Howling Frog Books

 Galahad and the Grail, by Malcolm Guite A young coworker of mine follows this author and let me know about this project: a four-volume poetic retelling of the Arthurian story.  It's titled "Merlin's Isle."  This is the first volume, and The Coming of Arthur will be the second in November. Malcolm Guite is an Anglican pastor and has spent much of his life studying the stories.  I'm pretty picky about my modern retellings, but the beautiful cover attracted me, and I was very curious. First, the part where the story is entirely in poetry.  Guite keeps it simple, in balladic lines that are easy to read and would be pleasant to read aloud.  He sometimes uses common phrasing from ballads, which is nice.  Otherwise, it's arranged in three books of several staves (chapters) each. And Guite certainly knows his stuff!  An appendix explains his sources, here mostly Malory and the Quest for the Holy Grail  (this gave me an opportunity to feel extremely...

 I've been collecting some of these old 80s horror stories for teens, and RIP is the time!  Here we go: The Haunting of Frances Rain , by Margaret Buffie :  Lizzie's family is a mess, but now it's summer and they're going out to the island to live with Gran.  It's Lizzie's true heart-home, and she's got serious plans for doing archaeology on nearby Rain Island to see what she can find.  In the ruined foundations of an old cabin, she finds a pair of glasses -- and when she puts them on, she sees the events of nearly 60 years ago.  Lizzie learns that the island was once the home of Frances Rain, a schoolteacher who loved the solitude of island life.  But who was the girl who came to live there for a summer, and what happened to them? This one was a little unusual, interesting and fun.  And it's a Canadian story that takes place in the Winnipeg area! Dream Date , by Sinclair Smith :  Shy Katie has just moved to town and is hoping to reinvent her...

 Strange Buildings , by Uketsu It's another Uketsu book!  This one is a follow-up to Strange House , which I read in the manga version with several volumes.  The still-unnamed writer has been getting all these stories about strange houses ever since publishing Strange House .  Out of many stories, eleven stand out as being somehow possibly related.  So we get eleven files, and some clues do start to emerge.   The author goes to visit the same architect buddy and they come up with some unnerving theories....but the real story is something that winds through generations, all over the country, in complex family arrangements and even a strange 90s cult. As always, it's a fun and addictive read, and quite spooky in it's own oddball way.  Since it is pretty much a sequel, I'd advise reading Strange House first, but that's not truly necessary.

As long as I'm on a reading roll, I'm joining RIP XXI, which it seems has mostly moved to Instagram, where I am not.  But I am undaunted and have collected all the spooky books on my TBR pile, and we'll see how much I can get done.  Gotta love me some spooky season reads!  

 Woohoo, I did it!  I combated my reading slump and reached my goal, and I had a lot of fun doing it.    I went off the rails a bit from my list, but that's what lists are for; so you can turn into a pirate and flout them if you want.  A couple I decided not to read; I've color-coded a few for if I'm partly into them or just haven't gotten to them yet. Going to the Wars, by John Verney Walking the Bones of Britain, by Christopher Somerville Castle Dor, by Arthur Quiller-Couch and Daphne du Maurier  The Curse of the Montrolfes, by Ronan O'Grady  Germany Jekyll and Hyde, by Sebastian Haffner  (whoa, seriously heavy-duty, save for later) The Elements of Typographic Style, by Robert Bringhurst  Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer Knock Three Times! by Marion St. John Webb The Otterbury Incident, by C.Day Lewis  The Millicent Quibb School....by Kate McKinnon  (got 5 pages in, not for me) Kraken, by China Mieville When They...

Sunken Lands: A Journey Through Flooded Kingdoms and Lost Worlds, by Gareth Rees  I loved this book.  Rees has, since childhood, had a fascination with legends of sunken cities, and I get that!  What's more enticing?  So I've been excited to read this, and it was good stuff.  Rees is British, and the British Islands have lots of sunken lands around the edges.  Former ice ages bound lots of water up in glaciers, and when those ice ages ended, the seas rose and covered coastal regions.  He starts off with Doggerland, which was inundated tens of thousands of years ago, and works around through ancient forests to the Lowland Hundred, Lyonesse, and other lands that passed into legend.  Then he looks at manmade land sinks, like the eastern fenlands. The second half of the book ranges abroad, first through myth with a long section on the stories of Atlantis, and then to the ancient Roman resort town of Baiae (across the bay from Pompeii, it was not dest...

 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...