Howling Frog Books

 The Taste of Ashes: The Afterlife of Totalitarianism in Eastern Europe , by Marci Shore  I've had this for quite some time, and was spurred to start it when I started watching a series of lectures online and realized that the professor was the same person who wrote this book.  And also she's married to Timothy Snyder, whose books I love.  So I dove in, and it still took me forever to read, but that's because of my slump, not because it wasn't fascinating.  It was! It's a sort of combination memoir and description of life in many different places in Eastern Europe after the Cold War ended.  To my intense envy, Shore -- who must be only a year or so older than I am -- spent 1990 on studying and teaching in Czechoslovakia and other places.  That's what I wanted to be doing in the early 1990s!  Only I didn't know how to get there, and probably I wouldn't have done too well at it anyway.  But reading about her doing it was pretty amazing. Shore's...

 The Giant Under the Snow, by John Gordon I heard of this one somewhere and was intrigued, and I had to buy it on Kindle.  I'm not sure it was ever published in the US?  If so, it was decades ago; this story was published in 1968. Jonquil (Jonk), her boyfriend Bill, and his best friend Arf (Arthur) are nice, slightly disaffected teens of the late 60s.  On a school field trip to the countryside, Jonk wanders off and finds herself on a barrow that is surprisingly hand-shaped.  Then she's chased by a terrifying dog and takes shelter at the home of Elizabeth, a somewhat mysterious woman.  Soon the three find a Celtic buckle that turns out to be the deciding factor in a resurgent war between two powers, and between the winter solstice and Christmas, they have to try to help Elizabeth and foil an ancient evil. This is a really interesting and unusual story, much in the vein of Alan Garner or perhaps Susan Cooper (but a little bit older).  It's legitimately s...

 TWO!     That gives me a doorstopper of a maritime memoir, Two Years Before the Mast by Richard Henry Dana.  Dana spent two years of the 1830s sailing from the East Coast to California by way of Cape Horn.  So I'm hoping for penguins!  He published his account in 1840.  We'll see how it goes...I don't really know much about this one. I'll report back at the end of March!

Huzzah, it's time for the 43rd Spin!   You know the rules, so let's get to the list:   Eichmann in Jerusalem, by Hannah Arendt Two Years Before the Mast, by Richard Henry Dana  Amerika, by Kafka The Leopard, by di Lampedusa  Phineas Finn, by Anthony Trollope The Well at the End of the World, by William Morris The Tale of Sinhue (ancient Egyptian poetry) Stories of Washington Irving Life and Fate, by Vasily Grossman (this would be quite a feat!)  The Poetic Edda   The Law and the Lady, by Wilkie Collins It is Acceptable (Det Gaar An), C. J. L. Almqvist   The Obedience of a Christian Man, by William Tyndale The Once and Future King, by T. H. White Peter the Great's African, by Pushkin Lives, by Plutarch (vol I) Sybil, by Disraeli Polyhistor Solinus    Folktales collected by Afanas'ev (vol I of 3)   Sagas of Icelanders (aiming for 50% by the due date)  My preference would be Polyhistor, Poetic Edda, or the sagas.  Or the fairy ta...

 Circles of Stone: Weird Tales of Pagan Sites and Ancient Rites, ed. Katy Soar This is one of the British Library's titles in the "Tales of the Weird" series, in which they get researchers to read old serials and mine them for forgotten short stories.  I love this series and have a few of them; I'd happily get the whole giant collection.  And this one features spooky stories about my favorite thing: ancient stone monuments!  Yay! Some of these are famous names: E. F. Benson, Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen.  Others aren't familiar to me, and one or two are practically unknown, like Stuart Strauss, who published three stories in early Weird Tales issues and was never heard from again; presumably it was a pseudonym, but who Strauss really was is a mystery.   The stories also have a variety of themes, from villages untouched by the modern world to race cars, human imagination and stones that just eat people.  It's all very enjoyable, loved it, this...

  The Splendid Century: Life in the France of Louis XIV, by W. H. Lewis I've always been terrible at French literature and history, and I find them intimidating.  So I'm quite proud of reading this description of life in the 17th century under the reign of Louis XIV, the one who called himself the Sun King and moved the court from Paris to Versailles.  It's not at all a difficult or heavy-duty tome, but a lively and fascinating overview of a society, perfect for someone like me. Warren H. Lewis was C. S. Lewis' brother and, in later life, acted as his secretary and wrote books about French history.  But before that he made his career in the army, serving as a supply officer from 1914 until his retirement in 1932.  He therefore knew about everything there was to know about military logistics, especially horses, and this really comes through in his chapters about the French army -- and even his judgement of Louis' character, who he describes as so obsessed with de...

 Hans Christian Andersen Fairy Tales , World Edition, 4 vols. A while back I decided I wanted to find the best edition of HCA's tales possible, and I came up with this: a 1959 four-volume set issued at Odense, which is where HCA was born.*  It's a very satisfying set, with little, fat hardbacks perfect for holding in your hand.  Each one has a different portrait in the front.  They're illustrated with the original drawings by Vilhelm Pedersen, who HCA chose himself, and the final volume has illustrations by Lorenz Fr ø lich, who continued the work after Pedersen's death.  I don't know that this is a complete and exhaustive collection of HCA's tales; he wrote a lot of things that weren't exactly fairy tales or poems or plays, so it would be difficult to make a complete list.  I did notice that "The Daisy" is not in this set. I'm not sure how the stories are arranged; it's not by date (I checked) and almost all of the most famous stories are ...