Howling Frog Books

I'm now officially done with work for the semester, the kids are done with their schooly stuff (well, on the whole), and it's properly summer in my world.  So I'm going to really, truly start my Language Freak Challenge title, which I've been putting off until after the semester--I've decided to read Niels Lyhne so as to make James Joyce jealous. I also think I'm going to try to knock off several Classics Club list titles and see if I can get to 75 out of 150 by the end of the summer (I'm at 66), which obviously will put me halfway along.  To be honest that will probably entail reading a bunch of short things like plays and poetry, but I'll get to feel pleased with myself.  Probably next year I should focus on the things I have barely touched, like Latin American literature and really old Asian texts (scary!). Another blogging goal this summer is to put more energy into writing for Sandbox to Socrates .  I'm the webmistress, but I haven't...

If on a winter's night a traveler , by Italo Calvino Suddenly I'm turning into someone who really likes surrealist post-moderny literature.  How did that happen? If on a winter's night a traveler is one of the famous landmark postmodern novels.  Start reading it and you find that you're reading about yourself reading If on a winter's night a traveler .  First 'you' settle in to read, and then you get the first chapter of the story, but it breaks off; your book is misprinted.  Back to the bookstore you go in search of a sound copy, where you meet Ludmilla, another reader.  And every time you think you've found a whole copy of a book, it turns out to be the first chapter of a different and completely unrelated novel.  Chapters of your quest to find a whole book alternate with these first chapters, so that the entire reading experience turns into an exercise in frustrated desire (for stories, and, progressively more obviously, for women). There are s...

The Islands of Chaldea , by Diana Wynne Jones This time, it's really true; I've read my last first DWJ book.  I feel very fortunate to have gotten so many!  The manuscript for this final novel was found in DWJ's papers after her death.  I think she'd written most of it and then had a health crisis, after which she didn't go back to the story.  Her younger sister, Ursula, decided to try to look for the clues of how it would go, and finish it.  She did a fantastic job; from what I hear, no one has been able to pinpoint just where the break is.  I did notice at the end that it wasn't quite DWJ, but it was dang close and only a couple of things.  This is impressive. Aileen is supposed to be a wise woman when she grows up, but so far she feels like a failure at it.  Her Aunt Beck is the Wise Woman of their island of Skarr, and both of them set off on a journey to fulfill a prophecy that, in theory, will break the magic barrier that cuts off Logra f...

A Question of Honor , by Charles Todd I've enjoyed this series of mysteries set in World War I.  Bess Crawford is a nurse, so she gets around, moving from stations at the front to hospitals further back, and often traveling with wounded soldiers on their way to further recuperation.  She also has an Anglo-Indian background, having grown up in India as the daughter of a colonel, and almost the daughter of the entire regiment.  This fifth novel in the series draws on that Indian background for the story, which I thought was neat. Ten years ago, the Colonel Sahib's regiment was rocked by the sudden desertion of Lieutenant Wade, accused of five brutal murders (including his own parents).  Wade's body was reported as found in the mountains of Afghanistan, but the whole thing left a stain on the honor of the regiment.  Now, in a triage station near the front lines, Bess meets up with a dying Indian soldier who tells her that he has seen Lieutenant Wade alive and w...

Everybody is thinking about their summer reading plans.  I am too.  In fact, I've been checking books out from work like mad, because I won't be in over the summer and what if I want to read a selection from German classical drama?  What if I suddenly need to read Thomas Pynchon or something?  I must be prepared! As a result, I have a pretty weird assortment of books ready for summer reading. I have some serious ambitions: August 1914 (currently underway) Niels Lyhne in Danish two versions of Tristan WWI material, such as poetry and Tuchman's Guns of August I've been feeling a hankering to give Thomas Pynchon's V. a try And some more fun things: A WWII thriller by Follett my work friend gave me  A new book about free speech  I don't even know, stuff Then there's my TBR pile o' goodness--I'm thinking it's about time I pick up Tristram Shandy , and there's this amazing travel book by V. H. Morton about Palestine (in abou...

Slaughterhouse-Five, or, the Children's Crusade: a Duty-Dance With Death , by Kurt Vonnegut Yay for modernist surreally literature!  I had an excellent time reading (re-reading?  not sure about that) Slaughterhouse-Five , and it put me in the mood for more.  I had been thinking about trying out some more Thomas Pynchon and this book put me over the edge, so I now have a copy of V . for summer reading. This is one of the books that many people who Don't Like Classics have read and loved and called their favorite.  And ha, joke's on you there, it's a modern classic.  All a classic is, is a book a lot of people have called a life-changing favorite. But that also means that everyone already knows what happens and a summary from me is kind of redundant.  Here goes: Billy Pilgrim, near-washout in World War II, POW in Dresden, then an optometrist, husband and father, has come unstuck in time.  He time-travels, at random, to various points in his own lif...

The King in Yellow , by R. W. Chambers I'd never heard of this book until a couple of months ago, when I saw it mentioned in some article about a film (what film? what article?  who knows?), which claimed that lots of filmmakers like to drop allusions to The King in Yellow , and called it a sort of underground cult favorite.  Clearly this called for investigation!  I'd never heard of this book, so what is it?  What's it about?  What's so great about it? The King in Yellow is a collection of short stories published in 1895.  The first five or six are weird tales, most of which contain some allusion to a fictional play titled "The King in Yellow," which, if read all the way through, will send the reader mad.  The last four stories are set in Paris: three about bohemian art students, and one about the Siege of Paris during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. H. P. Lovecraft liked the stories.  He took some style pointers from Chambers and dropped ...

Notes From the Underground, by Fyodor Dostoevsky This was such a strange book that I'm not very sure where to begin.  So I put off writing about it until I forgot some things... Anyway, Dostoevsky wrote Notes from the Underground as a response to Chernyshevsky's What is to be Done? , which made him really mad.   From what I hear, Russians usually read the two together, but in the English-speaking world Chernyshevsky is practically unknown.  That must make Underground far more difficult to understand, because an awful lot of it is a direct reaction to a book most people have not read. The first part of the book is a rant written by the Underground Man, the narrator, who is about 40 and has left a life in civil service to hide from the world.  In his disconnected, skewed sort of way, he is raging against the machine, and especially against the idea of a rationalist utopia such as Chernyshevsky and other radicals envisioned.  To the Underground Man (...

Kaffir Boy: The True Story of a Black Youth's Coming of Age in Apartheid South Africa , by Mark Mathabane I first ran into this book when I started doing Banned Books Week at work, so when the Classics Club got started I put it on the list.  I've actually had it sitting around for some time now, waiting to be read, but it's difficult to find many books that describe more awful brutality and misery than this memoir of life in a black ghetto under apartheid, so it was kind of hard to get started. It's also an amazing description of a kind of life that is almost never documented by the people who live it, because they are nearly all too poor, illiterate, and desperate for survival to sit around writing about their lives.  It's important to read, but also really difficult to stomach. Johannes/Mark Mathabane grew up in one of the worst black ghettos in South Africa, and yet everyone there was desperate to stay.  The government actually wanted all the inhabitants to...

A Beautiful Place to Die, by Malla Nunn I was intrigued by the description of this mystery set in 1950s South Africa.  A lone detective is sent to deal with the murder of the small town's biggest landowner, a Boer and captain who kept a tight hold on the town and had a reputation for strict rectitude.  His sons are demanding an arrest yesterday, and then the secret police show up... The setting was fantastic.  Loved that part.  The detective I wasn't such a fan of; I didn't like him much and he was portrayed as puzzlingly unracist.  He sounds modern, in a book that is set 60 years ago in a country that set up one of the most racist societies ever. There is an explanation of that at the end of the story, but I don't really buy it; it doesn't seem much of a reason that he's the only non-racist guy in all of 1952 South Africa. Now that sets up an interesting question for me.  Let's say you have the excellent intention of writing a story set in a society...

The Classics Club question for May is: Which classic work has caused you to become a master in avoidance? It’s not necessarily because you’re intimidated but maybe there are works out there that just cause you to have the Dracula reaction: cape-covered arm up in front of face with a step back reaction? You know, I think it might be Ulysses , by James Joyce.  I'm planning to read lots of things someday, including Proust and Les Miserables and so on---I'm no longer nervous about any of those.  Solzhenitsyn can't scare me any more, and I might even read Moby Dick sometime, though American literature is not my big favorite.   But I have no desire whatsoever to read Ulysses .  Just none.  Or maybe Clarissa .  I did it once, I don't need to do it again.  At the time, I really got into it, and so did my roommate.  Clarissa kind of hypnotized us, in that we got immersed in it and the premises of Clarissa's behavior made total sense at the ti...

Arthuriad , by Charles Williams (Taliessin Through Logres, The Region of the Summer Stars, and Arthurian Torso) Charles Williams had a really strange mind, and with it he wrote really strange novels and poetry.  In these two books of poems built on the Arthurian legend, he brings in the legendary Welsh bard, Taliessin, and uses him to...well, to say what he wanted to say about Arthur and about a lot of other things. To do what he wanted to do, he changed quite a lot about the Arthurian legends.  Here, Logres (an enchanted pre-Britain) is the far end of an enormous empire with the capital at Byzantium--which is a sort of heavenly kingdom of divine order ruled by the Emperor, who is probably God.  The lands between are Gaul and Caucasia, each with a symbolic importance.  Broceliande is an enchanted forest, even stranger that usual.  The antipodes are ruled by forces of chaos.  Logres is meant, under Arthur, to achieve its own divine order, but through the...

Well, the d20 has been rolled and the number is 1!  I will therefore be reading two plays by Christopher Marlowe: Faustus and one other of my choice. This is where the universe gets to laugh at me.  When I made my list, James Baldwin's Go Tell It On the Mountain was in the #1 spot.  I was quite hoping to get that one, and thinking (as I do, despite knowing the rules of probability) that 1 never comes up, I moved it.  I will probably still read it over the summer, though.  Meanwhile, you can all point and laugh.

The Mill on the Floss , by George Eliot I put this book off for far too long.  Once I actually picked it up and got started, I enjoyed it as much as I expected to--I quite like George Eliot and loved Middlemarch when I read it a few years back.  Someday I'll do a re-read of it. The essay at the end of my copy thinks that Maggie chooses wrongly; that she clings to a useless idea of doing what's right when the damage is already done.  I disagree.  I think Maggie does her best with what she's got, which is very little.  Her determination not to build her happiness on others' misery is, in my opinion, a good course to take.  I do think she should have moved away and started over.  And I think she and the Guest fellow probably could have just been honest in the first place and not done too much damage.  But once Guest pulled his stunt, she chose the right course. I don't really like Stephen Guest at all, though.  I think Maggie is better of...

The XX Factor: How the Rise of Working Women Has Created a Far Less Equal World, by Alison Wolf I couldn't pass up the deliberately provocative title.  I meant to only skim the book, but right when I was going to put it down, Wolf produced some chapters that weren't the same old thing, and it turned out to be pretty interesting. Wolf is British and writes about Americans and Britons here, which gives a nice perspective.  She describes how modern ambitious women are getting the same high-profile jobs as men.  At the top, the gender gap is closing; women work the same jobs and the same hours.  If they marry, they do so later and have few children (unless they are super-rich), depending on cleaners, nannies, and other staff to support a double-income family.  (This would be the highly ambitious business people.  I don't know any IRL, since I don't live in London or NYC.) But more average women--and men--are not doing all that.  There is quite a gap...

It's everyone's favorite time again!  The Classics Spin is run by the Classics Club , and they'll publish the lucky number on Monday.  I have to put up a list of 20 books, so here they are: Marlowe: Faustus and one other play. Confucius, China, 551-479 BCE. The Analects . Baldwin, James , 1953,  Go Tell It On the Mountain . Kurt Vonnegut , Slaughterhouse Five.  John Donne, Divine Meditations Murasaki Shikubu, Japan, ca. 990. The Tale of Genji .(abridged) Lawrence Sterne, Tristram Shandy. Thomas Mann, Death in Venice.   Mohandas Gandhi, India, 1928. My Experiments with Truth. Mario Vargas Llosa, The Time of the Hero (or another work).   Meshack Asare, Sosu's Call.   Gunter Grass, The Tin Drum Anthony Trollope, 1864, The Small House at Allington .  Italo Calvino, 1979, If on a winter's night a traveller  Junichio Tanizaki, Japan, 1943. The Makioka Sisters   Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews. Naguib Mahfouz , ...

Hello everyone-- I just wanted to throw in a little news before I start on the 3 reviews I have lined up, and the Spin, and some other things... The other day I said I was starting August 1914 for the CC May Event.  It appears I got things a little mixed up--I thought May was going to be World War I, and that's June.  May is Post-Colonial Month, and I have nothing planned!  (Sure, I have many post-colonial titles on my CC list, I just wasn't thinking about it.)  But maybe this will spur me to finally get serious about reading Kaffir Boy , which I have had checked out from work for a truly embarrassing length of time.  Plus I have this interesting-looking mystery checked out from the public library which is also set in South Africa, so perhaps May will be South Africa month... AND I really want to read Notes From the Underground as a follow-up to What is to be Done?   I'm thinking I'll take a short break from August 1914 (I'm on chapter 8 and it's p...

Mirror of Flowers , by Dorothea Eastwood I am much better at reading about flowers than I am at growing them.  This is a really nice little book of essays about flowers, written in the late 1940s in Britain.  Dorothea Eastwood wanders all over the territory of the amateur botanist and flower-hunter. Eastwood really has some fun stuff in here.  There is an essay about all the wildflowers she was able to find in urban London (bomb sites are very fruitful territory); one about botany as the first accepted science for young women to study as education became improved; a nice tour through her collection of old and antique volumes of botany; folk magic and folk names as pertaining to flowers; and more about history and the joys of finding the elusive Filmy Fern. Makes especially good bedside reading.  And it's old enough that there is no photo available online.  My copy is in really good shape, dustjacket and all.