Howling Frog Books

It's Witch Week!  And this year we are reading Joan Aiken, one of the true greats of 20th century children's literature (not to mention some very fun other things).  One of my favorite go-to presents for children is Aiken's Arabel and Mortimer books, which are so funny and worth reading many times over.   But for this Witch Week I decided to revisit the alternate-history world of the Wolves Chronicles, which are set at the beginning of the 1800s under the reign of James III (often called Jamie Three).  In this world, not only are wolves the scourge of England in winter, but the industrial revolution is well under way, and the Hanoverians are forever plotting to overthrow King James and set the German Bonnie Prince George upon the throne. Aiken builds an amazing, adventurous, eccentric, and very dangerous world for her characters. Aiken is incredibly imaginative and inventive, so you never know what will happen next, and the language is wonderful.  Dido is the best, alway

  Wyllard's Weird , by Mary Elizabeth Braddon Mary Elizabeth Braddon was the Victorian sensationalist author of Lady Audley's Secret .  She was hugely prolific, and lived a rather sensational life herself -- she lived with the publisher John Maxwell as his wife and had six children with him, but Maxwell was already married and had five children with his actual wife, who was still alive.  No wonder her most famous novels were about bigamy!  I've always wanted to read Wyllard's Weird for no other reason than its title, and it became my book to read on my phone for a couple of weeks. We start in a train going to Cornwall -- as the train is on a bridge over a deep gully, a young woman falls to her death.  Mr. Wyllard, a wealthy man, is the first to reach her, but she is dead, and there is no identification at all.  She has no luggage, nothing but a basket containing a little food for the journey.  She seems French in her dress, but that's the only clue.  Did she jump,

 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 necessary. He talks about a whol

 THREE!   This means I'll be reading Ring of Bright Water , by Gavin Maxwell , a classic of nature writing.  The copy I have is actually the trilogy, so we'll see how far I get.   See you on December 18th!     

 Hey it's that time again, my favorite time -- it's Spin time!   You know the rules, so here we go: No Name, by Wilkie Collins Second-Class Citizen, by Buchi Emecheta Ring of Bright Water, by Gavin Maxwell The Tale of Sinhue (ancient Egyptian poetry)   Eichmann in Jerusalem, by Hannah Arendt   Hunger, by Knut Hamsun Sybil, by Disraeli The Leopard, by di Lampedusa  Phineas Finn, by Anthony Trollope   The Obedience of a Christian Man, by William Tyndale   Sagas of Icelanders (aiming for 50% by the due date) The Well at the End of the World, by William Morris It is Acceptable (Det Gaar An), C. J. L. Almqvist  Two Years Before the Mast, by Richard Henry Dana  Amerika, by Kafka Peter the Great's African, by Pushkin  The Beggar's Opera, by John Gay The Nature of Things, by Lucretius Polyhistor Solinus Lives, by Plutarch (again, aiming for part, not the whole) I'm still in a mood for ancient British literature, or at least something saga-ish or British, but there's n

 Storyland: A New Mythology of Britain, by Amy Jeffs This caught my eye when my mom and I spent a couple of hours in Foyles; I was kind of intrigued.  What do you mean, a new mythology?  So I got hold of a copy and found out.  It's a couple of years old now so this will all be old news to any British readers; Chris at Calmgrove probably beat me to this ages ago. Jeffs has taken all those old stories about the founding of Britain and British history -- from Geoffrey of Monmouth, and Wace, and Layamon, and such -- and told them as short stories or episodes.  She's had a wonderful time carving lino prints to illustrate the stories, too.   So we start with giants installing Stonehenge on an Irish mountain, and Brutus bringing his Trojans, and the Scotti, and so on.  Then there's Weland the Smith, King Leir and Cordelia, the origin of the Stone of Scone, Deirdre in Ireland, and the two dragons.  We move into the Arthurian cycle, especially stories about Merlin, and early Saxon s

 Tress of the Emerald Sea, by Brandon Sanderson A friend of mine recently started a book club, and for our second book we decided to read something fun -- this one.  It's a long time since I read any Brandon Sanderson, and he's developed this whole Cosmere thing that I don't really understand (I'm planning to learn), but this book is a sort of one-off for fun set on an obscure planet of the Cosmere.  It's narrated by a visitor, whose real name is not mentioned and who is apparently not a character from another book.  And as this was something of a personal project and more of a YA story, Sanderson lets quite a bit of his native silliness out in this novel. Tress lives on a bitty little island in the Emerald Sea -- a salt-mining outpost that people aren't allowed to leave, that's how unpleasant it is.  She's a nice girl with tangly hair (thus the nickname) who works hard and is good friends with the gardener up at the castle, though she knows he's rea