Howling Frog Books

  The Great Shadow: A History of How Sickness Shapes What We Do, Think, Believe, and Buy, by Susan Wise Bauer  My old homeschooling guru, SWB, has also written quite a bit of history, and when she got to the Renaissance she was struck by how very many ways there were to die gruesomely back then:  I was writing about the rise and fall of kingdoms, the quest of rulers for power, the growth of new nations—but I kept getting distracted by people dying. Not just people dying, because we all will. But the ways in which they died. The historical characters I was writing about died of the most mundane afflictions. People died of splinters, sore throats, pimples, earaches. They died of abscesses in their tonsils, of eye infections, of sore knees and infected toenails. They died of stomach aches and coughs and fevers and (my personal obsession) anal fistulas. (That would be Henry II, father of Richard the Lionhearted.) And these deaths are recorded with almost no comment. I was f...

 9! A watery nine for the ICY NORTH SEA This gives me The Poetic Edda  to read by July 5th .  I'm excited about it.  I read the Poetic Edda long ago in college, but somehow that book has disappeared.  (Maybe I gave it to my sister?)  But recently I was listening to a podcast I enjoy, and the guest was an Old Norse specialist who had published a new translation of the Poetic Edda , and I was intrigued, so I ordered it.  If you're not familiar, the Poetic or Elder Edda is a collection of Old Norse poetry that is the oldest source we have for Norse mythology.  It was actually written down from oral sources a couple of hundred years after the conversion to Christianity, so on the one hand, it's not quite as primary a source as we would wish, but on the other, by then the writers don't seem to have been worried that the old beliefs would have a resurgence, so there isn't a bunch of editorializing about the horrors of paganism. The poems seem to have ...

 If there's anybody left reading my blog, we all know that I've been in a major reading slump since the beginning of 2024 and I'm not having a lot of success clawing my way out.  I'm happy to say that I have made some progress recently, even though my reading didn't get as far as posting.  Besides my usual diet of fluffy mystery and childhood favorites re-reads, I whipped through Project Hail Mary (a re-read) after seeing the movie, and I recently finished the very depressing Black Pill: How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society, and Capture American Politics , by Elle Reeve.   I read the first part of the Once and Future King , enjoyed it so much, and have yet to pick it back up for the rest of the story.  (I've read it before, of course, and wanted to go back to it for its themes of 'Might Makes Right' vs. civilization, a very timely topic.)  And I'm currently reading Susan Wise Bauer's history of diseas...

 Hooray!  I've been looking forward to this 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!)  The Poetic Edda 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 It is Acceptable (Det Gaar An), C. J. L. Almqvist   The Obedience of a Christian Man, by William Tyndale 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   Since summer is coming up, I could tackle something pretty major this...

 Two Years Before the Mast, by Richard Henry Dana Jr. Wow, this is a fascinating account.  No wonder it was hugely popular in its day!  It's not well-known now, and I didn't really know what I was getting into, but I sure enjoyed this memoir of life at sea in the 1830s. In 1834, Richard Dana was a law student at Harvard, and he contracted measles, which damaged his eyesight; he couldn't read at all.  He decided that the way to recover his health would be to sign on as a regular sailor to a merchant ship and spend a couple of years at sea.  He entered service on the Pilgrim , which was headed to California -- in the days when Alta California was a sparsely-populated area of Mexico and the back of beyond.  No Panama Canal, no railroad, and no overland journeys from the United States yet.  The financial interest in California was for cattle hides from the herds run by the Spanish missions, brought to the coast largely by the Native peoples being used as ...

 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...