Howling Frog Books

 The Power of the Powerless, by Vaclav Havel This is one of those very famous books you always mean to read, and so I thought I'd give it a try this summer.  It's short and dense, just 21 chapters long, and published in 1978.  The edition I read has a very helpful introduction from Timothy Snyder, and so here's some information I cribbed from that: Ten years after the Prague Spring, nobody was particularly pro-communist anymore, but Havel was worried about how everyone just...adapted and resigned themselves to the status quo.  He wrote this book asking what ordinary people could do to make change wherever they were; he considered that he was critiquing the West too. Essentially, Havel asks, do we just go along, playing the game (whatever it may be), or do we try to live in truth?  By 'live in truth,' he doesn't mean to take up another Big Philosophy and live by it, or foment yet another revolution; he means to make decisions according to a personal sense of what...

Walking the Bones of Britain:  A 3,000 Million Year Geological Journey from the Outer Hebrides to the Thames Estuary, by Christopher Somerville I suppose it's a bit ironic that this was my first summer book, and it just took me the whole time to read it.  There's a lot of geology and it's not a terribly light read, so I took it slow and enjoyed the walk. Christopher Somerville is the walking correspondent for the Times, because of course the Times has a walking correspondent.   This is the UK, and walking is big.  He's written quite a few books, and this one I picked up two years ago in a little bookshop during our Ridgeway hike.  (I told the bookshop lady I liked books about walking, but not Robert Macfarlane, and she showed me this guy.  Yes!) The premise of this particular book is that if you look at a geological map of Great Britain, especially the simple and colorful kind of Somerville's old schoolbooks, you see that you can kind of start at t...

 War in Heaven, by Charles Williams  I sort of started this accidentally; I wasn't sure if I'd read it before, and next thing I knew, I was away.  Charles Williams, quite a strange man, wrote novels which were also quite strange.  He worked at Oxford University Press, but in London, was a connection of the Inklings, had a large theological and literary interest, and seems to have been highly charismatic.  He wrote six novels, all "supernatural thrillers," and this was the first, published in 1930.  Williams' ideas of what a supernatural thriller might be are not at all what anybody else would think of. We start at a publishing house in London, where Mr. Rackstraw comes back from lunch and discovers a dead body in his office.  So there's a mystery there.  Also, one of his authors has just turned in a manuscript tracing the history of the Holy Grail (Graal), and concluding that it currently rests in a small country church in the village of Fardles....

 Adventures of a Cat-Whiskered Girl , and Crazy in Poughkeepsie, by Daniel M. Pinkwater I feel like this might be cheating, but I did read these books and they are new to me, so I guess they count.  The two books I read recently, earlier works the Neddiad and the Yggysey , and these two all go together, sort of.  They, sort of, take place in about the same universe, characters go in and out, etc. though they are not necessarily consistent all the time.  Why worry? Adventures of a Cat-Whiskered Girl is about Big Audrey, who is in the Yggysey in Los Angeles.  She comes from a parallel dimension/universe, and even in the world she grew up in, having cat whiskers is pretty unusual.  Audrey catches a ride from LA to Poughkeepsie with this actor guy, Marlon Brando, who plays the bongos a lot.  There she gets a job at a UFO bookstore and makes some friends, especially a professor and Molly (the Dwerg), who both spend time at the mental asylum down the roa...

 18!  This gives me a doozy that I've long wanted to read: The Well at the World's End , by William Morris .  It's a knightly adventure through trackless forest, an imitation of Malory and of Spenser, I'd say.  Sir Ralph decides to search for, guess what, the Well at the World's End, and has many adventures along the way, often about the Castle of Abundance and so on.  I got an ebook from Gutenberg and it's looking pretty lengthy, being divided into four books of many chapters each.  PLUS Morris went for the full Victorian/Howard Pyle style, observe this random paragraph: Therewithal they gat to horse and rode away through that stony land, wherein was no river, but for water many pools in the bottoms, with little brooks running from them. But after a while they came upon a ridge somewhat high, on the further side whereof was a wide valley well-grassed and with few trees, and no habitation of man that they might see. But a wide river ran down the midst of...

 Parables of Kierkegaard , ed. Thomas C. Oden I wasn't sure what to expect from this collction, but given the general intimidatingness of Kierkegaard, I figured I could deal with some parables.  I did actually read Either/Or in college, with particular focus on "Diary of a Seducer," but that was long long ago! What this turned out to be is a collection of parable-like stories gathered from the complete works of Kierkegaard.  Perhaps it's a few sentences of anecdote, perhaps it's a long excerpt on the experiences of a particular character known in 1830s. Christianshavn.  And, each little story comes with a moral quesion that the editor inserted to clarify what Kierkegaard was getting at.  I'm not sure it helped; to my mind it mostly gave an appearance of purpose more than there was, in fact, purpose. But it was a nice and fairly interesting thing to read.

 It's time for the 45th Classics Club Spin!  You know the rules, so here's my list:  Amerika, by Kafka Thus Were Their Faces, by Silvina Ocampo Peter the Great's African, by Pushkin Lives, by Plutarch (vol I) Sybil, by Disraeli   Eichmann in Jerusalem, by Hannah Arendt   The Leopard, by di Lampedusa Life and Fate, by Vasily Grossman (this would be quite a feat!) Conjure Tales, by Charles Chesnutt Polyhistor Solinus    Folktales collected by Afanas'ev (vol I of 3)   Sagas of Icelanders (aiming for 50% by the due date)   The Law and the Lady, by Wilkie Collins The Burning Plain, by Juan Rulfo The Beggar's Opera, by John Gay Sport of the Gods, by Paul Dunbar Phineas Finn, by Anthony Trollope The Well at the End of the World, by William Morris The Tale of Sinhue (ancient Egyptian poetry) The Once and Future King, by T. H. White Hoping for: Once and Future King or Plutarch.  Nervous about: Life and Fate!  It's a brick! What do you thin...