Howling Frog Books

 Castle Dor , by Arthur Quiller-Couch and Daphne du Maurier Yep, this is my copy You've almost certainly heard of the novelist Daphne du Maurier, writer of Rebecca and many other tales, often set in Cornwall.  As a young woman, she became friendly with Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, who lived in Cornwall when he wasn't being an eminent Cambridge professor of literature.  He was working on a novel, but had little time for writing, and then the war came, and he died in 1944.  The manuscript was unfinished and had no notes about where it was going to go, but in 1960, du Maurier completed the novel at the request of Q's daughter.  The result is Castle Dor , set in a factual Cornish landscape (you can look up most of these spots on the map, though Dor is Dore now), but playing with legend. In the early 1860s, a young and beautiful Mrs. Linnet Lewarne meets Amyot Trestane, a Breton sailor.  Somehow, their immediate attraction to each other sets in motion a long-past ...

 Kraken , by China Mieville Billy Harrow, inoffensive curator of molluscs, is leading a tour around the Natural History Museum in London.  His prize showpiece is the preserved giant squid in the Darwin Room -- but it is vanished, tank, preservative, and all.  How could a gigantic specimen, larger than the door itself, simply disappear?  And then Billy is thrown out of his quiet, rational life into the world of London's underground cults, and all the  knackers, criminals, and strange creatures that go with them.  The end of the world is on its way, and nobody knows how to stop it.  ,  The Church of God Kraken is convinced Billy is the prophet to solve their problems.  A terrifying murderous duo is on his track, and so is the police department that works on cultic crimes.  A dead sorcerer is perhaps back in the game? and his rival, a living Tattoo on a poor schlub's back, is determined to get there first.  Everyone wants the kraken bu...

Wow, I hate this cover.   Look at them simpering! Det Går An/It is Acceptable , by  C. J. L. Almqvist Long ago in college, I read a lot of Scandinavian literature, and one of my favorites was the Romantic novel The Queen's Diadem (Drottnigens juvelsmycker) .  The only other work of Almqvist I've been able to track down in English is Det Går An/It is Acceptable , also published as Sara Videbeck .  This was a scandalous story in 1838 and led to Almqvist's removal from his position in the church. It all starts on a ferry; sergeant Albert notices a self-possessed young woman, clearly out on business.  They get to talking, and Sara tells him about her life running the family glassworks.  Soon they are good friends, and decide to travel together.  Nothing much happens except that they build a mutually respectful friendship, and when Albert wants to marry Sara, she argues that marriage is a trap, and they'd be much better off keeping their respective jo...

 I've been pretty lax about posting, but I do have books!  It's been a busy summer so far, even if much of the activity has been sewing.  I also spent a week in Seattle, visiting my sister with my mom.  My sister has exciting plans to move back down here and start a small business of her own, as she is desperate to escape the tech world.  While we were there, an awful tragedy hit our own branch library; you may have heard about the young guy who decided to stage a mass shooting at the Chico public library.  He killed two men, and I'm grateful for the quick response from my friends the library staff who herded families to safety, and for the fact that the kid wasn't very good at what he wanted to do, and the fast police response.  The perpetrator probably didn't imagine an aftermath, but now he faces a lifetime in prison.  Our town has rallied around the families and the library.  It was horrifying, and now our library is closed; they were goi...

 The Poetic Edda: Stories of the Norse Gods and Heroes , trans. by Jackson Crawford This was fun!  I read a couple of poems per day.  These are the oldest sources we have for information about the Norse gods, and they're kind of cryptic.  It helps to have a little bit of context and background information, which Crawford provides, but not too much; he doesn't overdo it. The first poems are mostly about Thor, Odin, and Loki.  In one, Loki shows up and creatively insults everyone, and they just have to put up with it because Odin has sworn to always drink with Loki.  (The swearing of oaths seems to be a popular, and dangerous, pastime while drinking.)  Odin goes in disguise to a giant and they have a contest of wisdom.  One poem is just good advice from Odin.  In another, Odin and Thor insult each other across a ford.  I particularly liked a complicated poem about "the escape of Voland the smith," who ended up as Wayland in Britain.  ...

 The Road to Roswell, by Connie Willis This was such a fun read!  Connie Willis is now in her 80s, and this is her last novel to date, published in 2023.  I've had a copy waiting to be read for a while now.  I wasn't sure what to expect, but what I got was Willis reveling in chaos and many of her usual trademark strategies until everything comes together in a precarious but satisfying ending. Francie is headed to the wedding of her college roommate/BFF's wedding in Roswell.  Serena has a penchant for odd guys, and this one is a UFO nut.  Francie considers it her job to figure out if Serena really wants to marry him or not, and back her up either way.  So she arrives in Roswell in the middle of a UFO festival and rolls her eyes at the crowds of people who believe in alien abductions, since those are obviously not real.  So she's quite surprised when an alien does, in fact, abduct her. This alien looks kind of like a tumbleweed and is totally silent...

  Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, by Robin  Wall Kimmerer Yep, I'm ten years late to the party, but I got there!  This book made a huge splash some years ago, and rightfully so.  I'm going to hand it to my youngest, who will love it. Robin Wall Kimmerer is a botanist and a member of the Potawatomi Nation, and comes at the natural world with two perspectives that merge into one, and that were never really that different to begin with.  Her point, which she makes over and over with various stories and ecological histories from several places in the United States, is that the Indigenous peoples of North America had (and still have) massive scientific and ecological knowledge about their environments, gained through centuries/millennia of practical experience in cultivating abundance and working with local resources.  When colonizers arrived, they simply assumed that the Native peoples were ignorant, an...