falk You know I always love a good book about how the Middle Ages were way cooler than you thought.  This one came out at almost the exact same time as another book called The Bright Ages , so there was definitely something in the air that year.  This book, however, is specifically about certain aspects of scientific progress during the Middle Ages, especially astronomy, and it constructs its narrative around a monastery in St. Albans, which is just north of London. We start with a very grabby story, about how in the 1950s a scholar found an old hand-written astronomical treatise at Cambridge and thought, for fairly good reasons, that it might possibly be a holograph by Chaucer.  The manuscript described an instrument that was not an astrolabe...what even was it?   And from there we set off to St. Albans and a tour of medieval calendar math, clocks, universities, astronomical prediction (with...

 It's nothing but fun around here, as you can see by these very cheery selections.  Maybe I should try to read heartwarming Christmas tales for a bit?   Sexy But Psycho: How the Patriarchy Uses Women's Trauma Against Them , by Dr Jessica Taylor:   This is a UK book, and focuses on UK practices, though it's still relevant to the US.  But just so you know, she uses a lot of NHS terminology that I didn't understand at first, such as sectioning , which seems to be holding a patient for psychiatric reasons without their consent.  Anyway... Taylor's theme is that she has seen way too many women shoved into psychiatric diagnoses and  medication because they were upset about the abuse that they had suffered.  Say you get a teen girl who has been through some horrific abuse, and instead of receiving therapy and advocacy, she is told that she is making a lot of it up and has BPD.  Her distress is interpreted as mental illness instead of a normal perso...

It's Spin day!  I finished my book in good time, and it was a very interesting read.   Boswell's London Journal, 1762 - 1763, by James Boswell, ed Frederick A. Pottle James Boswell was the son of the laird of Auchinleck, and he was on the outs with his father.  Lord Auchinleck wanted his son to study law and generally act like a responsible adult, and James wanted to live an exciting life in London, maybe join the Guards -- as long as he didn't have to actually leave London and do anything military -- hang out with literary types, and write poetry.  So they made a deal: Jamie's dad gave him an allowance that was enough to live on as a gentleman, but not enough for living large, and let him spend some time in London to see how he liked it.  (This was pretty nice of Dad, considering that a couple of years before, young Jamie had announced a desire to become a Catholic monk and then ran off to London for a few months of serious debauchery.  The Laird mus...

 Here are some titles from my official TBR list that I just haven't written about yet!  Mexican Gothic, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia : I saved this one for October, for an official RIP read.  And wow, this is a spooky story!  It's the 1950s, and Noem í is a debutante out for a good time in Mexico City.  Her father sends her down to the countryside to check on her cousin Catalina, who married last year in a romantic whirl.  Noem í arrives at a classic Gothic scene: a mouldering family mansion on a misty mountain, and....this is a strange place.  The silver mine that gave the Doyle family their wealth has been closed down for years, the house is festooned with mold, and everyone is very strange.  Catalina seems to be ill.  Her husband Virgil is creepy, but not as creepy as his elderly father is.  Just one family member, Francis, seems friendly, if shy and something of a weak character.  As Noemi unravels the dark family history and the se...

 I think I'm a bit behind on my reading; if we count my Spin title, I've now read 14 books of summer and have six to go, which isn't terrible.  But I'm going to need to buckle down a bit in August.  And I had this month off!  In August I have to go back to work!  I've admittedly been rather lazy, pottering about, working on crafty projects, and watching too many YouTube videos (but stitching while I did so!).  I've also done some day trips and hikes, and enjoyed air conditioning a whole lot.  And I've been getting a bit involved with the local public library!   How has your summer been going? Summerbook #9: Notes From the Burning Age , by Claire North :  Centuries after the apocalypse, humans live in a carefully balanced world built from the ruins of the old one.  At some point during a destructive world war, chimaerical monsters -- kakuy -- arose from the depths and wreaked destruction upon humankind in revenge for their hapless de...

Here we are with some bonus reading.... The Scouring of the White Horse , by Thomas Hughes : History? Novel?  What is this thing?  This 1859 publication is a novelization of Hughes' actual attendance at the 1857 scouring of the Uffington White Horse, which also serves as a sort of summary of what was then known about the chalk figure, and the history of its maintenance.  Reading it was a slightly odd experience because I thought it was supposed to be a simple account of the customs around the figure, commissioned by the heads of the nearby towns, but it reads like a novel, complete with the narrator deciding to take his annual two-week holiday at a friend's farm and falling in love with the friend's sister. Apparently Thomas Hughes, better known as the author of Tom Brown's School Days , came from the area around Uffington.  Maybe this explains it.  In the novel, while he's staying with his friend, he attends this scouring event and gets talking with an antiqua...

 Happy July!  I had an unexpectedly busy week so I'm a couple of days late but who cares.  One thing I did was spend an afternoon at the county board of supervisors' budget meeting, lobbying for them not to cut the library budget (which they already did last year).  It would have brought the largest branches in the system down to three days a week.  To our great surprise, it actually worked and the board decided not to enact the cuts -- but only for one year.   We also held an unexpected early birthday party, due to various factors such as the presence of the person involved and another friend being present from out of town.  So I spent a lot of time thinking about food -- a thing I don't do a lot any more now that I'm an empty nester.  And now, on to the books!  Actually, I have been too lazy.  There are too many books here for just one post.  I'm going to put my Books of Summer here, and do another post on the books I've read...