Howling Frog Books

 The Let Them Theory, by Mel Robbins This was my book club book!  I think we all agree that while the book could easily be half the length, the thesis is an important one that is particularly useful to people like us -- women socialized to make everyone else happy (whether they like it or not).  Also, you can really tell that Mel Robbins is a motivational speaker with a podcast.  Which I might listen to. All it boils down to is -- let people do what they're going to do, and don't worry about it so much.  Then decide what it is that you need to do, and do that. So if (as in her example) your teen kid wants to go for tacos in a tuxedo in the rain without a coat, just let him do that without fussing.  If people are judgemental, that's okay.  The only person you can control is yourself, so what are you going to do with yourself? Useful interludes include: What if I'm feeling envious of everybody else?  What if my life is a disaster?  What if some...

 Disobedient Women: How a Small Group of Faithful Women Exposed Abuse, Brought Down Powerful Pastors and Ignited an Evangelical Reckoning, by Sarah Stankorb I've been paying quite a lot of attention to the evangelical world for the last year or so, so this title naturally caught my attention.  Stankorb, a journalist, grew up on the edges of this world, and chronicles the efforts of many people over a long time to bring attention to problems of ecclesiastical abuse.  Evangelicals, in their efforts to build parallel institutions that would allow Christian families to live largely in bubbles insulated from the dangerous outside world, didn't really build in any safeguards -- after all, this was supposed to be their safe space.  Since every institution (schools, businesses, churches, Little League teams, whatever) is vulnerable to predators who seek to use it for access to victims, safeguards are always important.  And in these parallel institutions, children were t...

 Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging, by Sebastian Junger I heard about this book and it turned out to be pretty fascinating.  Also short!  It's about two things: PTSD and belonging in society.  Those two things have a lot to do with each other. Why is it that colonial Americans so often ran off to join Native American people?  They actually made laws disallowing it!  Why do so many people who have lived through war -- both soldiers and civilians -- miss the war when it's over?   Junger talks about the Blitz, Sarajevo, and other locations. Junger's theme is summarized in his introduction: ...why -- for many people -- war feels better than peace and hardship can turn out to be a great blessing and disasters are sometimes remembered more fondly than weddings or tropical vacations.  Humans don't mind hardship, in fact they thrive on it; what they mind is not feeling necessary.  Modern society has perfected the art of making people not feel...

  Selling the Dream: The Billion-Dollar Industry Bankrupting Americans, by Jane Marie This is an expose of MLMs -- multi-level marketing schemes -- which are pyramid schemes that keep just within the letter of the law.   You know them: Amway, Avon, Mary Kay, Arbonne, Doterra, Lularoe, and many many others.  Some are more respectable than others, but they all promise you the ability to run your own business from home, be independent, and make money at your own pace.  The trouble is that the product they're selling, whatever it is, is not where the profit lies; that's in your downline.  The more people you recruit to be sellers, the more money you'll make, but as the layers add up, the money runs out.  The people at the top make plenty, but you won't; in fact, you'll probably lose money and end up with a basement full of product you can't move. Marie dissects the biggest MLM companies, analyzing how they attract people (predominantly moms looking for fle...

 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...

 Here's some more November reading!  I'm thinking about going back to single-book posts, but on the other hand I'm having trouble finding time to write even these quickie riffles through several books at a time.  What do you think?     The Canceling of the American Mind: Cancel Culture Undermines Trust and Threatens Us All -- But There is a Solution , by Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott:   I've been looking forward to this book for a long time!  The title is a riff on Lukianoff's last book, co-written with Jonathan Haidt, and the two titles work together.  This time, Lukianoff is teamed up with a Gen Z writer, Rikki Schlott, to bring in a younger perspective.  The thesis here: that cancel culture (which yes, exists) is a manifestation of false ideas discussed in the earlier book, and which serve to make us less mentally healthy and less able to function as a society.  The ideas: Fragility: that people are fragile and need comfort; they...

First off, happy Halloween!  Happy Witch Week!!  I hope everything is suitably spooky in your neighborhood. Wow, I feel like I've done quite a bit of reading lately....but what I have not done is finish anything much.  I think I am 30 - 50% through ten or so books!  There are books all over my coffee table; it's a disaster. How Democracies Die, by Levitsky and Ziblatt  I Served the Kind of England, by Bohumil Hrabal The Cancelling of the American Mind, by Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott Overreach, by Owen Matthews (oh my gosh so heavy-duty) The Lost 116 Pages, by Don Bradley A Land, by Janetta Hawkes Sexy but Psycho, by Dr Jessica Taylor  (fascinating and I think goes a bit too far) London Diary, by James Boswell  (why yes he has picked up an STD, again) Les Miserables, by Victor Hugo Junk Film: Why Bad Movies Matter, by Katharine Coldiron  (I love this book) So, I'm in kind of a ridiculous place right now.  But here are the three books I'...

 My semester is over and I'm on summer break!  And the weather has been absolutely fantastic, not too hot, so I've been trying to spend a lot of time outside and hiking.  My goal is to do plenty of that this summer.  I've also read quite a bit in the last couple of weeks, and here is some of it, but it doesn't include the Louise Penny binge I went on of three novels in a row; they were good too! #antisemitism: Coming of Age During the Resurgence of Hate, by Samantha A. Vinokor-Meinrath : A survey and analysis of GenZ Jewish kids and how they feel about their Judaism and the rising incidence of antisemitism.  Most of these kids have GenX parents (like me) who grew up with very little antisemitism in the US, and I was shocked at how it's just common now for GenZ kids to have experienced, at the very least, comments from friends and schoolmates.                  A Place for Everything: The Curious History of Alphabe...

 ...to read lots of books?  That doesn't rhyme.  I have to do it right. ...to be a robin lightly dressed, concocting soup inside my nest! Mix it once, mix it twice, mix that chicken soup with rice! No, actually, I'm not making soup, I'm reading books.  Quite a few books, so here at the halfway point I'm doing a post.  The Marquis' Secret, by George MacDonald:   I'm a bit of a sucker for these sort-of translated 1980s Bethany House versions of George MacDonald's very Victorian Scottish romances.  This one was originally The Marquis of Lossie , a sequel to Malcolm.  Malcolm, a poor fisher-boy, is the true heir to the estate of Lossie, but his half-sister Florimel (a definite Faerie Queene reference!) thinks she is, and so he becomes her groom in hopes of finding a way to break the news to her without ruining her life.  Confusion and hijinks ensue; Malcolm despairs of influencing his sister for good; and also he falls in love.  Can this ...

I had a nice time reading DWJ, and I read some other things too.  On the whole March was not a big reading month, which is a shame, but I got lots of other great stuff done. The Merlin Conspiracy : such a good one.  I paid a lot of attention this time to how intense Roddy is.  She knows she's got hold of something really important, and so she is intense about it -- which turns a lot of people off.  Some are inclined to dismiss her because she's so worked up, which isn't fair; but also Roddy in her turn dismisses anything she doesn't already understand, which also isn't fair.  The whole thing is a masterclass in how not to communicate. The Homeward Bounders :  I took this along on our trip!  So funny, and so tragic. The Crown of Dalemark : one of my favorites, so I read it more often than the other Dalemark books, but Spellcoats is another favorite. Minor Arcana , by Diana Wynne Jones: I mostly read this one for "The Master" -- one of the stranger sho...