Howling Frog Books

 The Observant Walker: Wild Food, Nature and Hidden Treasures on the Pathways of Britain, by John Wright Oh, this book was a delight.  As we know, I'm now a devotee of the Ridgeway, and so I've been collecting books about walking in Britain (and other places) for a while.  There are a lot of them, so I'm not planning to be exhaustive!  I actually got this book on the Ridgeway hike, when we were staying in Wallingford.  There was a bookshop, and I asked what she would recommend if I liked books about walking in nature, but I don't like Robert MacFarlane . That stumped her a little bit but she recommended John Wright, and him I like! Wright is all about the plants.  He likes to walk around and drive everyone else crazy by spending all his time carefully studying the plants and fungi and lichens he sees.  (And if the lichen is in London, he'll lie in the gutter to get a good photo.)   He and Tolkien would have a grand time standing in one plac...

 Did I do it?  Did I hit my goal of 20 books by September 1st?  I did, and also I've been very busy and unable to finish this post.  So here we go... Summerbook #17: The Way to the Sea , by Caroline Crampton:   Crampton does a podcast I listen to ( Shedunnit ), so when she wrote this book I wanted to find a copy, but it was only published in the UK.  It's all about the Thames estuary - the bit between London and the sea -- which is where Crampton grew up, on a boat half the time.  She actually starts at the source of the Thames, but covers from there to Tower Bridge in the first chapter.  After that she gets down to business and covers history, the state of the river, ecology, and throws in bits of her own memory.  People have tended to ignore the estuary or use it as a place to dump things they don't want to look at, from actual garbage to sewage treatment and power stations.  These days the shipping is there too; an absolutely massive...

 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...

 I've been split between really quite heavy-duty books and incredibly light cotton-candy books.  I've read four Three Investigators novels in the last couple of weeks -- ones near the end of the series, so not as good as the earlier titles, but still fun.   I could tell the last one was different from the cover, and it turned out to be one of some stories originally written in German -- the Three Investigators were evidently hugely popular in Germany, and somebody wrote some sequels that come off more as fanfiction than anything else, I thought.  Anyway, on with the February reads: The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America, by Timothy Snyder -- it took me a long time to work my way through this one.  Snyder took on the job of explaining the underpinnings of Russian (Putin's) political ideology and policy to Americans.  It's a very tough job, because to a Westerner it's fairly incomprehensible.  Snyder then moves on to explaining Russia's acti...

 Hi ho!  I've been doing a lot of reading, but much of it is pretty heavy-duty long stuff and I won't be done right away.  (And I also indulged in two Barbara Michaels gothics -- fun!)  Here are the books I read in the first half of February:   Dark Archives: A Librarian's Investigation Into the Science and History of Books Bound in Human Skin , by Megan Rosenbloom --  a bit macabre, and an interesting read.  Not all books claiming to be bound in human skin actually are, and Rosenbloom's research group is able to do a test that confirms what kind of leather a binding is made from.  (You can't do a DNA test; the tanning process destroys all DNA.)  Most of the books in the English-speaking world were made by 19th-century doctors who were doing autopsies or dissections anyway, and lifted some skin while they were at it.  So Rosenbloom kind of goes all over the place, talking about the development of medical ethics and all sorts of things....

 Lotharingia: A Personal History of Europe's Lost Country, by Simon Winder I have finished Simon Winder's fantastic trilogy about European history, and I love it so much that I will definitely be re-reading one of these days.  I previously read and wrote about Germania and Danubia with great joy.  Simon Winder is just right up my alley -- he pretty much just goes out and frolics around barefoot through the meadows of central European history, and his enjoyment comes through beautifully.  He knows that it's impossible to get a real handle on a thousand years or so of matter, and so he picks and chooses his favorite bits, and we just come along for the ride. Lotharingia is about the much-fought-over stripe of Europe that covers eastern France, western Germany, some of Belgium and the Netherlands, and Luxembourg.  It ends where Switzerland starts, pretty much.  Charlemagne's heirs divided the massive empire into three parts and Lotharingia was the middle pa...

 Well, I got busy with...stuff...and didn't write any posts for a couple of weeks, and now I have a pile of books, but no more energy than I started with.  So let's just catch up with a riffle of reviews, yes? I'm doing well with the Popol Vuh (which is FASCINATING) and only OK with my 20 Books of Summer.  I mean, I'm currently reading books 14, 15, and 16 -- and one is a WIT title, with another upcoming -- but I have serious doubts that I can read the entire Ring of Bright Water trilogy by the end of the month, especially since I have three or four library books that are crying out for attention...so I'll probably change my list a bit.  And now: Summerbook #11: Harlequin's Millions, by Bohumil Hrabal.   Hrabal's later novel is all about growing old.  In a town "where time stands still," the local castle has been converted into an old folks' home.  Our narrator, a woman who remains unnamed, wanders around the grounds and, in her mind, throug...

 Th e Inland Sea, by Donald Richie This account is touted as a classic of travel literature, so I was very excited to read it; I love travel literature!  In this case, I was somewhat disappointed.  The travel parts are wonderful, but Richie talks a lot about himself, and...I don't like him very much.  He also talks a lot about the Japanese character, and it feels strange.  So, while I liked parts of it, on the whole...meh. Richie lived in Japan for all of his adult life, and this book was written in the late 60s from his journals of a trip taken in 1961 -- and somewhat streamlined.  The important thing about it is that he's describing an area of Japan that at the time was still very isolated from urban culture, and many of the people were still living a way of life that modernity had not yet taken over.  It's mostly tiny fishing villages and little puttering boats that go from island to island, and Richie is very aware that most likely, pretty soon it ...

Heidi's Alp: One Family's Search for Storybook Europe, by Christina Hardyment Way back in 1985, this British family borrowed a camper-van, bundled their four daughters in, and took weeks to drive around Europe on a storybook-themed trip.  Hardyment, the mom, wrote up this lovely book to tell the story. Obviously it was a tricky proposition to take that much time off, so what they actually did was start the trip with Mom and four daughters, plus a friend and her year-old baby.  After a few weeks, the friend and baby went home and Dad joined them.  Mom being a writer, she seems to have been able to pull off the long trip. They start in Holland, with Hans Brinker (which I have actually never read, I really should), exploring the cities and dikes of the Netherlands.  Then it's off to Denmark, where Hans Christian Andersen will be a major guide on the trip; they first visit Legoland, Odense, and Kronborg (that's the castle at Helsingør, Hamlet's Elsinore).  This gave...

This isn't about books at all; it's about what I did Wednesday and how happy I am about it, and so I thought I'd write it down. One of my very favorite all-time bands is a New Zealand group called the Chills.  It's fronted by Martin Phillipps, whose lifelong project it is; the other members have changed quite a bit though the current lineup has been around for a while.  I first got into them with their 1990 album Submarine Bells , which was their first international release.  In 1992, they did a US tour, and I saw that they were playing in San Francisco -- at a venue I couldn't get to.  I didn't have a car or any friends with cars who wanted to go see a band they'd never heard of (cars were very rare in my world); it was too far from any BART stations and in a really sketchy area.  I sadly concluded I'd have to wait till the next time, but I never heard of another one.  Until now!  And now I have a car! So my husband and I hopped into the car on ...