Howling Frog Books

I'm so excited about sharing an M. R. James story with you every day!  This is going to be great.  Experts seem to call him MRJ all the time, so that's what we will do too, if only to save my fingers.  I'll try to post some tidbits about him throughout the month along with the stories. One of the story's original illustrations Our first tale is "Canon Alberic's Scrap-Book."  It was James' first story, written sometime in 1892 or 1893, and is semi-autobiographical--Dennistoun is himself.  MRJ did cycle through the French countryside with two good friends looking for cathedrals and antiquities, and he did discover a book--though that was in Suffolk.  He must have had some fun spinning his own trip into a ghost story!  James read this story out to his literary group, the Chitchat Society, on October 28, 1893.  This became quite a tradition, though it usually moved to Christmastime.  Ghost stories at Christmas is a venerable English trad...

It's time for the third quarter challenge checks.  I've finished a bunch of things, yippee!  And of course I'm not really satisfied with my progress on my very own Greek challenge, but overall I think I'm doing pretty well. Greek Classics : I am no longer quite sure how to count them.  Not there yet, but doing OK.  I'll need to spend a lot of November reading Plato! Medieval Literature : 10/12 , yay!  I still need to read Piers Plowman and then choose one more.  Can we do this one again next year? Back to the Classics 2012 : 9/9 .  Finished.  A really great challenge, and I'm pretty sure this is what got me started on the path that led to The Classics Club, so definitely one of the highlights of my reading year. November's Autumn Classics Challenge : 7/7 discussions posted, so officially finished, but I'll keep participating. League of Extraordinary Gentlemen : 9/9 Finished. Mixing It Up : 15/16 .  Only the food book is lef...

Griffin & Sabine trilogy , by Nick Bantock Just the other day Amira posted about Griffin & Sabine .  I had completely forgotten about the existence of these books, and I was really happy to be reminded because they are really neat.  I liked them when they came out and spent a lot of time looking at my roommate's copies.  They especially appealed to me because I love stamps. (I have a stamp collection, even.  And in library school my reference work project was on stamps.  For reals.)  So I put the whole trilogy on hold at the library, and they showed up the same day!  I got to read them all at once.  It was fun, because I remembered all the artwork really well, but not until I actually saw it again. Anyway.  Griffin is a London artist and lonelier than he realizes.  Sabine designs stamps for a tiny archipelago of Pacific islands, and--mysteriously--she can see Griffin's art.  They start a correspondence, but is Sabine rea...

I only just realized the other day that it might be sensible for me to give Howling Frog a little presence on Facebook.  Sure, other people do it all the time and I like seeing their blog posts, but it took me a little while to figure out that such an idea might apply to me too.  O at D é laiss é and Adriana at Classical Quest gave me some encouragement, so here you go: Howling Frog on Facebook . Just in time for October's Gothic celebration!  (That's why I put the Gorey illustration up for my picture.  It's thematic, see?)

Labyrinths , by Jorge Luis Borges Everyone always raves about Labyrinth s, so of course I never read it, because I'm annoying like that.  But I put it on my Classics Club list, and then it came my way, so I tried it out.  And I thought it was pretty great. The stories are not easy to read and I had to make sure that I could sit and concentrate on each one, and that I had time to read a whole story in one go.  They are not the kind of short stories that you can put down halfway through and easily come back to; you really have to focus. These short stories are mysterious, strange, and erudite. The most famous story is the "Library of Babel," about an infinite and nightmarish library that everyone wants to visit anyway, but I also really liked "The Zahir," "The God's Script," "The Shape of the Sword," and several others. There are also some short essays at the end (that went almost completely over my head) and some 'parables...

Next week is officially Banned Books Week.  I don't usually post much about it here, because I already have plenty going on at work.  This year I somehow wound up sort of in charge of the event, which is kind of panic-inducing.  Luckily my full-time co-worker is doing the budgeting part and actually knows what she's doing. I've spent the past few weeks trying to get the event together.  Today we did the decorating and strung yellow 'Caution' tape around the place until the word 'caution' became meaningless to me.  We scattered books wrapped in brown paper around the library--each has a label on it with a title and the reason the book has been challenged or banned.  Since I like history, I have some volumes that say things like "The Bible in English" and so on.  What the books looked like last year And our display tables went up with tri-fold boards explaining what the event is all about.  One of the other part-time librarians made a g...

The Angel's Game , by Carlos Ruiz Zafon It's back to the world of tortured Barcelona and the Cemetery of Forgotten Books.  I like the Cemetery, but I'm not so keen on Barcelona.  This time, we follow David Martin, a young man with literary ambitions and lots of torment in the 1920s.  He is approached by a mysterious French publisher named Corelli, who draws him into a Faustian contract to write a book.  As David starts to realize that there is a web of old tragedy and secrecy around the house he lives in, he also begins to think that Corelli had a lot to do with that.  The element that made me enjoy the first book was the weird Gothic humor, and that was missing this time.  There is, of course, a beautiful and unobtainable girl, though this book was thankfully much lighter on the adolescent boy stuff than The Shadow of the Wind .  On the other hand, pretty much everyone dies violently, and once again, Barcelona appears to be about the worst place i...

 I've been getting ready!  I have 7 paper books and have downloaded 5 e-books from Google (I just love reading really old books on my tablet when I can't get them in real life.  And they're free!).  I can't possibly read them all, and if I did, I would probably end up like a proper Gothic heroine and die tragically after a severe attack of brain fever.  Here's what I've got, though: The Castle of Otranto (1764) and Hieroglyphic Tales (1785), by Horace Walpole -- Otranto kicked off the Gothic craze.  I think someone ought to make a film of this story; if you filmed it perfectly straight, it would make a hysterical comedy. The History of the Caliph Vathek (1786), by William Beckford -- Combine the craze for all things Oriental with the Gothic craze, and you get Vathek .  There does not appear to be a single evil Catholic priest in the whole story.  Instead, all the evil people are apostate Muslims who get into demonology. Hor...

Are you getting prepared for going Gothic in October?  We are going to have a marvelously spooky time.  Also, if you're looking for inspiration on what to read, try taking a look at The Literary Gothic , a website entirely devoted to Gothic literature pre-1950. “ Dear creature! how much I am obliged to you; and when you have finished  Udolpho , we will read  The Italian  together; and I have made out a list of ten or twelve more of the same kind for you.” “ Have you, indeed! How glad I am! — What are they all?” “ I will read you their names directly; here they are, in my pocket-book.  Castle of Wolfenbach, Clermont, Mysterious Warnings, Necromancer of the Black Forest, Midnight Bell, Orphan of the Rhine , and  Horrid Mysteries . Those will last us some time.” “ Yes, pretty well; but are they all horrid, are you sure they are all horrid?” “ Yes, quite sure; for a particular friend of mine, a Miss Andrews, a sweet girl, one of t...

Days of Obligation: An Argument With My Mexican Father , by Richard Rodriguez This title caught my eye at work when I was finding a different work by the same author for somebody.  I appear to be the first person to check it out since it was acquired...in 1993.  It took me a while to figure out that it's actually a collection of essays (which is what I get for not reading the acknowledgements), so it's a bit choppy, but all the essays are centered on the differences and influences and questions of identity between Mexico and California.  I probably didn't understand half of it. I gather that Rodriguez was kind of an unusual writer in the 90s and people weren't always happy with him.  He is an American born of Mexican parents and grew up in Sacramento (his descriptions of Sac sure sounded familiar).  There are a lot of musings on how California and Mexico bleed into each other, and the influence of Catholicism versus Protestantism: "...I have told my friends ...

Bev at My Reader's Block says it's time for the quarterly check-in for the Mount TBR Challenge.  I'm pretty happy with my progress--two more books and I'll be done with the Mount Vancouver (25 titles) level. Here's what I've got: The Story of an African Farm, by Olive Schreiner The Man in the High Castle, by Philip K. Dick The Book of Beasts, trans. T. H. White Mr. Dixon Disappears, by Ian Sansom Nightmare Abbey, by Thomas Love Peacock The Haunted Dolls' House and Other Stories, by M. R. James    The New Road to Serfdom, by Daniel Hannan    Doctor Thorne, by Anthony Trollope Winking at the Brim, by Gladys Mitchell  Lovely is the Lee, by Robert Gibbings  A Collection of Essays by George Orwell  Erewhon, by Samuel Butler Warbreaker, by Brandon Sanderson  Decameron, by Boccaccio  Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert Twenty Years A-Growing, by Maurice O'Sullivan The Communist Manifesto, by Marx and Engels   The Fir...

House of Many Ways , by Diana Wynne Jones You know I can't go for very long without reading a DWJ book.  Yesterday I needed to read one again, and picked House of Many Ways since I've only read it about 4 times so far.  This is the third book featuring the Wizard Howl, but it's sort of interesting how Howl doesn't have all that much space in the second and third books--he's there, but not as a major character, and he spends most of his time in disguise. Charmain lives in the tiny kingdom of High Norland, and all she really wants to do is read all the time and munch while she reads.  (I sympathize!)  But now she has to go take care of her great-uncle William's house while he is off getting cured of his illness.  It's a magical house, which I would like to live in please, and she has no idea how to do even the most basic things. Then an unlucky wizard's apprentice shows up.  So does the world's cutest dog.  Add a bunch of angry kobolds, a scary ...

Telling Tales: A History of Literary Hoaxes , by Melissa Katsoulis I had fun reading this collection of literary fakes and hoaxes (and I love the clever cover!).  Katsoulis only covers more modern stories, from the 18th century on, and I was not familiar with most of them.  She describes all sorts: plain forgers preying on the gullible, sons looking for approval from distant fathers, zealots, jokesters, annoyed rivals, and impersonators.  A whole chapter is dedicated to Australia, which apparently has more hoaxes per pound than most other countries do.  They're a Weird Mob is a funny, jokey semi-hoax, but some of them are pretty strange.  Of course, the worst one was pulled by a woman from the US--I'd heard of Mutant Message Down Under before, but was unaware of the details.  Wow. The 'Native American' and 'Holocaust victim' hoaxes are often pretty disturbing, not to mention the really disturbing ones involving fake AIDS victims.  Besides them, ...

When you're feeling a bit tired and want a little fun reading, few things beat a nice Daniel Pinkwater book.  I was in a Pinkwater mood and read The Snarkout Boys and the Baconburg Horror , one of my all-time favorite books ever. Every page has a new perfect funny sentence.  All the characters are completely crazy, each in their own special ways.  There are literary jokes I didn't get until fairly recently.  I wish I could eat at the restaurants, and most especially I would like to try a borgelnuskie, but sadly borgelnuskies don't seem to be real.  (You never know--quite often the things that sound made up in a Pinkwater book do turn out to be real.  In 1989 when I was 16 I was taken on a daytrip into Czechoslovakia, and was stunned to discover that Wartburg cars are real.) Here is a bit.  This is Osgood Sigerson, the world's greatest detective, in discussion with the Honorable Lama Lumpo Smythe-Finkel: "By Jove!  You're right, Lama!" the gr...

Things Fall Apart , by Chinua Achebe It's the most famous African novel there is, and I read it so long ago that I could no longer remember much of it, so I put Things Fall Apart on my Classics Club list.  I probably understood it quite a bit better this time around! The story of Okonkwo, a strong but unthinking man caught in the inevitabilities of change, is one that gives us plenty to think about.  He is watching his traditions change and erode as white colonialists slowly take over the country.  But you don't need a plot synopsis from me.  It's hard to know what to say about books like this. Things Fall Apart is such an extremely important book, and one that is very readable to boot; I would recommend that everyone read it.

The Penguin Book of Russian Short Stories I guess I've been in a Russian mood lately, since I read this and K Blows Top at the same time.  I've had this book for years and never gotten to it, so thank you TBR challenge!  This is a collection of 20 short stories by Russia's most famous authors from Pushkin to Solzhenitsyn.  I finally read Gogol's Nose !  (It is weird and surreal.)  I loved Turgenev's Bezhin Lea and Garshin's The Scarlet Flower .  I did not really care for the Nabokov story even though I usually like Nabokov.  And I very much liked Nagibin's Winter Oak . I took my time with this book and read it a little slowly so I could enjoy every story.  On the whole it was a lovely collection.  This particular collection is no longer in print and Penguin has replaced it with one that's about twice as large.  It's probably good too.  I couldn't find an image of my edition at all, but it has this portrait of Pushkin on the ...

Lately I've been lucky and was able to re-join my gym.  I love going to the gym, but I need a book--and it can't be too hard to read.  So I like to read mysteries while I'm working out, and here are 4 mysteries I've read lately. Rainbow's End , by Ellis Peters -- I've never read a Peters book in a modern setting.  I thought the victim's name was pretty improbable (Mr. Rainbow, really?), but the mystery was interesting and had nice medieval relics too. The Man in the Queue , by Josephine Tey -- Tey mysteries are reliably good.  This one had some nice twists and turns and a manhunt in Scotland too. The Pilgrim of Hate , by Ellis Peters -- This was a re-read but one nice thing about mysteries is that I nearly always forget who the murderer is.  Brother Cadfael has plenty to do in this story. After the Armistice Ball , by Catriona McPherson -- The first volume in a new series set in the 1920s.  The detective is a nice, but not terribly exciting, wife an...

Toying With God: the World of Religious Games and Dolls , by Nikki Bado-Fralick and Rebecca Sachs Norris Religious games and toys exist for every belief and taste.  Here, I mainly learned about board games and dolls.  By page 9, I had a whole new wishlist featuring a Karma Chakra (a board game about Buddhism), the Plush Plagues Bag (includes all 10 Plagues!), and a sweet stuffed Ganesh.  My daughter now thinks Fulla is cuter than Barbie--Fulla looks exactly like Barbie, being made out of the same mold in the same factory, but she is tan, has dark eyes and no makeup, has less in the chest area, and she wears a hijab.  I really enjoyed the first couple of chapters, but after that it seemed like it had a lot of filler of the academic kind.  There was interesting analysis too, but not enough to balance out the filler.  So, that was kind of a disappointment.  At least I got a book off my library TBR list, which is gigantic.  I'm going to try to w...

K Blows Top: A Cold War Comic Interlude, Starring Nikita Khrushchev, America's Most Unlikely Tourist , by Peter Carlson This is a pretty irresistible book.  In 1959, at the height of the Cold War, President Eisenhower sort of accidentally invited Khrushchev to visit the United States for a couple of weeks.  The visit was a surreal media circus that defied belief!  It's amazing to read about.  All these unbelievable things happen and there's something new and strange every couple of pages. Khrushchev was a dictator responsible for the deaths of thousands (at least).  He was also a shameless ham who knew how to work a crowd and get laughs.  And he had a really bad temper and could destroy the world if he felt like it.   It was an interesting combination for the nervous Americans taking him around the country.  Carlson comments: [Khrushchev] recognized that his trip was not just a diplomatic journey; it was an opportunity to put on a TV sh...

Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey: the Lost Legacy of Highclere Castle , by the Countess of Carnarvon I've been seeing this history book all over the book blogs, and was happy to get a chance to read it.  This is the life story of Lady Almina, Countess of Carnarvon, and an exciting life it was.  The family, and the Carnarvon country seat of Highclere Castle, has been the inspiration for the hugely popular Downton Abbey TV series (which I have not yet seen the second season of, so no spoilers allowed!).  The current Countess took the opportunity to tell the real story of the Carnarvon family, which is much nicer and lacks backstabbing sisters or evil footmen. Almina Wombwell started off as a very pretty debutante with a  dubious background.  She was the natural daughter of somebody (Alfred de Rothschild), which made her very wealthy indeed but an outsider in Victorian England. Even so, young lords needed rich heiresses to keep their estates going, and ...

A Distant Mirror: the Calamitous 14th Century , by Barbara Tuchman The 14th century was pretty bad, and Barbara Tuchman is here to tell you all about it.  Her central focus is on France, which was the cultural center of medieval Europe in many ways, and she picks Enguerrand Coucy VII as a organizing central figure to follow.  The Sire of Coucy was an important lord involved in nearly everything that went on, and there is plenty of documentation about him.  That said, I don't think that the majority of the book is directly about Coucy; there is lots of background information and other stuff going on. Misery is piled upon misery in the 14th century; the Black Death, constant pointless warfare, brigandage that ruins towns, a papal schism, and a ruling class that requires ever more money and ostentation while impoverishing ordinary people and delivering nothing but bad government.  More than anything else, there is war--quite often war simply because the knights want...

The Convert: a Tale of Exile and Extremism , by Deborah Baker Deborah Baker found a box of letters and documents in a library archive and was drawn into the story of how Peggy Marcus, a Jewish girl from the suburbs, became Maryam Jameelah, a vocally conservative Muslim writer.  It was 1962 when Peggy changed to Maryam and left her New York hometown forever in order to live in Pakistan and help build an ideal Islamic society--which is pretty amazing when you consider that she didn't actually know any Muslims in her community.  The world she was born into could not have been further removed from what she wanted out of life.  The story is far more complex than it seems at first, though, and by the end I was left wondering about a lot of things. Maryam Jameelah's life story is hard to put down.  Baker braids together the letters, her research, history, and eventually meetings with Jameelah herself in an effort to understand it. I'm having a hard time figuring out w...

Where I live it doesn't yet feel like fall.  The heat has downgraded from really hot to pretty hot, and it gets dark earlier, but it's still summer.  However, my kids are planning Halloween costumes, the R. I. P. event is in full swing, and everyone is already announcing their October reading--so I'd better get on the ball and announce a Classics Club event. In October we'll be celebrating Gothic literature with read-alongs, profiles of famous Gothic novels, and an M. R. James story for every single day of the month!  o at Délaissé is hosting a readalong of The Mysteries of Udolpho and will be doing lots of exciting things, so go check out what she's up to.   Here at Howling Frog we will be doing the James-a-Day fun.  If you want to participate, run out and find a collection of his stories.  The complete stories are most easily found in a 2-volume Penguin edition , but there are several other editions, and smaller collections like Dover's re...

Katherine at November's Autumn posts: I love the have my radio tuned to King FM while I'm reading and sometimes the mood of the music perfectly suits what I'm reading.  This month's prompt is to select a piece of... Music ...that you feel reflects the book. Modern, classical, jazz, anything, it doesn't have to be from the period of the novel but share what it is about the piece that echoes the novel in some way. I wasn't going to do this one quite yet, because I'm not currently reading a classic of literature.  But I am reading a classic of history!  That would be Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century .  It's excellent, but long and dense and kind of depressing, since the 14th century was about as bad as it could have been.  The Black Death killed a third or more of the population, constant pointless warfare ruined the countryside and killed more people, bands of brigands roamed around pillaging towns and rui...

Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity, by Katherine Boo I don't think I've read many books like this.  Katherine Boo spent years visiting a shantytown slum in Mumbai getting to know the residents very well indeed, and eventually wrote their story.  She writes as though she was not there.  We get to know several neighboring families in the slum: a family that sorts garbage for a living, the very angry disabled woman next door, a politically-ambitious woman who wants to become the slumlord, her daughter who attends college and teaches children.  They all live next to a lake of sewage behind the Mumbai airport, and their place is called Annawadi. Boo's chronicle centers around an incident that causes huge trouble for Annawadi residents, stemming out of jealousy, anger, and ordinary neighborly bickering.  Everyone has their own story and hopes for a better life; it's amazing to read about how they mostly keep going, not just...

What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite , by David DiSalvo Who could resist this title?  Not me.  David DiSalvo explains what makes for a 'happy' brain (that is, a brain that avoids risk or loss or harm and therefore doesn't get killed or have to work too hard) and why these energy-saving, protective tendencies are both helpful and harmful.  When I first saw the title, I thought "Oh, it's a book about overcoming the natural man!"  (As in, Paul's 'natural man' image in the New Testament.)  Which it kind of is in some ways. Brains like habits, default patterns, and the easier road every time (also addictions).  But if you always do what your brain wants you to do, you'll wind up kind of unhappy, not to mention a lazy slob.  So DiSalvo spends this book coming up with a list of about 50 (!) strategies and tips for motivating yourself, thinking productively, and generally taking advantage of how your brain works. A str...

The Classics Club September Meme question asks: Pick a classic someone else in the club has read from our big review list . Link to their review and offer a quote from their post describing their reaction to the book. What about their post makes you excited to read that classic in particular? Confession: for years, I've been torn between wanting to read Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy and being far too intimidated by the size of the book.  It's something like 1500 pages long.  I even remember when it was first published; I was in college and saw it at the beautiful Morrison Library, where I used to go as often as I could (really, wouldn't you? ).  But it was too long to read while I took heavy literature classes, and anyway I always sort of figured it was too much for me.  Recently I've seen it mentioned here and there, and Amy's post at Book Musings finally pushed me over the edge and put A Suitable Boy on my official Classics Club reading list.   Amy s...

The Golden Legend , by Jacobus de Voraigne I am quite proud of myself for reading this whole thing!  The Golden Legend is a giant collection of saints' legends and histories.  My copy is just a selection of only 71 stories, which was quite enough.   The stories are interesting, but gory.  And somewhat repetitive.  And often more vengeful than a modern Christian might prefer, but after all much of it is medieval embroidery. For example, about St. Martin (My version is in modern English, thank goodness): And as he went he saw in a water birds that plunged in the water, which awaited and espied fishes and ate them, and then he said: In this manner devils espy fools, they espy them that be not ware, they take them that know not, but be ignorant, and devour them that be taken, and they may not be fulfilled ne satiate with them that they devour. And then he commanded them to leave the water, and that they should go into desert countries, and they as...