Howling Frog Books

O's December Readathon is running this weekend!  In between sewing, decorating, taking family pictures, and I don't even know what, here is what I will try to read: The Good Soldier Svejk : I'm about a third of the way through and having a lot of fun with Svejk.  Plus I'm trying to figure out how to pronounce Czech, which is quite a project. Quo Vadis : Last week I didn't quite want to read a Christmas book yet, so I started a book about early Christians in Rome.  It's great!  But kind of bad timing on my part.  I guess I'll read it very slowly. Return of the Native : I read the first 3 chapters today.  I'll do some more tomorrow. Oh, and I should read a Christmas book!

Hello fellow Greeklings, it's getting down to the wire!  If you're going to read any more Greek literature this year, you'd better do it soon!  Did any of you read some Greek over Thanksgiving?  Post it here.  Greek harvest festival of Karneia My Mr. Linky subscription has expired, and I'm not sure it's worth re-subscribing, so just go ahead and put links in the comments. I read The Republic and Book V of the Histories .

I had a great time reading Madame Bovary with Adriana from Classical Quest and Christina Joy at Classic Case of Madness .  They are reading their way through the Well-Educated Mind 's booklist, which is an excellent project, and they just finished Anna Karenina (which I really wanted to do but it was right during Gothic October, so I'm planning for it in 2013).  Now they're starting Thomas Hardy's Return of the Native , and I'm joining in again, yay! This book is divided into 6 sections, so I'll check in after every two.  I think that will work. I've read hardly any Hardy, except his most cheerful book, Under the Greenwood Tree .  So this will be new territory for me.  (Edit: I just remembered, I've also read Tess .) Am I going to get my heart broken?

Ha'penny , by Jo Walton I found out from Jordan that Jo Walton had written a trilogy.  I enjoyed Farthing a few years ago, but hadn't realized that there were two more books.  I thought Farthing was great, so that was good news. The Small Change Trilogy is a cozy-mystery series set in an alternate-history Britain, one that made peace with Nazi Germany in 1941.  Eight years later, the Western world is falling into an abyss of fascism, and Britons are largely apathetic, willing to blame communists and Jews for everything.  People have heard stories about the camps, but mostly refuse to believe them  Germany is all-powerful in Europe and still at war with the USSR. Carmichael is the link between the three stories.  He wants to be a decent man, but he's picking his way through a minefield of anti-Semitism, official fascism, and blackmail from his superiors, who know about Carmichael's own unapproved lifestyle.  He's losing himself. The story is ...

Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow , by Jerome K. Jerome Like every right-thinking literature devotee, I've read and enjoyed Three Men in a Boat .  I hadn't known that Jerome K. Jerome had written so many other things, but now I've downloaded several of them onto my tablet.  Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow has chapters that are short essays on this and that: "On the Weather," "On Cats and Dogs," On Memories," that sort of thing.  It's pretty good for bedside reading. I expected the essays to be funny, and they very often are.  I did not expect to find out how sentimental Jerome could be!  This book consists of at least 60% slush. Here is a bit I thought was pretty funny, from a chapter about the woes of shyness: Conceit, indeed, is the quickest cure for it [shyness]. When it once begins to dawn upon you that you are a good deal cleverer than any one else in this world, bashfulness becomes shocked and leaves you. When you can look roun...

Herodotus and I are back together again and I've read Book V of the Histories .  It was nice to get back into my giant book. We start off with a description of the Thracian people, who are numerous enough to conquer everyone else if they would just get their act together (he says), but they are too divided up.  There's a really terrible story about the Paeonians and how they were conquered and dragged off to the Persian empire.  Then a couple of very famous stories: one about a Macedonian prince who kills all the Persian envoys (probably not true, since there were no reprisals) and about how the Greeks got their writing system from the Phoenicians, which is apparently quite accurate. After that there is quite a lot about Sparta and its kings, and Athens and its tyrants, and both of their wars.  It was really quite confusing and I could have used a diagram.  I think Herodotus expects his readers to know a good deal about these people already, as of course t...

Seven Gothic Tales , by Isak Dinesen I know her real name was Karen Blixen, but I just always think of her as Isak Dinesen.  So that's what we're going with. In college I read a whole lot of Dinesen--nearly everything, I think.  I still have all her books on my shelf.  I thought it would be neat to re-read some of them for the Classics Club, to see how I like them now.  Seven Gothic Tales was Dinesen's first published book, so I started with that. Gothic in this case does not mean that there will be frowning Italian castles, dark passages, ominous priests, or ghosts.  (Well, there's one ghost.)  But here, Gothic means more elaborate, mysterious, Germanic-style-Romantic.  Considering that Dinesen was writing in the 1930s and 40s, she had a deliberately old-fashioned, baroque style to suit her stories that were set in the 19th century or before.  She actually wrote the stories in English and then translated them into her native Danish....

Jane and the Canterbury Tale , by Stephanie Barron I've read some of these Jane Austen mysteries before, and they're kind of fun.  This one has Miss Austen visiting her brother Edward.  They attend the wedding reception of a local couple, the bride being a very young widow.  But the next morning, her first husband shows up newly murdered and Jane has a complicated mystery on her hands. This was an OK book, but to be honest I probably wouldn't have bothered to read the whole thing if I hadn't happened to have a terrible sneezy allergy attack for half of yesterday (poor me, I couldn't taste the pie properly!).  I couldn't breathe and my head was completely stuffed up, so a brain-candy mystery was about all that I could handle.  The Regency slang and everyday detail is fun (very much like Georgette Heyer), and Barron makes strenuous efforts to fit the murder into the spaces between the lines of Jane Austen's documented life.  So it won't drive you to ...

The Broke and the Bookish has a Top Ten meme every week.  I meant to do this one days ago...actually you can probably guess most of them if you show up at Howling Frog very often.  But I have bread rising in the oven, and all the rest of my share of Thanksgiving cooking is done, so this seems like a good time. (Now that I've written the list, I see that I've cheated a bit.  Oops.) 10.  Jasper Fforde , for inventing the Bookworld and Tuesday Next.  Plock. 9.  For humor, Gerald Durrell and P. G. Wodehouse and yes, Daniel Pinkwater --I couldn't get along without them. 8.  Eleanor Farjeon , Elizabeth Goudge and Susan Cooper come in just under #7. 7.    L. M. Boston and E. Nesbit are the first really wonderful authors I can remember reading and absorbing as a kid. 6.  I've read exactly one Elizabeth von Arnim book in my life-- Enchanted April --but it came along just when I needed it. 5.  I don't really read Madel...

I like the UK cover better. Reflections: On the Magic of Writing , by Diana Wynne Jones This collection of speeches, essays, and bits and bobs from Diana Wynne Jones is wonderful, and you simply must have it if you're a DWJ person.  It's arranged chronologically, so that the earliest piece (a reflection on the nature of childhood and imagination) is from 1981, and the last pieces are a final interview from a few weeks before her death in 2011 and posthumous thoughts from her sons. Some of the essays and speeches have been easily available from the official Diana Wynne Jones website, so I was just happy to have them in a more easily readable format because I've already read them twice.  "Heroes" and "Inventing the Middle Ages" are both really interesting, for example. The majority of the pieces, though, were not easy to get at all.  Many were new to me.  There are wonderful essays on narrative, literary fashions, childhood, and fantasy.  (I re...

Socrates and Plato: a medieval portrait The Republic , by Plato One of Plato's most famous works shows Socrates in an incredibly long dialogue with friends, the main one being Glaucon.  Together they discuss the nature of justice and plan out the ideal city-state, one ruled by philosopher-kings.  They also cover some other topics such as different forms of government, the theory of Forms, and the immortality of the soul.  "The Cave" is also part of the dialogue, as Socrates illustrates how men see the world and then how a philosopher sees truth. This work has had an immense effect on Western civilization.  I find this rather worrying, since there was almost nothing in the whole book that I agreed with, not even the definition of what justice is.  I kept feeling like Kermit the Frog in The Great Muppet Caper :  "You know, that's amazing.  You are 100% wrong.  I mean, nothing you've said has been right." After much discussion, Socrates and...

O is celebrating the start of December with a nice weekend readathon on the 1st and 2nd.   I will certainly not be able to spend all of that weekend reading, but I can try to spend my free time reading instead of footling about on the Internet.  By then I'll be well into a candy-making marathon and will probably be sewing like mad between batches of fondant or truffles, so we'll see how it goes.  But look, a pretty picture! I'll post pictures of Christmas candy too, in case anyone wants to see how it's done. I have some really neat books on my pile and I'm feeling free to read them!  Plus I have 2 more books to read before I can finish off my challenges for the year--I'm almost done with Plato but after that I need to read more Herodotus and one more medieval book.  I'm having trouble picking which one (Eneas?  Marco Polo?  The one about Wales?  The Venerable Bede?) so I haven't started yet. I just started a classic of Czech literatur...

Clearly I need to have a little fun and read something nice.  So I'm joining Michelle at her Spirit of Christmas blog for the annual Christmas reading challenge.  The rules: challenge will run from Monday, November 19, 2012 through Sunday, January 6, 2013 (Twelfth Night or Epiphany). cross over with other challenges is totally permitted AND encouraged! These must be Christmas novels, books about Christmas lore, a book of Christmas short stories or poems, books about Christmas crafts, and for the first time...a children's Christmas books level! visit this  POST  for a list of new Christmas books for 2012.  There are a lot of good ones coming out this year, including the new Richard Paul Evans novel, A Winter Dream (I just got it yesterday!). Levels:              --Candy Cane:   read 1 book              --Mistletoe: ...

Night , by Elie Wiesel In order to round out my week of memoirs about war and oppression and misery, I read Elie Wiesel's Night --probably the second most famous Holocaust memoir there is.  It's been on my TBR pile for years and I've always rather avoided it. Wiesel was born in the Transylvania area of Romania.  I was quite surprised to find that his town was largely untouched by the war for years; it wasn't until 1944 that the Jewish population was evacuated by German soldiers.  It was at this point that Wiesel, who was 15, and the rest of his community was taken off to Auschwitz.  They had never heard of it. Wiesel and his father were assigned to a work team at Buna camp, and they managed to stick together for a long time.  As Germany's defeat loomed, the camps were evacuated and inmates taken further into Germany, and the two ended in Buchenwald.  Wiesel's father died there, only a couple of months before the camp was liberated in April 1945. I d...

Enchanted , by Alethea Kontis I haven't been reading much YA lately but I'm glad I picked this one up.  It's like a game of "how many fairy tales can we cram into this story?"  and it's a good read. Sunday Woodcutter has a large and talented family.  They eke out an existence at the edge of the Wood, relying on their talents and lots of hard work to survive.  Sunday is a dreamer, and she would write stories, except that when she writes something down, it comes true--badly.  So she only writes down the past.  And then one day she meets a talking frog and falls in love with him. Exciting, not too mushy, and a reasonable book to give to your younger teen while you try to stave off the Twilight phase.  Mind you it's not an amazingly original work that puts a new twist in the re-written fairy-tale genre, and of course it has a girl in a pretty ballgown on the cover (there are at least ballgowns in the story!)...but it's a perfectly good story that I ...

Escape from Camp 14 , by Blaine Harden Shin Dong-Hyuk is the only known person who was born in a North Korean prison camp and escaped.  Only a few people have escaped at all, but the rest have known something about the world outside the camps.  Shin knew virtually nothing, not even the usual North Korean propaganda, and he had never been outside his prison. (I'm not sure why the author calls him Shin all the time, since that's his family name.) North Korea, and its prison camps, are not something that we talk about much.  For one thing, we know very little, though that is now changing as the border with China has become more porous and there are people who go in and record news on tiny memory sticks.  Still, though, we don't know much, and we know less about prison camps. We do know that the prison camp system is large, and in it people are fed a starvation diet and slowly worked to death.  Kim Il-Sung not only established gulags, he not only imprisoned ...

Goodbye to All That , by Robert Graves The War Between the Generations WWI Challenge has put a lot of books on my wishlist this year, and here is one of them.  Robert Graves, a fairly well-known author and poet ( I, Claudius, The Greek Myths, and The White Goddess are the most famous), served as an officer in World War I.  This is a memoir of his life from childhood until about age 30: "...my bitter leave-taking of England where I had recently broken a good many conventions; quarrelled with, or been disowned by, most of my friends; been grilled by the police on a suspicion of attempted murder; and ceased to care what anyone thought of me."  This is partly a reference to the events and subsequent scandal that led to the breakup of his marriage.  He left England for Majorca and stayed there for most of the rest of his life.  It turns out that the 1957 edition I read was an edited version, with all the scandal bits and a good deal of the venom taken out....

Sciencia: Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, and Astronomy For All , ed. John Martineau Last year I reviewed Quadrivium , a collection of small books from Wooden Books about the four branches of knowledge belonging to the quadrivium.  This book is its twin: 6 books about the main branches of science.  The format is just the same, consisting of lovely little two-page spreads of illustrated text that take the reader through a condensed overview of the subject.  Again, the ink color changes from brown to green to purple, and it's nicely arranged so that the biology pages are greenish and the astronomy pages are navy and violet.  It's so pretty that to look at it is to desire it. This makes a great bedside book.  I've had it there for months now and it's easy to pick it up and read a few pages whenever I feel like it, whereas it gets overwhelming to try to sit down and read it right through.  There is too much information for that. The material is ...

Mrs. Ames , by E. F. Benson E. F. Benson is most famous for his Mapp & Lucia series, which I have not yet read.  But since I am always attracted by books in the Bloomsbury Group series, I went looking for Mrs. Ames , which is an earlier work from 1912--a satire of ultra-respectable English life from before anyone thought about a war. Life in Riseborough village is very tightly constrained, and Mrs. Ames is the queen bee, "sceptre firmly grasped in her podgy little hand."  Nearly everyone is middle-aged and comfortably living in a rut of gossip, social engagements, clubs, and minor hobbies.  Mrs. Ames realizes that her husband's eye is straying just a little bit to her cousin Mrs. Evans, and she starts to make some changes.  Before long she is bursting out all over with changes. I really enjoyed the book, and it has some great scenes and characters.  I particularly love Harry, Mrs. Ames son at Cambridge, who has a secret club (the Omar Khayyam), writes...

The Merlin Conspiracy , by Diana Wynne Jones It was time for some comfort reading, and The Merlin Conspiracy was very nice to have this week.  It's sort of a sequel to Deep Secret , in that it takes place in the same uni multiverse, but you don't actually have to have read Deep Secret to love The Merlin Conspiracy . We have two narrators: Roddy, who lives on the Isles of Blest and travels with the King's Progress (and is a teenage girl), and Nick, who lives in our world's England and wants to learn magic.  Somehow he winds up on the dark paths between worlds.  His and Roddy's stories make a helix pattern, twining around each other ever more closely. Blest is a fulcrum of magic for the multiverse, so it's very important that its King takes good care of the land and makes sure nothing goes wrong with the balance of magic.  His chief advisors and magicians, though, intend to make things go very wrong indeed, and Roddy, with her friend Grundo, are the only o...

Warning to the West, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn I just recently got the Solzhenitsyn Reader , and I'd been hoping that these speeches were included in that book, but they weren't.  In fact it kind of cheats in my opinion, in that large swathes of the book are excerpts from The Gulag Archipelago and other gigantic works, and I'd been hoping for lots of essays and speeches collected in one place.  I should really know better than to get readers--my medieval literature professor used to dismiss them as collections of "gobbets" and I've never found her wrong about it.  Anyway I got Warning to the West through ILL, on the theory that I can't start the whole reader right now anyway. This book consists of the text of 5 speeches given to the Americans and to the British in 1975 and 1976.  Solzhenitsyn tries (and tries, and tries) to warn his listeners that while the leadership of the USSR might be saying nice things about detente, in fact they are as violent...

Lectures on Literature , by Vladimir Nabokov In 1940, before launching on my academic career in America, I fortunately took the trouble of writing one hundred lectures--about 2,000 pages--on Russian literature, and later another hundred lectures on great novelists from Jane Austen to James Joyce.  This kept me happy at Wellesley and Cornell for twenty academic years. And here they are!  I read the first volume, which is the one not about Russian literature; unfortunately my library doesn't have the second volume, so I will have to get it from somewhere or other.  These are lectures on Austen, Dickens, Flaubert, Stevenson, Proust, Kafka, and Joyce.  Very often they've been sort of reconstituted from notes, and my volume includes reproductions of quite a few pages of those notes--drawings and diagrams as well as writing.  This is a nice addition, but it also makes the volume even heavier and more cumbersome than it already was, so I'm not sure how worthwhile i...

The Dharma Bums , by Jack Kerouac I always think I won't like Jack Kerouac,* but then when I actually read one of his books, I do like it.  At least, that's what happened with On the Road and Dharma Bums .  Still, my ignorance on all things Kerouac is pretty comprehensive, and I had never heard of this book at all until very recently.  I was rather delighted by it, though, because (here I go again) there is a beatnik coffee shop in one of my favorite books called The Dharma Buns, and I had never gotten the joke before. Dharma Bums is one of Kerouac's autobiographical "road novels" and comes from a time when he and his friends were very into Buddhism.  Kerouac's character, Ray Smith, hops freight trains and hitchhikes, traveling around or living with friends for a while.  He spends a lot of time with Japhy, based on Kerouac's friend Gary Snyder, and they are Dharma Bums together.  Their city life--consisting of wild parties with other poets and worris...

"Aristotle" by Francisco Hayez.  Finally, I've actually completed a book from my own challenge!  It's taken me ridiculously long to finish this not-very-long book; I kind of got bogged down in the dull middle section. Aristotle starts out defining different types of rhetoric and what they are for.  Those guys really liked to get everything categorized very carefully, and while I rather appreciate that, they take it awfully far!  For quite a while, he analyzes different feelings or actions--who feels them and why--such as happiness, pity, anger, enmity, and so on.  That got pretty old, but then he moved on to much more interesting material about how to argue a court case.  Nearly everything he said applied to judicial rhetoric, really, and he didn't say much about the other two categories. I know this is the foundational rhetorical textbook, and that lots of people still recommend it.  I don't really think it's useful for moderns as a book to te...

Katherine at November's Autumn asks : Of all the Classics you've read this year is there an author or movement that has become your new favorite? Which book did you enjoy the most? Or were baffled by? Who's the best character? The most exasperating? From reading other participants' posts which book do you plan to read and are most intrigued by? Doctor Zhivago, Madame Bovary, and The Age of Innocence were all favorites this year, and all were new authors to me.  I will be reading more Edith Wharton for sure, and will re-read the other two, but I'm not sure that I will read Pere Goriot or much more Flaubert, but o at Delaisse wrote about The Dictionary of Received Ideas and that sounds like something I want to read.  I don't know what else by Pasternak to read--he wrote a lot of poetry, so maybe My Sister, Life, which is a major poetic classic in Russia?  Labyrinths was pretty baffling, but I liked it too.  The Master and Margarita was...

This month's discussion question at the Classics Club is: What classic piece of literature most intimidates you, and why? (Or, are you intimidated by the classics, and why? And has your view changed at all since you joined our club?) I'm getting less intimidated all the time, and I'd say that's partly because of the Classics Club.  A lot of my reading this year (overall, not just CC reading) has made me get more selective and purposeful about what I read.   I've gotten to read some wonderful classic-type books that I once would have made less of a priority and then failed to actually read. However, there are still plenty of classics to be scared of.  All of mine are long.  I like the instant gratification of books that are shorter than 500 pages long, and tend to get distracted over the long haul, and the next thing I know I've forgotten what's going on and I quit.  So: Anna Karenina , which I really really want to read.  And then War and Peace ....

A Homemade Life: Stories and Recipes From My Kitchen Table , by Molly Wizenberg I've finally managed to find a food book to finish off the Mixing It Up Challenge!  Maybe after I read all those gardening and food books last year, I was just done for a while.  Anyway, challenge complete. Molly Wizenberg writes a food blog, and as is so often the case, a book resulted.  (The book is not, so far as I know, made up of blog posts.)  Each short chapter talks about a piece of Wizenberg's life and then provides an accompanying recipe.  It's mostly autobiographical; she talks about her childhood and her parents--especially her dad--college, relationships, time in Paris, and eventually meeting and marrying her husband (who she actually met through her blog). There are some great recipes included, many of which are interesting or different, not just your usual thing.  I'm copying several.  There is not so much in the way of philosophizing about the joys of h...