Howling Frog Books

I think it is pretty hilarious that April's question for day 12 is: How do you fight blogger fatigue? And this is my first post in a week.  Ahem.  But it wasn't really blogger fatigue, so much as life: I'm in the middle of 2 super-long books so I don't have much to post about (though I do have one finished title to write up, so it's not that much of an excuse), we're getting settled into our school routine and I am running a new science group that is taking lots of time, and I started back at work this week too.  I've hardly been on the computer, but I have been making strenuous efforts to set aside reading time, so I'm happy about that. Really, I might deal with blogger fatigue in a few ways: I am OK with taking a week off to do something else; though I usually do like to produce a fairly steady stream of posts, I dislike making myself stick to a strict schedule.  If this becomes a job, it's no fun anymore and then I won't want to d...

Today April at Good Books and Good Wine wants me to show off five of my best blog posts.  I went through my archive--though I left out my first year on the theory that it probably wasn't that great--and picked some favorites.  Here you go: My post on What Makes Diana Wynne Jones Magical from DWJ March of this year.  I can't say it does any justice whatsoever to the amazingness of DWJ, because I am not that articulate, but I tried. In January, I co-hosted a children's literature event.   This post on 19th-century illustrators was fun to write. I love books like Pink and Blue , with lots of cultural history and information about clothing. Last October I read The Castle of Otranto for a Gothic novel event.  I had fun reading it and writing what I hope was a sort of humorous post. I'm including this one because I'm such a sucker for ancient British history and antiquarians: Ancient British Trackways. Bonus post: I had a really good time writing up a ...

Today April wants to know how I choose what book to read next. Mood, mostly.  I have my TBR/classics pile, and a bunch of books out of the library, and I choose according to what mood I'm in.  Since I always have several going at once, it's easy to make room for another one if I really want to read it right away. I also follow along, mostly, with the WEM Ladies' reading list, if it's something I haven't read and want to read.  Right now they're doing Native Son , and I've read that so I'm skipping it this time. Since I'm signed up for lots of challenges, that gives me plenty to pick from, plus of course whatever I happen to want to read just because.  

I have finished Sarah's Back to the Classics Challenge!  This year, there were 6 required categories and 5 optional categories.  I did all of them: The Required Categories: A 19th Century Classic-- T he Red and the Black, by Stendhal A 20th Century Classic-- Botchan , by Natsume Soseki  A Pre-18th or 18th Century Classic-- Pamela , by Samuel Richardson A Classic that relates to the African-American Experience - The Souls of Black Folk , by W. E. B. DuBois A Classic Adventure-- Last of the Mohicans , by James Fenimore Cooper A Classic that prominently features an Animal - My Family and Other Animals , by Gerald Durrell Optional Categories:     A.   Re-read a Classic-- Sense and Sensibility , by Jane Austen     B.   A Russian Classic-- In the First Circle, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn     C.   A Classic Non-Fiction title-- The Life of Olaudah Equiano , by Himself     D.   ...

My Family and Other Animals , by Gerald Durrell In order to finish Sarah's Back to the Classics challenge , I was supposed to come up with a book having something to do with animals.  This stumped me.  Look at my CC list--nary a critter to be found.  So I wandered around my bookshelf and found one of my all-time ever favorite books. Gerald Durrell was a famous naturalist, and started one of the first conservation zoos in the world-- Durrell Wildlife Park on Jersey Island.   He publicized and partly financed his conservation efforts by writing books about his adventures with animals, and My Family and Other Animals is probably the most famous of them. For five years in the 1930s, the entire Durrell family lived on the Greek island of Corfu.  This consisted of Mrs. Durrell, widow; pompous Larry,* gun-obsessed Leslie, fashion-conscious Margo, and Gerry, age 10 and animal-mad from birth.   Durrell combines animal adventures with stories about his ...

The World's Strongest Librarian: a Memoir of Tourette's, Faith, Strength, and the Power of Family , by Josh Hanagarne I've been looking forward to getting this book!  I had to wait my turn at the library, but once I got it (yesterday), I gulped it down. Josh is a librarian at the main Salt Lake City library (I've been there, it's really nice.  After all, when you're visiting a new place you have to see what the library is like, right?).  He's got lots of good library stories, which is of course my favorite part.  This is a guy who understands the librarian soul: I also work here because I love books, because I'm inveterately curious, and because, like most librarians, I'm not well suited to anything else.  As a breed, we're the ultimate generalists.  I'll never know everything about anything, but I'll know something about almost everything and that's how I like to live. SEE? Josh's story is about how he wound up where he ...

The Classics Club posted the spin number today and it is:  4!  Which means I will read Jens Peter Jacobsen's great Danish novel, Niels Lyhne .  I'm very excited.  It's another title that I really liked in college, and now cannot remember one thing about.  It's a later novel than The Queen's Diadem , and at the moment I'm kind of thinking it's going to be a bit like The Sorrows of Young Werther , but hopefully without the suicide. Looking at ebook offerings, I see that you can get it for free on Kindle if you want a German edition, but the English costs $5 or so.  Penguin has a nice-looking paperback, too.  My own copy is hardback, and I can't find an image of it at all. In other news, today was our first day of school.  It was a very good day; we reviewed math and grammar skills, started modern history with a discussion of the British Empire in the 1850s, and began a study of American government.  This year we are hosting a physics class,...

Today April wants to know: Why do you blog about books? I sort of fell into this gig, really. The homeschooling message board I hang out on has a reading group, and Robin runs an ongoing challenge called 52 Books in 52 Weeks .  It sounded fun and I wanted to join up for the 2012 year, but I had never particularly wanted to blog about anything.  I was not into reading blogs much, didn't know much about them, was not terribly interested.  But as I looked at this challenge, it became clear that I was going to need a blog for it.  So I got my brilliant friend Jenny, who already had a book blog, to show me how to do this weird blogging thing (she has since quit blogging in favor of law school--told you she was brilliant).  I came up with my super-cool blog name, and she showed me how to get a fancy background from our other brilliant friend Alicia (who has since quit blogging in favor of actually making money at web design). It's Robin's fault.  Tha...

April at Good Book and Good Wine asks: Quick! Write 15 bullet points of things that appeal to you on blogs!  (She means things I like to see on other people's blogs, not things about blogging in general.  Wow, I used the word blog way too many times there.  Isn't it just the ugliest word?  Blog .  Ick.  I think I need Shakespeare or Samuel Johnson or somebody to invent a word with some dignity to it--clearly we 21st century folks are no good at naming things.) Pretty pictures, but not GIFs.  Especially really neat photographs from the past--I'm no good at it myself but I appreciate it! A layout I can look at.  Not a dark or busy background, a nice clear font, and a clean layout (not sure I have that myself!). Interesting thoughts--I love long rambly posts that have a point about life or literature or whatever. It is awful of me but I like to know a bit of personal information, like location and stuff.  I absolutely understand the...

Moura , by Virginia Coffman I saw this recommended as a spooky Gothic read recently, and it was cheap on Kindle, so I snapped it up.  Indeed it's a pretty good Gothic! Anne is housekeeper at a girls' seminary--this is 1815.  When a young French student is taken back to her home estate of Moura, Anne gets worried about her and travels to France to check up.  She finds an ancient, crumbling chateau, surly servants, a murderous ghost, and plenty of other chilling elements. It's a good spooky story, dating from 1959 when they knew how to turn 'em out.  Unfortunately the Kindle scan is terrible.  There are a couple of pages missing at one point, I think some other skipped passages, and lots of typos.  That was disappointing.

There is a non-fiction challenge to compliment the Classics Club!  I must join. A Non-Fiction Adventure Michelle, the hostess, says:  Taking the lead from the awesome creators of the Fill in the Gaps: 100 Project and The Classics Club , I have decided to create a similar challenge focusing on non-fiction books.  The fruition of this idea came to me yesterday as I was looking at my shelves of non-fiction books.  In my library of 3000+ books, non-fiction makes up about 1000+ of that total.  I focus so heavily on fiction I never take the time to squeeze in some non-fiction reads which I do love to read.  So I thought, why not follow the lead of those I mentioned above and create this challenge for the non-fiction genre. Here are the guidelines: choose 50+ non-fiction books; the number is up to you.  Choose 50, 75, 100, 200.  It's entirely your choice Books must be non-fiction--biography, autobiography, history, memoir, cooking, ...

April at Good Books and Good Wine asks:  What are your blogging quirks?  I'm not very disciplined about this whole blogging thing.  I'll write a post a day for two weeks and then ignore it for a week.  To be fair, I usually have to have finished a book in order to post, and that does not happen three times a week. I have to have an image but I won't use animated GIFs.  Ever.  (This statement ensures that the universe will find some way to make me use a GIF, I suppose.) I like to make my posts publish first thing in the morning, so I will usually set them to post at 7am or something. I have a semi-colon problem; I also use too many dashes.  I have to go through my writing at the end to take out the overflow of parenthetical comments too.  Strunk and White would cry if they saw me. I try to follow the rule that I can't post two non-book review things in a row.  It doesn't always work, but if I've got a pile of memes and no actual book...

The Host, by Stephenie Meyer I read a Stephenie Meyer book, and I was pleasantly surprised.  I have huge problems with the Twilight series, but a couple of friends were reading The Host and I said I would too.  My husband read it several years ago and he thought the premise was neat but there were too many feeeeelings .  I do think the premise of the story is great.  This parasitic alien species invades Earth, Goa'uld style (or like Invasion of the Body Snatchers ), but the story is told from the one of the alien invader's point of view.  And she thinks of herself as a good person, a member of a beneficial species that goes around improving the planets they settle.  She has been on several planets before, and she is anxious to do a good job on Earth too. But her human host has other ideas.  Melanie was a rogue human, one of the few left, before she was caught.  Her personality is still in there, and as the alien tries to suppress her, Mela...

It's time for another Classics Spin!  My reaction is two-fold: oh goodie ! and, but I just started A Suitable Boy !  I should have known that starting a 1500-page novel would get me into trouble.  (I'm really liking it.  Do not let the length intimidate you!) Obviously I can't just skip the Spin, though, because that would be no fun and probably cowardly too.  So here are my 20 titles--some I want to read, some I'm scared of, some I'm indifferent to, and some random choices: Shakespeare:  Richard III Anthony Trollope, The Small House at Allington . Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited Jens Peter Jacobsen, Niels Lyhne Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,  Faust .  (1 and 2) Kaestner, Three Men in the Snow     Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls .   Mark Mathabane , Kaffir Boy .  Mohandas Gandhi ,  My Experiments with Truth.   Junichio Tanizaki , The Makioka Sisters   Rudolofo Anaya , Bless Me Ultima   Will...

At least, I'm pretty sure it's 6: Describe how you shop for books. Dang, I think I already did that with the 15 confessions bit.  OK, well, mostly I fuss around for a couple of weeks trying to figure out exactly how I can get the books I want for as few dollars as possible.  Then I finally purchase something. My husband and I do really enjoy going to the bookstore on our dates sometimes.  We'll go out for dinner and then hang out at the bookstore afterwards.  This doesn't usually involve purchasing anything, but every so often we will.  It's really special when we can go to the used bookstore, run by a friend, instead of plain old Barnes & Noble.  That's always extra-fun. Mostly I get my books at the library.  I go to the public library about once a week, and I usually have something waiting for me on hold.  I also work at a community college library, so every day that I work I stop by the new books to see if anything different has s...

The Rithmatist , by Brandon Sanderson Brandon Sanderson has started up yet another sprawling epic series.  Dude must have quite a mind.  This one is YA and not really as dark as some of his other stuff.  I thought the magic system was bizarrely improbable (even for a fantasy series) and I wasn't sure I was going to read the whole thing, but then I did.  I got into it by about halfway through. The premise: Joel, teen boy, is a charity student at the prestigious Armedius Academy.  He's an outsider, and he's obsessed with Rithmatics, the geometrical magic that only a few can perform.  Rithmatists attend special classes and hold themselves aloof from the others.  Over the summer, Joel meets Molly, a Rithmatist student who is as much of an outsider as he is.  When young Rithmatic students begin disappearing from their homes,  Joel and Molly have to learn to get along and use all their talents to figure out what's going on. So, kind of formul...

Dude, check this out-- our local used bookstore, run by my friends Josh and Muir, is featured in the New York Times.   There is a huge picture and everything!  The story is up now and will run in tomorrow's edition.  I might have to go buy one. The reason for the story is the Indie gogo campaign they ran earlier this year.  I posted about it at the time.  The owner of the store announced his retirement, and when Josh wanted to buy the store, the deal was expensive and sudden.  The whole community stepped in to save a bookstore that is irreplaceable. .

Since I got the days mixed up, this is really the Day 4 question: What's the last book you flung across the room? Ooh, that's a toughie.  Of course I don't actually throw any books, but even metaphorically speaking it's hard, because when I don't like a book I just quit and forget about it.  I don't write it down or blog about it unless I actually finish it, and I'm quite willing to drop it if it's not worth reading.  So I'm going to have to think really hard here.  I know I dropped one quite recently, but goodness knows what it was. I would have thrown Last of the Mohicans across the room if I hadn't vowed to finish it no matter what.  Never again will I try to read James Fenimore Cooper!  And the same goes for Pamela , especially the second volume. And London Under was kind of aggravating.  I would have thrown that at times for sure.

The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, The African. By Himself , ed. Joanna Brooks The life of Olaudah Equiano is the first slave narrative we have, an autobiography written by a man who was taken from his home in (now) Nigeria and sold as a slave.  He eventually bought his freedom and was able to write his story down, so this is an extremely valuable text.  It's also a remarkably old one, since Equiano was born in 1745 and wrote his book in 1792.  He argued for the abolition of slavery, but did not live to see it happen in the British Empire. Equiano tells the entire story of his life, starting with his family and the society he was born into.  He was kidnapped as a child (about age 10, I think), and moved slowly out to the coast, where he was put onto a slave ship of the kind we read about in school.  This one was bound to the West Indies, and he was sold to a sea captain.  Equiano spent most of his life at sea, ...

It's time for another installment of April's 15-day challenge!   Today's item is:   Recommend a tear jerker. Say what?  Hm, I am not much on tear jerkers unless they are Bollywood films.  I don't like stories with a lot of tragedy, since these days it seems like there is quite enough tragedy to deal with in real life.  I don't need extra.  (Bollywood films don't count, because they are so over the top about it.) Aha!  I know!  Connie Willis' time-travel saga, Doomsday Book .  I've only read it once because it's so darn sad.  It's a great book!  And the sequel, To Say Nothing of the Dog , is clever and hilarious, so I've read that several times.  It's a great cheering-up book.  Ahem.  Doomsday Book-- the publisher's summary: For Kivrin, preparing an on-site study of one of the deadliest eras in humanity's history was as simple as receiving inoculations against the diseases of the fourteenth century and ...

The Queen's Diadem , by C. J. L. Almqvist Once upon a time, I was a comparative literature major and I took classes in Scandinavian literature.  Sometimes I read the book in Danish (or Norwegian, or Swedish, because the attitude is why translate when the languages are so close?  Just figure it out already) and then wrote the paper in Danish too, probably badly.  I read some really great books, but that was a long time ago and I forgot quite a bit.  I still have the books, though, and so I put them on my Classics Club list to re-read.  English only, this time.   The Queen's Diadem , or Drottningens juvelsmycke , was one of those books.  I wrote a paper and everything, but that was in 1995 or something and I'd forgotten all but the central symbol of the novel.  I found a weird and fantastic tale.  I can't believe I forgot this! C. J. L. Almqvist was one of the greatest voices in Swedish/Scandinavian literature and a leading Romantic write...

Today's question is: Who are your blogging BFFs? To be honest, I'm not in love with this question!  I will try.  But I don't like to single people out (and not others)... However, I have met LOTS of wonderful people through this book blogging gig!   So here are a few. Amy at Book Musings reads great books and is forever inspiring me with ambition to read some of them too.  Plus she's a fellow homeschooling mom and all. Emily at Classics and Beyond is another classics lover, and I just always like to see what she says.   She is a college student, lucky thing (I really liked college) and usually finds way more to say about literature than I can. Eva at A Striped Armchair hasn't been around as much lately, hopefully because she is busy traveling and having an amazing life.  Her blog is a treasure trove of amazing and unusual books, and she has put many great titles onto my list!  I think she reads more than anyone I've ever met. ...

Northanger Abbey , by Jane Austen I just love this book. *happy sigh*  Adam at Roof Beam Reader is hosting Austen in August, and this is my contribution.  I was lucky and got to read most of it while I was away for a couple of days, so I just sat and read large chunks at a time--something I practically never do.  It was great! I'm not going to reiterate the plot, since just about everybody knows it and if you don't you can easily look it up.  I'm going to talk about Catherine for a minute.  She is so breathtakingly young and naive!  Yes, she is only 17, but really it's mostly because she has lived deep in the country her whole life and hasn't known very many people.  She has a small circle of acquaintance, and they are all 'prosy' sorts of people.  To the modern reader, Catherine's incredible naivete must seem rather unlikely, but I don't think Austen is exaggerating. In Bath, Catherine meets a whole lot of new people, and she simply doesn...

Julia at Stamping Ground hosts What's on Your Workdesk? Wednesday.  I've mostly been prepping for school to start, but I did get a bit done on my quilt project, and I won a pack of fat quarters from the local quilt shop!  I picked the neutrals pack because it goes perfectly with this quilt, and I've been keeping an eye out for several of those colors to use as setting triangles. In the picture you can see my prize and a couple of 6" squares.  I like the pinwheel one a lot, and the unfinished one is a feat because I used what may be the World's Ugliest Fabric, or at least the one hardest to match.  What looks like a greyish rose-pink is actually a hideous shade of pink with a tracery of black squiggles all over it.  It doesn't go with anything but black.  I tried.

Penhallow , by Georgette Heyer Heyer's mysteries are hit-and-miss for me.  Some of them aren't any good at all, and some are fine.  This one is quite good, but darker than Heyer's usual tone.  It's really not quite a mystery; more of a novel with a mystery in it, because readers know perfectly well who did it, but the characters do not. Penhallow is both the Cornish estate and the owner.  Old Penhallow is a tyrant who rules the house from his bedroom and insists on having all of his grown children there, under his eye, no matter what they would rather be doing.  Although he's always been domineering and insensitive, he's getting worse and is now just plain gleefully cruel.  But when one family member thinks to relieve the intolerable situation by hastening his death, it becomes ten times worse. It's a dark and tragic story, but gripping and hard to put down.  One of Heyer's better mysteries, I should say.

The Classics Club question for August is: Do you read forewords/notes that precede many classics?  Does it help you or hurt you in your enjoyment/understanding of the work? Mostly I try to abide by the dictum set forth by Susan Wise Bauer in The Well-Educated Mind :  proceed with caution.  Forewords may be dangerous, because they often offer an interpretation of a text before you even get to the text.  SWB advises-- Do not automatically read the preface.  In the case of a nonfiction book, the preface may set the book in context for you...But the preface can also give you an interpretation before you even read the book--something to be avoided...[because it is] something you should do yourself before turning to an expert to do it for you. Generally, you should read the preface only if it has been written by the author (or translator) personally.  If the preface of introduction was written by someone else, skip it.  Read the first chapter of th...

Saint Thomas Aquinas and Saint Francis of Assisi , by G. K. Chesterton Some years ago, on a Chesterton kick, I bought this double edition of two biographical sketches.  Then I realized that I can only read so much of him at a time, and the book has been sitting on a shelf ever since, waiting for me.  I enjoy Chesterton, but his trademark paradoxical style gets to me after a while. The book on Thomas Aquinas is pretty interesting, and the funny thing about it is how very little biographical information is in it.  This is in no way an ordinary biography with details about when and where events took place.  There is very little of that, and none of it is in chronological order.  Mostly Chesterton draws a sketch--rather a haphazard one--of Aquinas' time, his personality, and most especially his philosophy and theology.  And he often goes off into Chestertonian flights of fancy, too, of course. I don't quite feel like I have a good handle on Aquinas' life ...

Today's question is pretty easy; it's about my bedtime reading routine. Once I'm in bed, I read for a while.  As usual, I have to take two or three books with me so I'll have a nice choice available.  I don't want to pick anything too difficult.  I try to read some scripture first.  Then I read until I get sleepy. Quite often I'll wind up reading on my tablet because I can turn off the light and keep reading (on the night setting) if my husband wants to go to sleep before I do.  And reading in so much darkness is almost guaranteed to send me to sleep quickly, so I pick something easy.  It's also handy for the occasional bout of insomnia--just pick something really boring! Not very exciting, but she did ask...

The Home and the World , by Rabindranath Tagore The great Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore is one of those writers that I want to read, but am a bit afraid of.  Someday I'll get to the poetry, but for now I'm sticking to prose.  As far as I can tell, Tagore wrote just the one novel, published in 1915, and as you might expect it is excellent. The Home and the World is set on a Bengali estate in 1908, in the midst of political upheaval and rebellion.  The three major characters take turns narrating their own points of view.  Bimala, at the center, is torn between her husband Nikhil and the leader of the radicals, Sandip.  Bimala has lived her adult life in purdah, as is traditional, but Nikhil, a thoughtful modern man, wishes her to leave her seclusion and enter the world so that they may be equals.  Nikhil is a serious and gentle man who despises coercion and above all wants individual freedom for everyone; as a result he dislikes argument and refuses...

This little challenge has been making the rounds lately and it looks neat.  It's hosted by April at Good Books and Good Wine.   There isn't a set schedule and it's just for fun.  I won't be posting every day, more like every few days I should think.  Or maybe I will surprise you (and myself). The first task is to make 15 book-related confessions.  I am going to have a hard time coming up with 15 confessions, but I'll try: I don't buy very many books anymore.  I  am too cheap, so when I do buy them I fret and worry about it.  Used books are easier, but not by a whole lot.  Recently I had some gift money at Amazon and it still took me a couple of weeks to decide what to get.  I usually only buy books if I know I want to own them forever, and I can't easily get them at the library. My TBR pile is thus relatively small, and heavily weighted with books I bought used years ago and never got to--or else books that I've picked up for no ...