Howling Frog Books

My copy--pretty good for 1977 Roadside Picnic, by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky Ekaterina at In My Book reviewed this Russian SF classic for Vintage SF Month , and I was intrigued but didn't expect to get to read it very soon.  Then I started back to work for the new semester and found a copy in the stacks!  Wow!  I feel so lucky.  It's the first English edition from 1977, and includes another short novel, Tale of the Troika.  I'll be reading that too. In the not-too-distant future, a bunch of alien artifacts landed on Earth in 6 locations, as though shot in packets.  Redrick Schuhart has grown up right next to one of the Zones, and he's a stalker--he makes illegal runs into the Zone to find alien artifacts to smuggle and sell.  Stalking is an incredibly dangerous job; the Zone is filled with bizarre phenomena and invisible deadly dangers.  You might find so-so's, which act like batteries and multiply spontaneously, but you might also fal...

Richard III , by William Shakespeare Richard III, as everyone already knows, is Shakespeare's most villainous villain, embracing evil and having people murdered left and right until he comes to a well-deserved end in battle.  And as a cartoon villain he's pretty great; he thinks of everything and tirelessly makes everything terrible for everyone around him, even his poor old mother.  He even tries to marry the older sister of the princes he had killed! Evil Richard III I really liked the prominent roles that the women played towards the end.  Possibly because there were no men left, having all been murdered by that time, but the ladies have these wonderful scenes where they lament their losses and blame Richard III for everything--just as he deserves. I did find this play quite difficult to read, just because there are all these characters, all with titles that make it tricky to keep track of them, and anyway which Edward or Richard or Elizabeth are we talking a...

Dune , by Frank Herbert I hadn't gotten around to reading Dune before.  I've seen two film versions, though (the one with Sting and the SciFi Channel's miniseries).  I guess it was high time I read the real thing. In the very far future, there is a galactic empire--but an empire without computers or artificial intelligence.  Instead, certain people are trained to calculate.  Mentats are coldly logical and concentrate on math; the Bene Gesserit learn to manipulate emotion and influence politics, using religion as their tool.  The desert planet of Arrakis produces one of the most valuable substances in the galaxy, and it is therefore exploited and oppressed--but the desert people of Arrakis are waiting for their savior.  He is Paul Atreides, and he's going to change everything. The setting is clearly based on the politics of the Middle East.  Spice is oil, the Fremen are probably Bedouin, and much of the vocabulary is based on Arabic.  The Ar...

Rose City Reader's 2013 Challenge actually extended to the end of this month, so as to give space for wrapping up anything that needed finishing--a great idea, I thought.  Now it's time for the final post and count.  Here are the different countries I visited.  Many of them got several books, really.  I ended up reading maybe 4 books set in Poland, for example, and I don't even know how many UK titles.  And for this purpose, I can only count one UK book, not separate titles for Scotland, England, Wales, and NI.  So here it is: Five Billion Vodka Bottles to the Moon, by Iosif Shklovsky (Ukraine) Anna Karenina, b y Lev Tolstoy (Russia)   The Middle Window, by Elizabeth Goudge (UK) Portrait of a Lady, by Hen ry James (Italy) Sister Queens, by Julia Fox (Spain)    Zaremba, or Love and the Rule of Law, by Michelle Granas (Poland) T he Red and the Black, by Stendhal (France)  The Trial, by Franz Kafka (Austro-Hungary/Czech Re...

The Winter's Tale , by William Shakespeare January is Shakespeare Month at the Classics Club , and so I read "The Winter's Tale."   I knew the basic storyline, and I may have read it in college, but I'm not sure about that.  Anyway, it made for a nice Shakespearean interlude, and after that I got ambitious enough to start "Richard III," which I'm hoping to finish before the month ends.  Wish me luck, since I'm still on I.3. Leontes, King of Sicilia, and Polixenes, King of Bohemia, have been best friends since boyhood.  Polixenes is on an extended visit with Leontes and his queen Hermione, but when he accedes to Hermione's request to stay longer, Leontes becomes uncontrollably jealous and paranoid.  Although everyone in the court reminds him of Hermione's perfect character, he convinces himself that she is unfaithful and that her children are not his.  He orders his new infant daughter taken away and exposed, and even assurance from t...

 This was a fun idea I saw at ipsofactodotme .  I didn't do a proper 2013 retrospective, since I felt the constant challenge wrapups were more than enough, but the idea here is to post the first sentence of the first post of every month and see what it says about me.  Let's give it a try, shall we? I discovered that I sometimes had to use the first book post of the month instead of the actual first post, and sometimes I've skipped a tiny non-sentence.  Otherwise this would be a boring list. January: I was planning to start a really big chunkster today, preferably Anna Karenina , but I woke up with a hangover--which is hardly fair, considering my revels last night consisted of fizzy lemonade, Just Dance 4, and card games, and ended before midnight. February: Aren't fashions in titles funny?  Title trends come and go, and right now very long subtitles seem to be the thing.  The shorter and/or more cryptic the main title is, the better, and the...

Eugene Onegin Readalong, 3 & 4 I've read two more chapters, and Tatiana has met Onegin.  Although she has only met him once, and barely spoken with him, she falls for him hard.  Her habitual pensive mood becomes a fretful preoccupation that follows a time-honored formula: as any proper heroine would do, she can't sleep or eat.   Finally she does something that would be truly shocking to her family and society: she writes Onegin a letter declaring her feelings, and waits on tenterhooks for a response.  Onegin gently but firmly refuses Tatiana and leaves her to yearn and pine away, which she does, while he leads a solitary and restful country life.  But then Lensky wants him to go to dinner and meet the whole family again--oh, dear. Tanglewood has more questions : Chapters 3 & 4 Questions - Impressions of Tatyana and Olga? They are both so young!  Poor Tatiana, she's never met young men or had crushes before, and this just bowls her over...

The big central word is "poem." Dead Souls, by Nikolai Gogol This was most certainly a Long-Awaited Read for me.  It's been on my TBR pile for at least a year, and I've really wanted to read it, but needed a bit of a kick to get over the Russian Literature Nerves so many of us have. The first thing you need to know is that Dead Souls is a comedy , darkly satirizing Russian life in Gogol's day.  Even for a modern American, it's funny; to a Russian, it must be hysterical.  The other thing you need to know is a tiny bit of background about the Russian feudal system of the early 19th century, when serfs still belonged to the land they lived on.  They had to pay rent to the owner, and taxes (the owner didn't pay taxes but collected the serfs' taxes and sent them on), and had to ask for permission to go off the estate to earn money.  Every so often the government would take a census and register each male 'soul' tied to the estate.  Taxes...

I love this new series of covers. The Game Players of Titan , by Philip K. Dick It's turning out to be a very PKD and Bester-heavy month for me!  This time I read The Game-Players of Titan which, in classic PKD fashion, involves an awful future scenario, much questioning of reality, and lots and lots of drugs. After a devastating world war and fight with slug-like aliens from Titan, there are not a lot of people left and fertility is nearly gone.  The alien vugs dictate a lot, and they make people play the game of Bluff to trade property and spouses.  Pete Garden has just lost his home base of Berkeley (and his wife, but no big deal) and he's determined to get it back, but this particular loss sets off a chain of events that lead to a murder, an unexpected trip to Titan, and a game of Bluff against the expert and telepathic vugs. This was a great read.  Part scary SF scenario, part murder mystery--but then it goes way off the rails.  The second half is...

The Stars My Destination , by Alfred Bester It's my other Bester book for Vintage SF Month!  Also published as Tiger! Tiger! (as in the Blake poem), it tells the story of Gulliver Foyle, the most dangerous man in the galaxy if only he knew it. Bester explores what would happen if people could "jaunte" -- teleport by the power of the mind.  In this future, once the ability is discovered, it can be taught, and almost everyone can jaunte--though not usually more than 500 miles at a time.  And you have to know where you're going.  In such a world, the wealthy hide behind mazes and criminals live in a round-the-world night.  Girls are guarded from attack by seclusion in rooms without doors that only their family or friends can enter, and the highest mark of prestige is to walk where you're going. Gully Foyle, a rough and violent laborer, lives for just one thing: revenge on the people who left him to die on a derelict wreck of a spaceship.  His life is de...

Erec is very comfy at home with Enide Erec et Enide , by Chretien de Troyes Erec et Enide is the first story in my book of Chretien de Troyes' Arthurian Romances, and one of the earliest tales in the tradition.  I may have read it in college, but I don't remember doing so, so it certainly felt like the first time.  Erec has pretty much fallen out of the Arthurian tradition; I don't know that he appears in Malory and you certainly don't run into him in the modern retellings, so here is a quick summary: King Arthur declares a stag hunt, and Erec keeps the queen company as they watch the hunt.  A strange knight comes by and insults them; Erec cannot retaliate because he is unarmed, but he vows a quick revenge.  Once the hunt is over, he arms himself and sets out to follow the knight, and ends up in a town where he defeats the knight and meets Enide, a poor but gentle girl.  Erec takes her back to Camelot, where they marry before setting out to go to Erec's...

Eugene Onegin Readalong, 1 & 2 I am keeping up with the readalong, but not with the blog posting about the readathon.  I have a new copy with a different translation--Stanley Mitchell--and I love it.  I think it was Tom the Amateur Reader who told me that if the Deutsch translation was the one I'd read before, reading a different version would be like reading a different book, and it is.  I'm very glad to be reading this for the second time, so I can absorb better!  Tanglewood has these questions about the first two chapters: Chapters 1 & 2 Questions - First impressions of Eugene? Honestly, Eugene is not the kind of guy I love.  Society dandies drenched in ennui--no, thank you.  Though I rather suspect that Pushkin is poking a little fun at the type, maybe? - What do you make of the narrator's commentary? He's humorous and a bit ironic while being sympathetic too.  I think.  I don't know of another poem where the narrator put...

We, by Yevgeny Zamyatin , trans. Mirra Ginsburg This is my double whammy title: a Vintage SF Russian Classic!  We is one of the very first dystopian novels written (leave it to a Soviet to invent dystopian literature!), and it inspired both Brave New World AND 1984 . Zamyatin started off as a Bolshevik, but after the Revolution, he was unhappy with the way things were going in the new Soviet regime. He seems to have disliked authorities of any kind.  Disillusioned by the oppression he saw, he became a dissident and wrote critiques and political satire.  He was an eminent voice in the 1920s, in the middle of all that literary maelstrom that was going on.  We , written in 1920-21, bears the distinction of being the first work banned by Soviet censorship.  It was not published in Russia for decades, but Zamyatin smuggled it out to the West, where it was published in 1924, though not in an English translation.  Zamyatin hung on in the USSR for some time l...

Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said , by Philip K. Dick This must be one of the odder titles in SF, but then this is Philip K. Dick we're talking about--weird is what he did.  While I've read some of Dick's short fiction, I don't think I've read any full-length novels.  Maybe. Jason Taverner is one of the most famous celebrities in America--millions watch his show every week.  He's made several record albums, he's in every issue of every gossip tabloid, everyone knows who he is.  And one morning, Jason Taverner wakes up with no identity.  No one remembers him.  There is no record of his birth or his fingerprints or anything; and in the fascist American state of 1988, a person can't even walk a few blocks without proof of ID.  How can Taverner survive without getting killed or sent off to a labor camp? The solution to Taverner's sudden loss of identity--partial as it is--only comes at the end, and is much, much weirder than I expected.  The who...

History in English Words , by Owen Barfield I was so excited about this book when I first got it!  Then I made the mistake of trying to dip into it as a bedside book instead of really focusing and reading it all at once, and I got bogged down.  This time around, I treated Barfield right and read it in large chunks, and it's a fantastic book. Owen Barfield was an Oxfordian scholar, a philosopher (in the old sense) and essayist, and an Inkling.  He and C. S. Lewis met in 1919 and were solid friends for many years, during which they appeared to agree on very little.  Barfield was very interested in 'the evolution of consciousness' and spent a lot of time on developments in language and culture.  Later on he became an Anthroposophist, which I am still not quite sure how to pronounce, but you see its remnants now in the Waldorf philosophy of education. History in English Words was an early book, published in 1926, and is nothing less than a history of Western ...

Where the Red Fern Grows , by Wilson Rawls For the Children's Literature Event, I wanted to read Where the Red Fern Grows .  Emily of Classics and Beyond reviewed it a little while ago, and I had never read it, so I thought I would. Billy, who lives way out in the Ozark Mountains, wants nothing more than a hunting dog.  He begs, he pleads, but his family is far too poor to afford any such thing.  Eventually Billy figures out a plan; he works and saves for over two years and orders a couple of redbone hound pups.  He and his dogs are inseparable, and they hunt raccoons every night (the story is set around the 1920s, when raccoon coats were all the rage).  Billy's dogs are such good hunters that he enters them in a contest. There is a whole lot about dogs and hunting and raccoons.  I am not interested in those things at all, but I hung on, drawn by Billy's intense feelings, his family and Ozark background, his faith in God, and the knowledge that it w...

The Demolished Man , by Alfred Bester Alfred Bester is one of the great grand-daddies of science fiction, so I wanted to read one or two of his classics.  The Demolished Man is a great yarn, set in a future where some people have developed telepathic powers.  These "espers" (as in ESP) are organized and controlled by a Guild that oversees their employment and also by the way wants to make the whole human race telepathic. Ben Reich is the powerful head of the Monarch corporation, obsessed with overtaking the rival D'Courtney company.  He decides that he must kill D'Courtney--but no one gets away with murder these days, not in a world where telepaths can sense violent intentions and report them before they become actions.  Reich starts planning, and blackmailing his subordinates into helping him.  He is sure that between him and his new partner, a high-level esper, they can plan the perfect crime.  If the plan fails, they will both be put t...

The insanely ugly cover of my copy Rendezvous With Rama , by Arthur C. Clarke I've been looking forward to the Vintage Sci-Fi Not-A-Challenge this month, and I collected several books for it.  I've been reading a lot of them!  My first title was Rendevous With Rama ; I've read most of the major Clarke books, but not this one.  Clarke is usually more about the concept than about characterization, and that is really obvious here.  Rama is the main character, and the people are not terribly distinct.  That's OK with me, since I like concept-exploring SF pretty well. Over 100 years in the future, mankind is spread out over the solar system.  Scientists spot an incoming celestial body, but it's not a comet or anything else familiar--it's a ship, a cylinder headed straight for the Sun.  The Endeavour is the only human spaceship able to get to the mystery ship (christened Rama) in time, and the crew have only three weeks to learn as much as they can ...

My Uncle Silas , by H. E. Bates I've been on a little bit of a blogging break, I guess, and now I have at least eight books tell you about!  I'd better get started. H. E. Bates is the same fellow who made a smash hit with his books about the Larkin family in The Darling Buds of May .  He wrote a couple of little vignettes based on an elderly uncle of his, a happily reprobate countryman who he called Uncle Silas.  Silas proved so popular that Bates wrote a whole bookful of short pieces about him.  Bates can describe him better than I can: Certainly there was no strain of the Puritan in my Uncle Silas, who got gloriously and regularly drunk, loved food and the ladies and good company, was not afraid to wear a huge and flamboyant buttonhole, told lies, got the better of his fellow-men whenever the chance offered itself, used a scythe like an angel, was a wonderful gardener, took the local lord's pheasants, and yet succeeded in remaining an honest, genuine and lova...

Well, actually, start your reading 2.5 hours ago, but that was too early.  It's the Second Annual Classics Club Readathon!  I'll be reading as much as I can all day, but I have other things to do too--like go out with my husband to celebrate our anniversary.  Which is really on Monday. I have lots of books that want me to read them, but I'll be starting with Where the Red Fern Grows --I started it yesterday and got a couple of chapters in Dead Souls --so far so good, but I'm not very far along yet. I think I'll save any vintage SF for later in the day--so far this week I've zipped through 3 already! I'll update every so often, but mostly in a readathon, I read.  Have a great reading day! 12:00pm PST: I didn't read either of those books.  Instead I picked up History in English Words by Owen Barfield to read over breakfast, and just kept going with that.  I read the first section of 4 chapters and now I'm going to switch. The CC has s...

Happy 2014 everyone!  May you all have a wonderful year of reading great books of all kinds. January is so full of exciting events that I do not know how I'm going to fit it all in.  I'm going to give it a good try, though.  Here are some of my plans: Long Awaited Reads Month : I've been saving these titles: Maidenhair The Thing Around Your Neck Dead Souls In the Steps of the Master   The History of the Renaissance World The Mill on the Floss Vintage Science Fiction Not-A-Challenge : Rendezvous With Rama, Arthur C. Clarke Dune (can you believe I've never read Dune?), Frank Herbert Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, Philip K. Dick The Demolished Man, Alfred Bester The Forever War, Joe Haldeman We, Evgeny Zamatin Children's Literature Event: Where the Red Fern Grows , Wilson Rawls The Wizard of Oz , L. Frank Baum ???  The Eugene Onegin Readalong : starts January 7th The Classics Club theme for January is Shakespeare/Eliza...

Hello, fellow Arthurians!  I am so excited about this year's challenge.  We are going to have a lot of fun!  Please comment and tell me what you are going to read first, or what you are excited about. I think I want to start with some Chretien de Troyes--it's a long time since I read Lancelot .  I've just read a couple of the really old chronicles (Nennius and Gildas), so now I'm going to go for some fanciful adventure.  I'm also going to start reading Arthur's Britain , which is quite a long book and I'm sure will go slowly. The Knight of the Cart (Lancelot!)