Howling Frog Books

Karen at Books and Chocolate is hosting the Back to the Classics Challenge this year, and it's time for a check-in post!  I have finished SIX of the ELEVEN categories, and I have the movie of Slaughterhouse-Five ready to watch soon.  I'm still not sure what classic thriller I'll read--I already read a lot of mysteries but I want something a bit special.  Anyway, here you go: A 20th Century Classic -- If on a winter's night a traveler , by Italo Calvino A 19th Century Classic -- Mill on the Floss, by George Eliot. A Classic by a Woman Author A Classic in Translation      Dead Souls , by Nikolai Gogol. A Wartime Classic   August 1914 , by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn A Classic by an Author Who Is New To You Brideshead Revisited , by Evelyn Waugh Optional Categories: An American Classic --  A Classic Mystery, Suspense or Thriller --  A Historical Fiction Classic.  A Classic That's Been Adapted Into a Movie or TV Serie...

Lost and Found in Russia: Lives in a Post-Soviet Landscape , by Susan Richards Susan Richards has been traveling regularly to Russia, writing about Russia, and trying to help people in Russia for quite a while now.  Here, she chronicles chapters from her visits over the past 20-odd years, ever since the fall of Communism. Every section covers two or three years and begins with a short explanation of what was going on in Russia at the time.  (This is really helpful if you were in college in 1994 and missed much of Yeltsin's decline through lack of TV or news.)   It goes from 1992-2008, so there's a lot of stuff happening--the book is only about 300 pages long, but they are dense .  Richards visits several friends--often the same ones, so we can follow them over the years--and visits various spots to see what's going on. Post-Soviet Russia, as described by Richards, is a difficult place to live.  Her friends cope in different ways; some are trying to ru...

One of my Classics Club selections was poetry by Wilfrid Owen. I thought June's WWI event would be a good time to do that, but then I found that a copy of only his poems was not easy to come by.  What I could find was a very nice collection of modern poetry that contained quite a bit from several WWI poets, both famous and not.  So I decided to replace Wilfrid Owen with "Selections From WWI Poets." I just went through and read everything by anyone who was a familiar WWI name or who had a poem that was clearly related.  This included Siegfried Sassoon, Rupert Brooke, Isaac Rosenberg, Wilfrid Owen, Robert Graves, and May Wedderburn Cannan. I enjoyed my hour or so with the poets, but I'm not much good at talking about poetry.  Instead I'll give you "Rouen," by May Wedderburn Cannan, who must have been a nurse. Early morning over Rouen, hopeful, high, courageous morning, And the laughter of adventure and the steepness of the stair, And the dawn acros...

The Haunted Looking-Glass: Ghost Stories Chosen by Edward Gorey This is an excellent selection of spooky--but not horrifying--ghost stories, not a one of which is titled "The Haunted Looking-Glass."  Gorey must have made that up himself, I guess.   Seriously, people there is fantastic stuff in here, and most of it is not so famous that you've already run into it 17 times in other collections ("The Monkey's Paw" is included, but it was worth reading again).  There are several famous names: M. R. James, Saki, Wilkie Collins, and so on, but several others were not familiar to me.  Each story gets a Gorey frontispiece. Be sure to pick this one up!

I don't join very many readathons, but I had a fun time last year doing the Wicked Wildfire Readathon, and I thought I'd give it another try.  It starts on my daughter's birthday, so I might have a slow start... Rules for Wicked Wildfire Readathon 2014 : The  Wicked Wildfire Read-A-Thon  is a time when we all get together to dedicate the days of July 14-24  to as much reading as possible. You read as much as  you  can in order to get yourself a little further through that huge to-read pile! We know real life gets in the way and  even if you can’t participate more than one day , you’re welcome to join in on the fun! In the meanwhile, we will be hosting book-related challenges where you can win some awesome prizes and have a Twitter party at the hashtag  #WWReadathon ! You can posts updates on your blog, Twitter, Goodreads, Facebook or even YouTube — as long as the profile is public and we all can enjoy your reading progress...

I love the fake vintage cover! How the Heather Looks: A Joyous Journey to the British Sources of Children's Books , by Joan Bodger In 1957, a little family came into some money, enough to spend a summer abroad.  Both husband and wife were half-English and had grown up on the British classics, and they wanted to introduce their young children to the real places that had inspired the literature.  So they spent a summer traveling around England, finding Caldecott's villages and farms, Christopher Robin's woods, Mrs. Tiggywinkle's farmhouse, Rat's house on the river, and King Arthur's castle.  Or as close as they could get, anyway. Each chapter is dedicated to one author and a section of the trip.  Bodger casts these episodes as quests, while keeping the real-life frustrations that befell them.   She is a marvelous writer and manages to evoke the atmosphere of each classic story and each landscape.  She also packs a lot in; this is not a short book...

Death in Venice , by Thomas Mann I knew nothing whatsoever about this novella (short story?) when I put it on my Classics Club list, except that it is quite famous.  And I figured someone would probably die in Venice. Aschenbach is an older gentleman who has spent his life writing, especially about the arts, but now he has writer's block.  He decides to go to Venice, but once there, becomes infatuated with a young boy of about 12-14 vacationing with his family.  Aschenbach watches this boy every day, and even follows him around, but rarely speaks to him; instead, he thinks about Platonic treatises on love and so on.  His obsession tears down his moral sense, until, when a cholera epidemic hits Venice, he fails to warn the family because he can't stand to think of them leaving.  He pays the price when, just as they are leaving anyway, he succumbs to the plague himself. Meh. 

August 1914 , by Aleksandr Solzenitsyn In January, I put this novel on my mental list for the year, thinking that it would be good for the 100th anniversary of WWI.  I hoped it would give me more insight into the Eastern front of the war, which I really know very little about.  August 1914 did do that, and although it's not my favorite Solzhenitsyn novel, it was very worth reading. Like In the First Circle , this is a sketch of an entire society at a particular moment in time.  There is a vast cast of characters, all doing their own thing and sometimes intersecting with each other.  We do not only see the warfront; there are people on country estates, in the cities, in schools, and even chapters consisting entirely of snippets from newspapers.  But the vast majority of the novel does take place with the soldiers going to war.  We don't see nearly as much of all the other things. Troop movements take up at least 2/3 of the book, and while I was interes...

This month's discussion topic is: Think of an example of a classic you’ve read that presents issues like racism/sexism as acceptable within society. Do you think the reception of this classic work would be the same if it were newly published today? What can we get out of this work despite its weaknesses? Or, why would you say this work is still respected/treasured/remembered in 2014?  I'm not actually thinking of any one particular book right now; my thoughts are very general.  I have a lot of thoughts on this topic, but they aren't terribly new or original.  So, you can skip if you like. :) Yep, older books are crammed full of racism and sexism and all sorts of things that we don't like.  That is perfectly true.  Some of the things we read in older books are quite disturbing.  Students routinely complain that there is offensive material in certain classics-- Huck Finn , for example, contains language that most of us would never use....