Howling Frog Books

This was going to be a book post, but my 'quick update' -- which is probably mostly for posterity anyway -- wound up six paragraphs long, so I guess it gets its own post now.  I'll write the book posts after this... and I'd love to know how everybody else is doing, too! We wandered around here about 10 days ago, lots of space! Like everybody else, we are staying at home a lot.  I work from home now, and I don't like it one bit, but I'm fortunate to be able to earn a paycheck.  Husband is also working from home, and 16yo is doing school here at home.  I think she's starting to rethink her nostalgic yearning for homeschooling -- but then, when we homeschooled, we went a lot of places.  Luckily we each have a computer, so we can work at the same time, but meetings are a little trickier.  This morning we each had a Zoom conference at just about the same time, and my plan to use my tablet in my bedroom didn't work (too far from the wi-fi), so I wound up...

Archer's Goon, by Diana Wynne Jones What with everything going on this month, I've pretty much fallen back on old favorite DWJ titles, of which Archer's Goon is a prominent member.  I love the humor in this book, the family -- this must be one of the very few DWJ titles that features a family that isn't completely, totally dysfunctional, though it is certainly eccentric! -- and the sheer chaos of this really pretty strange story. Howard, age 13, has an ordinary boring life until a Goon shows up in the family kitchen, demanding "two thousand" from Howard's dad Quentin.  Howard finds out about who really runs his town -- seven powerful siblings who have been stuck there for years, and aren't very happy about it.  The siblings figure that Quentin's words must be what's keeping them trapped, and they're determined to force him to write more words for them. This is one of those stories where everything gets turned upside-down, and it...

A Tempest, by Aimé Césaire  Aimé Césaire, born 1913 in Martinique (which is still officially French), became a world-renowned dramatist and poet; he, along with his friend the poet Damas, established the idea of "Negritude," that black people did not need to assimilate into European culture, but had valuable cultures of their own to contribute to the world.  Leopold Senghor was the leader of this movement; I read some of his poetry in 2014 .  This was an anti-colonialism black pride movement, largely in the areas that had been colonized by France, in the 1930s - 1950s.  A Tempest was published in 1969. Césaire's play is an adaptation of Shakespeare's Tempest which casts Ariel as mulatto, and Caliban as black, both enslaved by Prospero, who has arrived on their island and taken illegitimate possession of it.  Ariel works hard for Prospero, always hoping for his long-promised freedom and trying to appeal to Prospero's conscience, while Caliban has given up wa...

Bellman and Black, by Diane Setterfield This novel was recommended to me by a rare-book expert I know; we have some similar tastes and she said this was a favorite of hers.  I actually wouldn't have chosen it, just because there is a Victorian dress on the cover, and I'm a little tired of the kind of books that feature fancy dresses on the covers.  But!  It turned out that the dress was actually meaningful to the plot, and it wasn't at all a 'ballgown' kind of novel.  (I should have realized that just from the person who recommended it!) A village in mid-Victorian England:  four boys are out playing, and William Bellman, in a moment of showing off, aims his slingshot at a young rook and kills it.  And then he forgets -- but the rooks don't forget, not at all. As a young man, William joins his uncle at the wool mill.  He's bright and practical-minded, and soon he's risen to manager.  The entire first half of the novel is given to William's lif...

Kirby cover! The Dark Side of the Sun, by Terry Pratchett --I've put a short update at the bottom if you're interested. I've had this book sitting around for a while, but had never read it, so this was a perfect opportunity.  This is Pterry's first 'adult' novel (as opposed to the juvenile fiction he'd written previously), from 1976, and pre-dates the Discworld books.  It's science fiction, very short, plays with some intriguing ideas, and is a lot of fun. In the far future, humanity has spread over several worlds, sometimes in cooperation with others of the 52 known sentient species.  All of them developed within a fairly small section of the galaxy, the rest of which appears to be sterile.  And there are artifacts left from the Jokers -- a super-intelligent, utterly mysterious, vanished race. Dom is the heir to the massive corporation and planet of Widdershins, a world that is nearly all swamp but that produces two incredible materials.  Wi...

Hexwood, by Diana Wynne Jones I love Hexwood so much.  It starts off with two stories: a girl in an English village, who has been ill and is therefore bored stiff, and an administrator of a lowly bureaucratic department of a galactic corporation/empire who is dismayed to receive a report of a problem on a backwater planet.  The two stories of a village girl and a galactic empire turn out to be in fact the same tale, and this tale is being told by the Bannus, an extremely intelligent machine that can run scenarios in order to predict the consequences of decisions.  It has co-opted a whole lot of people into the story it is enacting, and all of it with the goal of bringing down the cruel Reigners who have run the galaxy for a thousand years or more. I'm not very satisfied with that description, actually, because it doesn't give the least hint of the mystery, adventure, puzzle, intrigue, and tragedy (as well as comedy) of Hexwood .  But I wanted to bring out the ...

Before I get to the book part, just a quick note about the thing on everybody's minds.  Like so many folks, we are semi-battened down.  Our county has no confirmed cases yet, but then they have only done a few tests, so the true state of affairs is unknown.  (Couldn't resist a DWJ reference, ha.)  The reaction has been slow here, but school admins have the advantage that this week is spring break.  Things are changing fast, but at the moment K-12 is off for two weeks instead of just one (I think that will change), the university has gone online until the end of April, and the community college I work for is preparing to go online but so far, will still hold classes after a couple of extra days off.  We have some students with no internet access at home, and some instructors who have not chosen to become familiar with online education, so it's a bit tricky and I'm hoping our library and the tutoring center can stay open to serve those who need support. ...