Howling Frog Books

Murder in the Cathedral , by T. S. Eliot To wrap up Modern March, I saved the play "Murder in the Cathedral" for last.   Eliot first wrote it in 1935 for the Canterbury Festival, and subsequently lengthened and changed it a bit.  The edition I read was the 4th and final, from 1938 (I presume, since my paperback is from 1963). This is a dramatization of the murder of Thomas a Becket in December of 1170, by knights of Henry II.  The form is much like a Greek play; most of the lines are in verse, and there is a chorus of poor women of Canterbury.  It's also, I think, like a medieval mystery play.  It is not divided into acts, but into two parts and an interlude. First we see Thomas return from seven years' exile on the Continent.  After the women and the priests, he is assailed by three tempters who try to turn him from his path.  I thought the tempters were really interesting; each speaks in a different poetic style, and the second one talks...

From Ritual to Romance , by Jessie L. Weston I blame T. S. Eliot for this.  References to "The Waste Land" constantly mentioned how the poem was partly inspired by Weston's landmark book about the legend of the Holy Grail, and put me in the mood to read it myself (and the same for Frazer's Golden Bough , which is now sitting by my bed).  I have an old paperback of this book, which I read partway through back in college when I was auditing a course on Arthurian literature because it was given by my favorite professor.  So when I opened the book again, I found a bookmark: a ticket to a 1995 performance of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead , which I remember enjoying very much.  I must have seen it just before meeting my now-husband. So.  In 1920, Jessie Weston published the result of her decades of study (she was 70 at the time): a sort of anthropological and folkloric study of the roots of the Grail legend, with special emphasis on the mysterious figure o...

"The Hollow Men," by T. S. Eliot I wanted to read this poem in the same way that I read "The Waste Land."  I found an annotated version online, read it through once, then read it while checking every annotation, and finally read it once more while trying to keep all that in mind. "The Hollow Men" draws from four different sources: Dante's Divine Comedy , Conrad's Heart of Darkness , Julius Caesar , and the Gunpowder Plot of 1605.  As in "The Waste Land" (and probably every other serious poem he produced),  Eliot writes in a densely allusive way that requires a lot of study to begin to grasp. It seems to me to be a lament for the modern man--Eliot sees himself and others as lacking in substance, with no more depth or soul than a scarecrow stuffed with straw.  As they die, these men cross over to the next world, but are prevented from going anywhere much because they failed to make a choice; they lived as shadows and will continue to ...

The Moving Toyshop , by Edmund Crispin I don't know what blogger first mentioned Edmund Crispin, but I've been hoping to read something by him ever since.  Luckily for me, my mom found The Moving Toyshop. The story belongs to Richard Cadogan, a respected but poverty-stricken poet who heads off to Oxford on a holiday.  He blunders into a murder scene in a toyshop, but when he leads police back to the shop, it's a grocery store and there's no body.  Enter Cadogan's old friend, Professor Gervase Fen, who solves mysteries in his spare time! The mystery was quite good, in the cozy British tradition.  But it's the fun that really makes the story.  The characters are eccentric or engaging, and the detectives are forever coming up with oddball quotations, solving clues with Lear limericks, or--best of all--playing literary games like "Awful Lines from Shakespeare" or "Detestable Characters from Fiction."  For example: “Let’s play ‘Unreadable...

March isn't quite over yet and you still have time to read Archer's Goon or Hexwood .  I just thought I would wrap up now and direct you over to Neil Gaiman's tribute --written two years ago--and Kristen's final post . This fantastic watercolor painting is by Goldeen Ogawa.  Check out her fun post on HMC! I have been reading Howl's Moving Castle aloud to my kids, in particular the 9yo (who is almost 10, ack!).  My younger daughter is notoriously picky about what she reads and usually refuses to open any book she doesn't already know she will like.  The solution is to read her new books aloud, so she gets hooked on them without having to take the plunge herself.  Howl's Moving Castle makes a wonderful read-aloud--the humor comes through wonderfully and it's just really fun. I hope you've had some fun with DWJ Month, and I'm looking forward to next year already.  Maybe by then I'll have something neat to show off.

The Pope Who Quit , by Jon M. Sweeney This has been my gym book for a little while now and it turned out more timely than I expected! A bit over 700 years ago, a Pope quit his job and walked away, after just 5 months.  His action sent shockwaves through the Christian world--could a Pope even do that?  But it was also a relief, because Celestine V was not suited to the position at all.  Sweeney documents the whole story, and then some. Peter Morrone, the man who became Celestine V, was a dedicated ascetic monk.  Like Simon the Stylite and other hermits, he longed for a life of solitude and difficulty dedicated to prayer and contemplation.  In his middle years he founded a new religious order of hermits, but he always wanted to get further away and live even more ascetically.  By 1292, he was living in a cave at the top of a rugged mountain and always trying to get away from the monks who followed him up there.  When cardinals failed for over two...

Uniflame posted this morning about a new (to her) meme she came across called "What's on Your Workdesk Wednesday."  You post a picture of whatever you're working on at the moment and link back to the host at Stamping Ground.   I thought that was fun, so here is what I'm working on: This is going to be a rather fancy wall quilt. One smocked baby dress, now in construction, and one little-girl dress being smocked.

Bev at My Reader's Block is having a check-in.  She has two requirements: 1. Tell us how many miles you've made it up your mountain (# of books read).  If you're really ambitious, you can do some intricate math and figure out how the number of books you've read correlates to actual miles up Pike's Peak, Mt. Ararat, etc. And feel free to tell us about any particularly exciting adventures you've had along the way. So far I have only read 6 TBR titles!  I am not doing so hot. Anna Karenina, b y Lev Tolstoy The Middle Window, by Elizabeth Goudge The Portrait of a Lady, by Henry James  The Souls of Black Fo lk, by W. E. B. Du Bois   The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man The Chemical History of a Candle , by Michael Farad ay   2. Complete ONE (or more if you like) of the following:   A. Post a picture of your favorite cover so far.  B. Who has been your favorite character so far? And tell us why, if you like. ...

The Limpopo Academy of Private Detection , by Alexander McCall Smith The latest installment in the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series continues on its path of quiet appreciation for life and small mysteries that are almost a sideline to the story.  This time, things are going badly wrong.  One of the mechanics has been arrested for a crime, and Mma Potokwane, the director of the orphanage, is being dismissed.  Mma Ramotswe must set things right, and she has an unexpected ally: Clovis Andersen himself has come to visit!  He has a secret of his own too. I like these books. 

Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate , by Greg Lukianoff I've been way behind on my posts lately, which is fine except that I want to tell you lots of stuff and this way, by the time I write the post I've forgotten too much. Well, this book came out very recently and I happened to see a video interview with the author online.  I've followed some FIRE things before and I knew I needed the book immediately!  Luckily it had just been purchased at work and so I got it right away. Lukianoff is a lawyer who has specialized in the First Amendment.  He is part of a small group called FIRE: The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, which is active in helping students and faculty who have had their First Amendment rights infringed by their universities.   You can visit FIRE and see the sort of thing they do here.   It would be lovely if FIRE was not needed in the higher education world, but oh my it certainly is.  ...

"The Waste Land," by T. S. Eliot For Modern March I promised myself that I would read T. S. Eliot's poem "The Waste Land."  I actually read it way back at the beginning of the month, but like a good classical student I read it 3 times, which took a while. I used this annotated copy , which was very helpful.  First I read it straight through without much preparation, then I read it with all the notes, and then I read it through again, keeping the notes in mind.  It was hard work!  I'm not really a poetry person, and I'm especially not a modernist poetry person. The poem is thickly allusive, so that every line refers to something else.  Lots of mythology, literature, songs, all sorts of things.  There is a lot about birds, and water. Many different voices say things, and they mostly seem to be women.  Women keep showing up in similar circumstances; they are tired and used by men who have no interest in their welfare.  (Even Eliot's wife makes ...

The Classics Club March Meme is: Do you love Jane Austen or want to “dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone”? (Phrase borrowed from Mark Twain). Why? (for either answer)? Favorite and/or least favorite Austen novel? I am a thorough Austen enthusiast.  I love her language, her delicate satire, her realistic (but humorous) portrayal of her society, and how she manages to protest against that society while simultaneously poking fun at it and remaining a practically-minded matter-of-fact Georgian--- all at the same time . I suspect that Miss Austen must have been one of the first novelists to have female heroines who were real people with faults and moral failings to overcome.  The predecessors of Emma Woodhouse and Lizzie Bennett were more like Clarissa Harlowe or Evelina Anville: angelically good and beautiful girls whose virtue lay in their passivity.  What a contrast! I never know which book is my favorite, but Sense & Sensibility a...

India: A Sacred Geography , by Diana L. Eck I took a very long time with this book--I think I started it at the new year.  Eck tackles Hinduism: a fascinating religious system that is so vast, ancient, complex, and variable that it is impossible for any one person to even come close to fully understanding it.  Here, she focuses on the geographical nature of Hinduism, which is (as you would expect) deeply rooted in the landscape of India.  Every mountain, river, city and village has its special story, and pilgrimage--visiting spots connected with certain stories-- is an important part of Hinduism.  Pilgrimages may range from day-trips to local places to long journeys like walking the entire shoreline of a river, visiting linked places around the country, or even circling all of India on foot. (I had not realized that pilgrimage was such an important aspect of Hinduism.  Right after I started this book and began to learn about Hindu pilgrimage, I watched a Bol...

Naked Once More, by Elizabeth Peters Jacqueline Kirby is back, in her final adventure!  (Unless Elizabeth Peters decides to write one more?  Maybe?)  I don't think I have read this one before, except that the cover looks awfully familiar...but I remember reading all the other Jacqueline stories and not this one at all. Jacqueline gave up being a librarian when she discovered how much more money she could make by writing best-selling historical romances, even if she poked some fun at them while writing.  Now she's on the short list to be chosen to write the sequel to the amazing best-seller Naked in the Ice --a cross between Clan of the Cave Bear and Kingdom of Thrones , it sounds like.  The author, Kathleen Darcy, disappeared seven years ago and has been presumed dead. Jacqueline is trying to figure out just how to write the sequel to one of the greatest romances ever written, but Kathleen's mysterious fate keeps distracting her, and suspicious accidents...

Death of a Harvard Freshman , by Victoria Silver I picked up this semi-trashy mystery in the student study center while waiting for a meeting to start.   It was on a bookshelf where you can leave or take a book, that sort of thing.  Here we have Lauren, a freshman at Harvard who is taking a small seminar on the Russian Revolution.  She and her fellow students do not seem all that bright, nor do they spend a whole lot of time studying, so I don't know why Silver set it at Harvard except that she must have liked the scenery.  Instead they spend all their time scoping each other out, gossiping, or taking drugs.  Anyway, one day the seminar discusses the death of Rasputin, and that very night Lauren's favorite crush, Russell, is murdered in a suspiciously similar fashion. Lauren is the only one who knows that the murderer must be one of the 9 remaining students in her seminar.  Who could it be?  And why was he killed?  She must investigate ...

Just a quick note to tell you to take a peek at Kristen's blog--she is hosting a giveaway of some Howl's Moving Castle themed jewelry!

The Chemical History of a Candle , by Michael Faraday First I have to tell you about my copy of this book.  It's a discard from one of the local elementary school libraries and it's pretty old.  I must have gotten it from my mom, and who knows where she picked it up.  When I started reading it, there was a slip of paper pasted inside the cover that says, "This book purchased under the National Defense Education Act (NDEA) Science Pilot Project for 1962-63 school year."   How cool is that?  Sputnik gave me a book! Michael Faraday, the great scientist, lived and worked at the Royal Institution for most of his adult life.  In 1825 he started an annual Christmas tradition of giving a series of lectures for children.  This tradition continues today and you can even watch them online now .  The Chemical History of a Candle was one such series, and was transcribed and printed in 1861. It's a neat little book to read.  Faraday was clearly b...

Farmer Boy , by Laura Ingalls Wilder I bet I am not the only person who loved the stories about Laura and Mary, but always skipped Farmer Boy out of a conviction that it would be boring.  Well people I WAS WRONG.  Farmer Boy is fantastic. This story tells about a year in Almanzo Wilder's life as a boy--from age 9 to 10.  His parents own a farm and are well-to-do; they are also careful, thrifty, and hard-working.  Almanzo is now old enough to go to school, but most of the time he would rather be working with his father, especially if it involves horses.  There are some great stories--how the mild-mannered schoolteacher deals with a pack of tough young men who pride themselves on breaking up the school every year, how Almanzo trains his team of young oxen, and what happens when the parents go on a ten-day visit and leave the children in charge of the farm.  Oh, and there's a great chapter about returning a lost wallet. What really struck me about the ...

Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man , by James Weldon Johnson  It's been a while since I read this novel, and now I don't have as much to say about it as I should.  This is an early African-American novel; it was first published anonymously in 1912 and didn't make much of a splash.  At that time, novels about black culture and experience did not sell as well as memoirs and autobiographies, which did very well indeed, and that may have been partly why it was written and titled as a memoir.  It was re-published in 1927 to much more acclaim, and by that time Johnson was quite well-known. The story is written as if it were a memoir.  The protagonist does not name himself at all, telling his story from the first person and never revealing his name.  He writes his story simply.  As a young boy his mother raised him carefully and trained him in music, and he only saw his white father once or twice.  He plans to go to university, but ends up working in...

The Prince and Other Modern Fables , by Rabindranath Tagore I've wanted to read Tagore for a long time, but am always very nervous about actually doing it.  After all, I'm not really very good at poetry--and Tagore writes poetry in Bengali, which brings it to a whole new level of difficulty, right?.   I ran into this little book of fables at work, and I thought it might work as a nice introduction to Tagore.  And so it did.  I am looking forward to trying more of his work. This is a collection of little stories--not quite fairy tales, but fables in the sense that they are short imaginative stories, like folktales but written by an author.  They do not feature animals in peoples' places, like Aesop's fables.  You could read most of them to a child.  They are lovely little tales, and if you can find a copy, spend an hour or so reading them. The stories were originally written as prose poems, and Tagore said that he didn't arrange them as poetr...

Impossible Things , by Connie Willis I found myself on blog hiatus when life got super-busy and the kids got sick at pretty much the same time.  The kids are still sick--they are on the couch watching Tintin cartoons right now--but I think I can tell you a bit about the many books I've got lined up for posts! Last week I was struck down with a cold and spent most of the day on the couch.  Kristen R. happened to post that morning about reading Impossible Things and mentioned a particular story, and I own Impossible Things, so I went to read the story, and the next thing I knew I'd read the whole collection.  A dose of Connie Willis was just what I needed to help the day go by. This is a collection of some of Willis' best SF stories; a couple of them have won prizes.  They are a varied lot--there are some really funny ones, some tragic, and some just strange. "Ado" is a literary story a bit like "Harrison Bergeron."  "Time Out" has time tra...

The Woman Who Died a Lot , by Jasper Fforde Yay, the new Thursday Next book!  Thursday's last set of adventures have rendered her unable to jump into the Bookworld, and the government has dissolved most of SpecOps, so she is looking for a new job.  She is appointed as Head of the Wessex Libraries, and you know in Thursday's world, libraries are very important.  They also have their own military arm, and a bunch of secret vaults, which is pretty much how the world should really work, right? Meanwhile, the rest of the world has gone mad--well, madder than usual.  Goliath is up to something again, involving worthless medieval manuscripts and clones.  ChronoGuard has been dissolved and young Friday is suddenly out of a future.  Swindon is scheduled for a full-scale smiting from heaven in less than a week.  And Aornis Hades is on the loose again. As usual, Thursday's new adventure is insane and wonderful and fun, with some really weird literary joke...

Kristen at We Be Reading asked me to do a guest post for her on what is so great about DWJ.  This is my attempt to answer the question.  You can see it at Kristen's blog here . I can remember the first DWJ book I read--in 6th grade--and even exactly where it lived on the shelf at my school's library.  It was Witch's Business , DWJ's first published children's book from 1973, and the school copy had a dusty purple cloth cover.  It's not one of her best books (though when I re-read it last year I was surprised to realize how good it actually is) but even so it must have made quite an impression on me.  I don't have that kind of memory for any other books from school. In junior high the public library had a few more DWJ titles.  I remember reading Howl's Moving Castle, Witch Week, and The Magicians of Caprona (which had an amazingly ugly cover even for a DWJ book).  I must have continued to read whatever I could get my hands on, because b...

The Homeward Bounders , by Diana Wynne Jones "You are now a discard. We have no further use for you in play. You are free to walk the Bounds as you please, but it will be against the rules for you to enter play in any world. To ensure you keep this rule, you will be transferred to another field of play every time a move ends in the field where you are.  The rules also state that you are allowed to return Home if you can.  If you succeed in returning Home, then you may enter play again in the normal manner." This is one of DWJ's older and lesser-known books, but I wish it would come back into print again; it's a great story.  Jamie is a tough Victorian city kid who likes to explore, and he pokes around a little too much.  He finds Them , who play his world as a game and impose rules on it, and They discard Jamie, telling him that he must wander the Bounds forever, unless he can find his way home.  He finds himself an exile, thrown from world to world....

The Prada Paradox , by Julie Kenner I have a whole pile of books to tell you about!  I've been sick, so blogging has been neglected, but I've read a bunch of books--nothing too heavy, though, since my brain hasn't been working very well. The Prada Paradox is the third in the trilogy that started with The Givenchy Code , in which a mysterious someone takes the hit video game Play.Survive.Win into the real world.  This time, things are a bit different; Devi is a movie star who has the lead role in the film version of Givenchy Code-- a project that Melanie hopes will help other victims step forward and maybe solve the mystery of who's running this thing.  A few weeks into filming, Devi is drawn into the PSW game for real, and her designated assassin is a deranged fan who has terrorized her before.  The clues are, of course, movie-related and take Devi all over Los Angeles. It's a fun and clever thriller that finishes off the trilogy nicely.

My dad's photo of a tulip tree. It's March!  I hope you are getting some spring where you are; here, it is my favorite time of year.  The first signs of spring here are daffodils and early-blooming trees--different varieties of early fruit trees, tulip trees, and most especially the almond orchards.  (Tulip trees are a kind of magnolia with pink or white flowers that bloom before the leaves show up; they are all over town and they're spectacular.) And since it's March, it's DWJ month!  Kristen M at We Be Reading is hosting , and she'll have guest posts every Tuesday and Thursday.  Watch for mine on the 7th!  There will also be giveaways; I'll keep you posted on those. Kristen is hosting TWO readalongs.   Howl's Moving Castle starts on the 15th and will feature a watchalong of the Miyazaki film on Twitter.  Check her post for details and keep in mind the tag #howlalong.  A Tale of Time City starts on the 29th so we can finish the mo...

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn , by Mark Twain Huck Finn is the latest WEM book (you can follow along at Classic Case of Madness *).  I think I read it in 8th grade and didn't get the dialect or the jokes, so it was pretty much like reading it for the first time.  I enjoyed it so much!  A lot of it is just really fun. The story is that Huck's dad, the town drunk, shows up again and makes Huck's life a misery, so Huck takes off on the river.  He meets up with Jim, a slave and a friend of his who is now a runaway.  Together they travel down the Mississippi River on a raft, having adventures and getting into scrapes and generally tearing up the the countryside.   Much of it is very funny, and some of it is tragic. Alongside and underneath the fun is Huck's gradual realization that Jim--who Huck has always been strictly taught is beneath him in every way--is a real person.  It takes him the whole book, and you can see it happening.  By...