Howling Frog Books

The Lost Wife , by Alyson Richman In Prague, in 1938, two young people fall in love and get married just as war is about to destroy everything they know.  Separated by events, they each believe that the other has died, until a wedding many years later, when they recognize each other. That's not a spoiler because it's how the novel opens.  You read the story to find out how it happened.  Lenka tells her story from the beginning, while Josef tells his backwards.  It's a gripping novel, and I quite enjoyed it, though it is a little toastier than I really prefer. Richman writes well, and she actually based her novel on a real-life incident she heard of through a family connection--two people really did meet at a wedding and recognize each other as their long-lost spouses. It's also, as you might expect, a really, really tragic novel.  As Jews, Lenka and her family are shipped out of Prague and end up in Terezin (Theresienstadt) for most of the war.  Jos...

The New Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption , by Kathryn Joyce I thought a lot of Kathryn Joyce's previous book, Quiverfull , and so I hoped to get this new title as soon as possible.  Here, Joyce takes on the very very emotionally and politically fraught topic of international adoption, especially as influenced by American evangelicals. Adoption has become a huge topic in the evangelical world over the past decade or so.  Logically enough, pro-life Christians want to put their money where their mouths are and obey the Biblical commandment to care for the needy, especially widows and orphans.  Told that there are millions of orphaned children living in institutions in poverty, good and well-meaning people want to bring those children into families.  But the reality is not so simple; there are not, in fact, millions of orphaned children with no family to care for them.  There are a lot of children living in poverty, but very ...

Tales of Mystery and Terror , by Edgar Allen Poe Lately I have been reading a lot of really, really tragic non-fiction.  Then I read a novel that was really tragic.  I needed to cheer myself up, so I decided to get into the Halloween and Gothic spirit by reading Edgar Allen Poe's famous collection of scary stories. I've never been much of a Poe person; I was assigned several of these stories to read in 8th grade and couldn't make head or tail of them.  Reading them now, it doesn't surprise me.  We read "MS Found in a Bottle"--no one explained what an MS was, and the story is practically incomprehensible anyway!   We also read "The Pit and the Pendulum," which was better, though I don't think I knew what the Inquisition was supposed to be, and "The Cask of Amontillado," but without knowing what Amontillado or Masons might be.  Maybe the teacher did explain and I just wasn't listening. I had read almost no Poe since that time, e...

Only Beautiful, Please: A British Diplomat in North Korea , by John Everard I ran into this title a little while ago at the library and had to read it right away.  Folks, this is a book about life in North Korea, written by the former British ambassador, and while the other books I've read about North Korea have been about life in the countryside or in prison camps, this is the first time I've run into a book about how the wealthier classes live. "Wealthier" being a very relative term, of course.  Here, it means the middle- and upper-class people in Pyongyang, who have approved family backgrounds and decent jobs, but it's nothing that you or I would recognize as wealth, because the whole country is slowly crumbling.  Even these people worry about food, and though they get rice every day (while for the poor, rice is a once-a-year treat), they mainly live on rice and kimchi, with some beans sometimes. Everard had little interaction with the really elite gove...

In the past few months I've mentioned a few times that I've been working on a group blog project that will focus on classical homeschooling.  Well, it's finally here!  It's still an infant blog, but I hope it will grow and become a helpful resource.  If you're interested, please hop on over to From Sandbox to Socrates and check us out.  And if there's any homeschooling topic you'd like to learn about, please ask and we'll see if we can write a post about it!

When Ladies Go A-Thieving: Middle-Class Shoplifters in the Victorian Department Store, by Elaine S. Abelson This is a fairly academic-style discussion of the rise of the great department stores in the late Victorian era (but in America only; no UK here).  Shoplifters were immediately a serious problem, one that was very difficult to address for many reasons. Abelson starts off with a thorough description of department stores.  She is really good at describing how incredible and tempting they were!  No one had ever seen anything like it before in the United States; everyone was used to little, dark dry-goods stores with a limited selection of goods, and suddenly there are these huge buildings crammed with wonderful stuff all over the counters.  People were dazzled.  Abelson describes the rise of plate-glass windows to give light and then the idea of elaborate window displays, the evolution of shop counters from heavy wood to light glass (which both showed of...

Cool cover, no? Around the World in Eighty Days , by Jules Verne My daughters are doing modern world history this year, which means 1850-present, which means we start with the British Empire and imperialism.  They've been reading books like Things Fall Apart (the 13yo), Just So Stories (the 10yo), and Around the World in 80 Days (13yo again).  And since I have always neglected the works of Verne shamefully, I took the opportunity to read it too. Phileas Fogg, a wealthy London gentleman whose love of routine, precision, and accuracy makes Hercule Poirot look sloppy, suddenly enters a bet that he can circumnavigate the entire world in 80 days.  This is a feat that has only just become possible in theory, and practically no one thinks it is actually possible.  The least delay--a missed voyage or train, a storm at sea--could derail the whole project.  Mr. Fogg and his new servant, the Frenchman Passepartout, set out that very day.  And hot on their ...

A little while ago Bev at My Reader's Block did this fun little survey, and invited others to do so as well.  I promised to do it, but only after I was done with the 15-Day Challenge, since I don't like to do all memes all the time.  Gotta space 'em out a bit, right? The Random # Survey is created by Melissa @ Harley Bear Book Blog. Melissa's rules state: How to participate: 1. Pick a number. Keep in mind how many books you have.  If you have one bookshelf like me you may want to keep it between 1-10.  If you're like Book BFF Angela and have a bunch of bookshelves you may want to pick between a higher range like 1-50.  I used Random.org and got the # 8! 2. G o to your bookshelf and count that many books until you reach your number. Answer the question with that book. (I counted 8 books in and got Delirium).  So I used Delirium to answer question 1.  3. Count the same number of books from where you left off and answer th...

The Ocean at the End of the Lane , by Neil Gaiman It seems like everyone is talking about the new hot Gaiman title, and for once I am too--at the same time instead of a year late!  I do love Gaiman, though I am a mid-level fan, not an obsessive one.  I've read all his books for years, but I don't buy them the minute they come out or anything, like I would with DWJ. This is maybe his weirdest story yet, crammed into a small space.  It is typical Gaiman, squared --strange and nightmarish, told from a child's point of view but with the later comprehension of an adult remembering the events--all taken up to a power of 2, if you see what I mean. The narrator is a middle-aged man who comes back to his home village for a family event, but gets distracted into finding where his old house used to be, and then going up the lane to the farmhouse of a friend he vaguely remembers knowing.  There he is plunged into reliving the experience he had as a small child, when the wo...

Gotta love that heroic mustache! Niels Lyhne , by Jens Peter Jacobsen It's my spin title! As my mom commented when she saw it, this is the most famous book you never heard of.  It's a major classic of the late 19th century--for literary middle-Europeans interested in Romanticism and Naturalism.  Thomas Mann and Rainer Maria Rilke considered it to be among the greatest of novels.  Henrik Ibsen and Stefan Zweig cited Jacobsen as an influence.  Both Zweig and James Joyce even wanted to learn Danish so they could read this novel in the original!  But J. P. Jacobsen remained obscure in the English-speaking literary world, and Niels Lyhne was not translated into English until 1919, forty years after it was published in 1880. Note that if you want to read this title, you should get the 1990 translation by Tiina Nunnally, now available in Penguin, not the 1919 translation. This is the story of Niels' psychological development from a child to a man.  As...

It's the final countdown day!  Today April at Good Books and Good Wine wants to know who my blogging mentors are.  Who do I look up to? Well, my friend Jenny taught me how to do this in the first place, so I guess she would be #1.  She is not blogging right now though, having left the bloggerverse for law school. I love reading Bookshelves of Doom .  Even the name is awesome, and Leila keeps us updated on good books, news about book challenges, and plus she sells excellent stamp jewelry in her Etsy store. Amy at Book Musings encourages me to read books I'm scared of, and since they are always great that makes me happy. Eva at A Striped Armchair hasn't been around much lately because she is globe-trotting, but her blog is what I'd like mine to be, though it never will. I read a lot of book blogs, and there are things I love about most of them, so you can all count yourselves. :)  And now I'm finished with the challenge!

A Suitable Boy , by Vikram Seth I have done it!  I feel so proud.  I think this is the longest book I've ever read, at nearly 1500 pages (it's more like a brick than a book; at one point it actually rolled down my pillow).  And I enjoyed it so much.  It only took me 20 years to get around to reading it, too. It's 1950 in post-Partition Bengal.  Lata Mehra is the youngest of 4 siblings, and her mother's mission in life is to find a suitable boy for Lata to marry.   Lata, however, is not at all sure that she wants to get married quite yet; she's in university.  And then she meets a boy who pursues her... From Lata, we move out to meet her family members and connections.  There are four families central to the story, and they all have connections too.  Seth's novel grows to narrate the lives of people at every level of society, from the poorest peasants and workers to the wealthiest landlords.  Hindus and Muslims, traditionalists...

It's been a while since I've posted this meme, but the beginning of school has been pretty overwhelming.  I have just one thing to show off.  We've been preparing for Banned Books Week at work, and we're taking photos for a rogue's gallery of people caught reading questionable literature.  Here I am, caught in the act, with the awesome sign I made for the project.  I wanted an old-school letterboard, but those things are impossible to find.  There were tons of letters at work, though, because there is a board bolted to the wall, so I stuck them into a piece of black foam core board. We're actually going to make the photos black and white and then print them out to hang all over the library.  Mine hadn't been converted yet when I emailed it to myself.  I was trying to look serious, but apparently I cannot not-smile.  The other shots were more smiley!  Sigh.

Today I'm supposed to talk about deal-breakers.  What will make me quit reading? Smooshy romance .  I'm not averse to a little romance, but on the whole it's not my thing.  The sloppier or more obsessive it gets, the less likely I am to read it. TMI .  Too much explicit this or that--violence, gore, sex, language, whatever--is not what I'm looking for.  Scientific gore is OK. Unrelenting tragedy (fictional) .  Life is quite hard enough, thank you, and I read novels to be cheered up, not to wind up depressed about the cruelty of the universe.  Real tragedy has to be read so I can learn about things, but fake gratuitous tragedy, no.

Shopping for a Better Country: Essays by Josip Novakovich Josip Novakovic* is originally from Croatia--well, when he lived there it was Yugoslavia--and he has lived in the US and various other places in Europe since college.  These essays are collected from many years of writing, and though they certainly feature exilic themes and travel, they are about all sorts of things, really. I like the way Novakovic writes; matter-of-fact and taking everything as it comes.  I liked that he consciously refused to judge countries based on short visits. He writes about his mother and his family--he has a son who plays the cello--about people he has met on travels, and about the difficulties of Russian airports or traveling to Croatia during and after the war there. A couple of bits I liked: An old man near my hometown claimed that he had no need to travel.  He had lived in eight countries and in one house.  He remained faithful to the previous regimes, and thus felt like...

Holy Is the Day: Living in the Gift of the Present , by Carolyn Weber A couple of years ago, I reviewed Weber's first book, Surprised By Oxford .  I enjoyed it quite a bit, so I was pleased to see that she has written a second book, this time about how her faith sustains her in difficulty, and finding joy and grace in the everyday. She is not kidding around about her trials, either.  Weber starts off by telling about the birth of her twin sons; everything went just fine with the first baby, and then suddenly things were not fine at all and both mother and baby came close to death.  With an opening like that, I was pretty hooked, and continued on to read about the pressures of raising three tiny children while trying to get tenure as an English professor, a sudden move away from academia, and a completely unexpected high-risk pregnancy--and since evidently Weber finished the book before her pregnancy was over, there is no resolution to that story!  (I checked her ...

Today's challenge is to describe one under-appreciated book that EVERYONE should read. You know, I think I'm going to pick a book I just told you about recently: My Family and Other Animals , by Gerald Durrell.  It's a fantastic book, a minor classic that has been unfairly forgotten, and a happily unusual and funny book too.  It will cheer you up when you are sad and educate you about the wonders of animals (even if, like me, you don't particularly care for animals in your house).  It has universal appeal, too. Bonus points: in my opinion everyone should at least try Diana Wynne Jones and Daniel Pinkwater.  DWJ because she is the greatest, of course, and Pinkwater because he is so completely weird.  But those seemed a little predictable for me--that's what I always say!

What To Expect When No One's Expecting: America's Coming Demographic Disaster , by Jonathan V. Last I've been quite taken up with school and work and all sorts of things, so I haven't been around at all, but I have been reading.  I have a whole bunch of books going on at once, in fact.  Jonathan Last takes on demographic numbers here, and although I suppose his primary focus is on the United States, he spends a lot of time talking about the whole world too, since sharply dropping birthrates are a worldwide trend.  His thesis is that while population is expanding now, that is not because we are having too many babies; it's just that there are a lot of people getting older and living longer.  Within a generation or two, populations will start shrinking, and by then there will not be a lot of young people to have babies.  The drop in birthrates is so dramatic that prosperity will actually become difficult to sustain--not because of resource scarcity but because...