Howling Frog Books

My desk is inundated with books from 3 different libraries and my own shelves.  I'm going to have to continue with the mini-reviews! Fathers and Sons , by Ivan Turgenev -- I enjoyed this so much, but I finished it right when I lost energy to blog.  Now all the impressions are dim.  But here we have two young men, Arkady and his good friend Bazarov.  Bazarov has been a controversial figure since the day he stepped on to the page; he's a Nihilist who claims to believe in nothing.  He wants to smash all of society, clear the ground so that a new and better world can be built from scratch, but he has little to say about what that world should look like.  Sort of proto-communist and scientific--Bazarov likes science, though not very much.  Then he falls in love, which he can't deal with at all.   Turgenev is showing us the generation gap he experienced.  I loved it, but I can't tell you too much about it in a mini-review. Shadow on the Mounta...

Well, fooey.  I love DWJ Month but I run out of energy right at the same time.  I feel sad that I didn't participate as much as I wanted to, and yet I couldn't seem to just do it.   So once again I'm going to post several things in order to catch up a bit: The Dalemark Quartet:   Oh, how I love Dalemark.  It is just about my favorite place, especially in Spellcoats and The Crown of Dalemark .  I love the green roads and the strange Undying who aren't gods unless they are bound. The Homeward Bounders : I think this might be the single saddest DWJ book.  I reviewed it a year or so ago.   Go ahead and take a look. Black Maria : This is a fantastic one.  I love it.  I love the punning title too.  (In the US it's Aunt Maria , which isn't nearly so good.)  Aunt Maria is one of the scariest villains in DWJ, I think.  Like Tanaqui in Spellcoats , Mig only starts to understand what is happening when she writes it all d...

My mojo is still lost, but I really miss my blogging.  I think it's just tiredness; homeschoolers mostly get really tired around about February, and I've been pulling back on online/bloggy stuff to conserve energy, I guess.  Anyway, I'm going to borrow a strategy from Ekaterina and throw out some mini-reviews, or I will never get out from under the pile of books I have!  Come to think of it, I'm pretty sure I have forgotten some by now.  I gave one to my daughter to read and now I don't know what it was. Not Without Laughter , by Langston Hughes -- I started this near the end of February, actually.  It's a great novel about a boy growing up in Kansas, and all his family members.  I enjoyed it very much and still want to read more Harlem Renaissance books, but I had to return the volumes to the library.  (That has been happening to a lot of my library books lately.) Call the Midwife , by Jennifer Worth -- The BBC series was based on the memoir, ...

I don't quite want to skip over all those prompts from the last week because some of them are my favorite books.  So: Wizard Derk:  Two very different books!  Dark Lord of Derkholm is a hilarious sendup of traditional sword-and-sorcery quest-type fantasy books, a genre full of Tolkien imitations.  I think it reached its peak in the 70s and early 80s, and now things are really kind of different, but if you've ever read Terry Brooks or other innumerable fantasies, Dark Lord is hysterical.  It also has a real story going on amid the scramble to put on a show, and some things cannot be fixed by a magic wand at the end of the story.  Then, The Year of the Griffin is a whole different kind of story; Elda, one of the younger griffin siblings from Dark Lord, goes off to university.  It's a wonderful take on college life--the way you find a group of friends and then help each other muddle through.  Elda's friends are from all over the world and each o...

...and I miss it.  I have lots of books to tell you about and DWJ fangirling to do, but I have just not been getting to it.  It's beautiful spring weather, though.  I'm going to try to do some writing today; I'm missing all my very favorite DWJ books! Spring!

I don't know a ton about DWJ fan art on the web, although I've really enjoyed some of it.  But!  I do have a little artist right here in my home, and after she read The Lives of Christopher Chant a couple of weeks ago, she drew this picture for me.

The Candide Readalong has begun , and I'm already kind of behind schedule.  I tried to get hold of a copy that would have more helpful notes and whatnot, but my attempt failed, so I'm reading my little Dover Thrift Edition, which to my surprise actually does have some footnotes, but not many.  There are maybe 15.  Anyway, I read chapters I-VIII last night (except I'm posting this two days later) .  They are very short, but you have to pay close attention or you'll miss something. Candide was written as a vicious satire of the brand of philosophy that insisted that this is the best of all possible worlds, and that everything happens for a really good reason and it couldn't be better.  So we are about to read a story in which Candide, an innocent young man, and his teacher Pangloss, the tutor who preaches this philosophy and insists that there is no free will but everyone makes choices, are about to spend the next 100 pages seeing horrible disasters, sufferin...

I'm skipping yesterday's topic of favorite supporting character because it's impossible and anyway I'm behind.  Right then, on to Dogsbody! Sirius (yes, the star) has been exiled for a crime he didn't commit, sentenced to live on Earth in a mortal creature's body.  If he can find the thing he lost, he can go free, but otherwise he will die like any other mortal creature.  Naturally, he is born as a dog!  Sirius bonds with his owner Kathleen, lives a dog's life (in both senses), and looks for the Zoi, but it's starting to look like he's been set up. This is such a funky and pun-filled premise, and DWJ pulls it off beautifully.  It all links up.  I really like recommending this book to DWJ newbies; earlier this year I read it aloud to my semi-reluctant-reader daughter, age 10, and she loved it.  I gave it to a friend looking for read-alouds for his class, and they loved it.  Success! It's a dog story and not a dog story, which is fun.  I ...

Shada: the Lost Adventure by Douglas Adams (Doctor Who), by Gareth Roberts Is that a confusing enough title for you?  Here is the story: Douglas Adams wrote a 6-part script for Doctor Who (the Tom Baker incarnation) that he really was not very happy about, because he wanted to write a different script entirely but they wouldn't let him, so he wrote this instead but under too much deadline, and he was quite relieved when there was a strike and filming stopped halfway through and it was never finished.  Somebody released what material there was on video, but it's kind of a mess.  Years later, this Gareth Roberts fellow (also a script-writer for Doctor Who ) got asked to write up the script as a novel, and he spent months on it, figuring out what Adams really meant to do and all that.  Here is the result. Chris Parsons, a nice but clueless physics student at Cambridge, borrows some high-level books from doddery old Professor Chronotis because he wants to impress...

My favorite part of The Ogre Downstairs is that when the dragons' teeth are sown in the parking lot, the resulting tough guys speak "Greek."  Really, it's English rendered phonetically into Greek letters, so you can decode it.  That and the last bit where they have a contest to find the most hideous possible thing in the house.  It always gave me really strange ideas about what Britons must have hiding away in their cupboards. Ogre Downstairs is another very early novel, early enough that DWJ was still having to put a gloss of Issue Novel on the story.  (For those younger than I am, back in the 70s it was well-nigh impossible to get a children's or YA novel published if it didn't deal with an Issue like divorce or teen pregnancy or drug use.  Thus Witch's Business and Ogre Downstairs have something of that flavor to them, partly out of sheer necessity.)  It's all about a new step-family learning to live with each other, with the dubious help of a...

This is yesterday's post, published today!  I've been working on a big event at Sandbox to Socrates , our classical education group blog.  All this week we are publishing a ton of stuff about science (go check it out!  I put a lot of work into that!).  I spent most of the weekend getting everything prepared for it, and I think my brain started to trickle out my ears by the end, so I haven't been able to do as much DWJ obsessing as I wanted.  So: on to the Howl books. Wizard Howl, easily the most popular DWJ character ever.  Vain, charming, cowardly, an incurable slitherer-outer, and a pretty lovable guy anyway, he does show up when needed.  DWJ always said that there were legions of young women wanting to marry him, which she could not understand and neither can I, but he sure is a lot of fun to read about. Howl's Moving Castle is the most famous of the three, and was made into a movie, but the other two are really great too.  Howl is in the...

My copy from the UK. The Time of the Ghost was a book I missed for years until my husband and I took a sort of newly-wed trip to the UK in 1996 and I raided the children's section of Blackwell's in Oxford for all the DWJ titles I didn't own.  I even had a special commission from a fellow DWJ fan back home to find Wild Robert .  Time of the Ghost (and, I think, Black Maria ) were the only titles that I had not read at all; I'd never heard of them. To me, this is easily the scariest DWJ book there is.  It's practically a children's horror story, it's so creepy.  I think it's great.  Four neglected and oddball sisters set up a game of worshiping an old rag doll they call Monigan, and accidentally wake up a real and ancient presence.   Time of the Ghost is also where DWJ put the most direct descriptions of her own family, though she said that she toned them down for believability.   The sisters are trapped in two ways, by Monigan and by the...

A more recent cover than mine. I'm a day or so late with this one, but I didn't want to skip it because I really like this book. Power of Three is fairly high on my list of favorite DWJ titles.  It has always appealed to me a lot.  It tells the story of three civilizations who know little about each other and are afraid--but they also unknowingly each have something the other needs to survive.  And i t starts with a dying curse. Most of the story is told from the point of view of Gair and his brother and sister.  Gair lives in a mound on a moor, and his life is made difficult when everyone from a neighboring mound--worst of all Gair's cousin Ondo--are attacked and move in.  Everyone is afraid of the Dorig, who live underwater and attack people whenever they can.  Gair then meets a couple of Giants (everyone avoids Giants as much as possible) and finds out that certain other Giants are planning to flood the entire moor, which would destroy Gair's p...

Fellow Diana Wynne Jones lovers, this is a great day for me.  My husband just gave me a copy of Changeover !   I never expected to be able to read it, so...wow.  I'm pretty speechless.  Is this a guy to hang on to, or what??  Thanks, honey! :) I'll post a picture tomorrow if I can get a good one.  Best DWJ March ever!! I wrote most of a Power of Three post earlier and then totally failed to finish it.  Maybe tomorrow.  I'm going to go to bed and look at my new book now.  Of course I will just admire it for a couple of days.  I have to find a good chunk of time to be able to sit down and read it in peace.  My usual method of wandering around the house reading a paragraph at a time is not worthy of this great event.

Another tricky question.  For years, as we all know quite well, DWJ covers were mostly terrible.  Finding ones I like has been difficult.  These days the covers are far better, though. I love the two different sets of covers that the Dalemark Quartet has had in the last several years.  The cover of Crown of Dalemark is awfully pink but otherwise they are great.  In the second set, I love how different pieces of the map are used as background with a sort of emblem superimposed on top.  Very nice. My copy of Power of Three is from the UK, and I've always really liked the cover, but it was hard to find an image.  This one is tiny.   I have to say this cover of Time of the Ghost is quite effective.  I don't have it but I would like to.

Eight Days of Luke is quite an early book, published in 1975.  I think that we'll be going through the stand-alone books in a rough chronological order, so expect a lot of 70s titles for the next week. David spends as much time as possible at boarding schools or camps, which suits his horrible and dreary relatives who don't want to deal with him and David as well, since he can't stand his relatives.  But this summer no one has remembered to arrange anything, and David is stuck with them.  Angry and hopeless, he decides to relieve his feelings by yelling a 'curse' of made-up words--and Luke appears, thanking David for his rescue and saying something about prison and venom.  David assumes that Luke is a kid from the neighborhood, but soon notices that Luke has some unusual talents with fire.  And mysterious people keep showing up, trying to trap Luke.  David makes a deal: if he can keep Luke free for a week, his new friend won't have to go back to prison....

Today we are asked to talk about our favorite main character.  This is something of an impossible question!  I will tell you a few of my favorites and see what happens. Tanaqui from the Dalemark quartet is a long-time favorite of mine.  She is stubborn and impatient, but insightful too.  I love how she tells her story. Christopher Chant, especially as a kid, is one I love.  Yes, he's kind of obnoxious at times, but what neglected nine-lifed boy wouldn't be?  I like his ideas. Of course, Polly from Fire and Hemlock , and Tom as well.  Tom is excellent.  I like their partnership, how they write stories together.

Tale of the Troika , by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky I just finished the second novel in my double volume; the first one was Roadside Picnic, which I read in January.  This novel is shorter and weirder.  It is surreal and absurdist, satirizing bureaucracy and government in a story that would remind you of Kafka if it wasn't so funny. Far in the future, the world is divided into floors accessible only by elevator, but the elevator doesn't work too well and won't go above the 13th floor.  The unnamed narrator and Eddie are scientists from the Institute of Magic and  Wizardry, and they are going to be the first people in generations to go past that; they are venturing to the 76th floor, the Colony of Unexplained Phenomena, with requisition forms.  They hope to obtain two items: an Ideal Black Box and a legendary Talking Bedbug.  No one knows what they will find, but Eddie has a humanizing machine with which he theorizes that any creature with a little reaso...

Every month, the Classics Club likes to ask us a question for discussion.   This time, the question is: What is your favorite “classic” literary period and why? Wow, that is a really tricky question for me to answer.   I like all sorts of things.  I was thinking about this earlier this morning, and remembered that in college, I always had a hard time concentrating on one thing to the exclusion of other things.  I was a literature major, but whatever courses I took, by the end of the semester I was completely sick of whatever it was we were studying.  From Shakespeare to European literature in the 1930s, it was all interesting for about 14 weeks and then I got tired.  All my friends and professors wanted to specialize in something: Gothic literature, Milton, Russian literature of the 19th century, whatever, but I could never settle on a specialty.  I would happily study nearly any subject or time period, though, as long as I didn't have to do it...

Today Kristen wants to know what we think about the Chrestomanci Chronicles.  These are, in order of publication: Charmed Life (1977) The Magicians of Caprona (1980) "The Sage of Theare" (1982 short story) Witch Week (1982) "Warlock at the Wheel" (1984 short story) The Lives of Christopher Chant (1988, a prequel) "Stealer of Souls" (2000 novella) "Carol Oneir's Hundredth Dream" (1986 short story) Conrad's Fate (2005, a sequel to the prequel) The Pinhoe Egg (2006) Witch Week is the first of these that I read, and I think it must be one of the first DWJ books that I read at all; it would have been pretty new then.   I read the three other main titles in the mid-to-late 80s, and it took me years to get something resembling a timeline sorted out.  The last two were a happy surprise.  I am really glad DWJ went back to the Chrestomanci universe for a couple more books. For non-fans, the books are set in a multiverse of twelv...

To all my Welsh readers. :) (Fun fact: Diana Wynne Jones was partly Welsh.)

For the first day of DWJ March, Kristen wants us to show off our collections.  Mine is fairly extensive, but beat up.  All of them have been read many times.  They mostly live in my 13-year-old daughter's room now.  She got the whole collection on to one shelf for you to see, so ignore the shelf above that. I have duplicates of a few titles.  And I have just about everything, except Changeover and Islands of Chaldea (coming soon!).  I even have a copy of Yes, Dear , a picture book about a little girl who finds a magic leaf, but I'm not sure where it is right now.  I thought I knew, but it wasn't there. Some of my copies are really ancient and I would like to get new ones before they fall completely apart.  Check out my copy of The Ogre Downstairs : hideous cover from 1977, former library copy, and a paperback.  The Spellcoats isn't doing much better; I picked it up used and it's from 1979.  Though I actually quite like the ...