Howling Frog Books

I started this post meaning to participate in Fanda's Kaleidoscope 2014 Even t, but then I realized that I was terrible at figuring out what to say in the categories.  So this post is actually a random mishmash of 2014 favorites. Looking over the past year, I had forgotten how many great fantastic lovely books I had read!  I can't really pick just five or ten.  So here are my favorites from this year. A Time of Gifts    --Who wouldn't want to walk across Europe? The Quest of the Holy Grail   --This was still my favorite Arthurian read.  I love its bizarre stories. Roadside Picnic and Tale of the Troika   --Great SF from behind the Iron Curtain, and pretty surreal stuff. The Conjure-Man Dies  --The Harlem Renaissance challenge led me to this neat mystery. Eugene Onegin (readalong with installments)   --I loved this poem; having a different translation and a second reading helped a lot too. ...

I haven't gotten around to answering the monthly Classics Club meme question lately, so I thought I'd try to jump back in.  December's question: Let’s talk about children’s classics! Did you read any classic works as a child? What were your favorites? If not, have you or will you try any classic children’s literature in the future? (We’re aware children often read at an adult level. Please feel free to share adult OR children’s classics that you treasured in childhood OR children’s works that you’ve recently fallen for.) Did I read any classic works as a child?  Well, yes.  My mother is a children's librarian and storyteller.  Our house was stuffed and overflowing with children's literature--a large percentage of them were library discards, so they were often pretty beat-up even before we got to them.  I was fairly resistant to reading anything that said CLASSIC on it, but I was also unaware that most of the books in the house probably counted in th...

That's my new term of venery for several reviews at once.  The credit goes to my husband, but I think it's pretty good, yeah?  I have 9 books here in front of me and a couple more ebooks that I have read, and I will never catch up unless I just throw them all out at once, so here goes. Two African Classics :  both of these are on my CC list and come from a list of the 12 best African books of the 20th century (as selected by a jury). Sleepwalking Land , by Mia Couto -- As Mozambique is torn by civil war, a young boy and an old man take refuge in a burned-out bus.  They find a set of notebooks written by one of the passengers, and start reading them aloud.  For each chapter about the lost pair, there is a notebook, which narrates the surreal journey of a young man looking to become a naparama warrior.  I loved the set-up, but it got pretty crude at times and I wound up kind of disappointed.  I can think of several African novels I've read that I wo...

Few booky bloggery types have missed the recent rash of articles about reading; each one gets a response and some discussion.  Most of the pieces seem to be about how readers are just doing it wrong .  Everyone has a different complaint, but the main point is that you are all reading wrongly and you should stop it.  A few examples: Charlemagne is skeptical of these arguments. If you're an adult, you should be embarrassed if you read YA books, because YA books are fundamentally not deep, gritty, or ambiguous enough for adults.  They are too pleasant and tidy.  (On this theory, Nicholas Sparks is deep, because his novels are for adults.) On the other hand, YA books are probably too violent for actual teens and may encourage them to be violent.  (From which it follows that the 70s and 80s must have seen a huge rise in teen incest and axe murder--after all, every kid I knew read almost nothing but VCA and/or Stephen King.) Science fiction has way t...