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...

Android Avenger/The Altar of Asconel (Ace Double)  I thought I would kick things off right and read an Ace Double from my recent haul.  I chose Android Avenger because I had a copy before, but it had mildew damage and had to be tossed.  I was bitter.  But I got another chance! Android Avenger is not that great.  It's the stinker of the two.  In 2017, the world is carefully regulated to avoid neurosis -- defined as anything the authorities deem even slightly abnormal.  Neurotics get executed, so everyone is very careful indeed to look calm and content, and to avoid those scans as much as possible.  Our narrator, Norman, thinks he's just an ordinary guy, until the day he suddenly loses control of himself and starts running inhumanly fast and murdering people he's never seen before.  He discovers that he's a tool of the man who plans to take over society -- an easy task now that everything is controlled by central computers.  Can Norman a...

 Second-Class Citizen, by Buchi Emecheta It's no wonder this is the novel that won Emecheta fame.  It's just so well-written!  It wasn't easy to read, because Adah is having a very rough time, and yet I couldn't put it down; it sucked me right in. Adah is an insignificant daughter of a family who was expecting a son, but -- even after her father dies and she has to go live with others -- she is determined to get an education and do well for herself.  As a young woman she obtains a well-paid position in Lagos, and that means that she is desirable as a wife, because she can pay for a husband's education.  She is married off to Francis (this is the late 1960s), and her ambition is to get her family to Britain, where she can get more education and become a librarian.  So first she funds Francis' trip to go there and become a lawyer, while she stays in Lagos and has a baby.  And despite all opposition, she gets herself and her little family to London. Londo...

 Nightingale Wood, by Stella Gibbons Who among us does not love Cold Comfort Farm ?   If you don't, it's probably because you haven't read it.  This one is less well-known, but it's still a fun read, if not the perfect comedic gem that is CCF.  Nobody could pull that off twice, after all. The Withers are an upper-middle-class family near a village, and their life is completely stultifying.  The two adult daughters are repressed and not allowed to do anything much; all Madge wants is a dog to love, and Tina wants...well, a life.  Into the house comes Viola, the young widow of the oldest son.  She was, horrors, a shopgirl, and she hasn't really got anywhere to go.  Is she, too, going to see her youth wasted in the desiccated atmosphere of the Wither home? Through winding byways, walks through the wood, and heartbreak, each member of the family eventually comes to find their own version of happiness.    It's a nice read, a pleasant 193...

Chesterton's Gateway, by G. K. Chesterton, compiled by Ethan Nicolle I often listen to a comedic book podcast called The Book Pile , which features two guys, Kellen Erskine and David Vance.  Erskine is a full-time comic, and we knew him as a teenager with floppy 90s hair, so we're always interested in how he's doing.  Vance is a writer -- he's written sketches for a different comedy group I follow.   They're fun to listen to! A little while ago they had a comic-book artist on the show, Ethan Nicolle, to talk about this book he'd put together.  (I have never read any of Nicolle's comics; my husband likes him.)  So he talked about how he'd gotten really into reading Chesterton, and even had a couple of discussion groups.  But he found that most people who wanted to read Chesterton would pick up Orthodoxy , and he didn't think that was a good place to start; Chesterton was mainly an essayist and it's better to start with essays.  So he'd put tog...

 The Wheel of Ice, by Stephen Baxter    This was a fun one that has been sitting on my TBR shelf for a long time; I got it from the donation table, of course.  It's a Second Doctor story (the one who looks like Moe), to my surprise, and features companions Zoe (future math genius from a space colony) and Jamie (18th century Scotsman). The Tardis senses a hole in time and lands on an early Saturn mining colony, to the crew's surprise.  What is wrong here?  The kludged-together colony, called the Wheel of Ice, is precarious, and is solely focused on mining a rare mineral from the moon Mnemosyne.  The children born here have to work as miners, too, and they're being accused of sabotage, though they insist that elusive little blue critters they call Blue Dolls must be the ones doing it.  Has the Wheel got gremlins? It's a great story, and pretty complex, with roots reaching back to 19th century London, not to mention a relic of a civilization lost bil...