Howling Frog Books

For a few years now I've seen bloggy friends participate in--and wax enthusiastic about--the R.eaders I.mbibing P.eril event , but I've never done it myself.  I think this is the year.  I love reading spooky books in the fall anyway.  So here are the rules: 1. Have fun reading (and watching). 2. Share that fun with others. As I do each and every year, there are multiple levels of participation ( Perils ) that allow you to be a part of R.eaders I.mbibing P.eril without adding the burden of another commitment to your already busy lives. There is even a one book only option for those who feel that this sort of reading is not their cup of tea (or who have too many other commitments) but want to participate all the same. R.I.P. IX officially runs from September 1st through October 31st. But lets go ahead and break the rules. Lets start today!!! Multiple perils await you. You can participate in just one, or participate in them all. I am going to sign up for...

Parzival, by Wolfram von Eschenbach Written in about 1200, Parzival expands and finishes Chretien de Troyes' unfinished tale of Parsifal .  I'm used to seeing this knight in a sort of mystical, perfect Christian knight way, because I'm most familiar with the Quest for the Holy Grail which is very mystical indeed, but Parzival is flatfootedly not one bit mystical and, while Christian, does not spend a lot of time on religion.  Parzival is a perfect knight--by the end--but he takes a while to get there and his virtues are largely expressed in chivalric battles that reveal his prowess.  His progress is revealed by how and why he fights. Wolfram was something of an upstart in the world of German Arthurian storytelling, and he has to fight for his place a bit.  His story (he actually refuses to call it a book!) was written in episodes which were performed before he wrote the next part, and there are some references to his audience and to other, more established Arth...

The ladies at My Shelf Confessions are hosting the Wonderfully Wicked Readathon in October!  They are so nice about any participation being OK with them, and I like that relaxed attitude.  I'll be joining up and reading what I can between October 17 and 27. Here's the deal, in their words: The  Wicked Wildfire Read-A-Thon  is a time when we all get together to dedicate the days of October 17-27  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 publi...

The Small House at Allington , by Anthony Trollope This was my Spin title, and very glad I am that it was.  After reading Savage Continent, a nice story about nice civilized people doing ordinary things and having ordinary problems was just what I wanted!  It was lovely to sink into this novel.  It's the 5th Barsetshire novel, though it's actually set in the next county over; almost none of the action takes place in Barsetshire. The Small House at Allington is sort of a little dower house attached to the much larger manor of Allington.  It is occupied by Mrs. Dale and her two daughters Bell and Lily, who live there because their uncle owns Allington.  He is fond of the girls and, under his patronage, they are able to have a bit more social life than their straitened circumstances would otherwise allow, but they do not expect to marry wealth or anything like that.  They are thoroughly nice middle-class girls. Bell has no particular prospects of marria...

The 39 Steps , by John Buchan The Back to the Classics Challenge asks for "a classic mystery, suspense, or thriller."  It so happens that I picked up a collection of Richard Hannay thrillers some time back, and the first one, The 39 Steps , is certainly a classic thriller, so I picked that.  And then it so happens that I found a Franklin Library edition for almost nothing--I don't collect those (do any serious readers buy Franklins? To read? I want to know) but this one has illustrations by Edward Gorey.  They are not actually terribly interesting illustrations, with the exception of the cover image, which I share with you here. It's summer 1914, and Richard Hannay is visiting England after a lifetime spent on the African veldts.  He is bored stiff and planning to leave, when his upstairs neighbor invites himself in and tells a fantastic tale.  The Black Stone gang are planning to assassinate the only man who can keep peace, and he's got the vital informatio...

To wrap up my year-long project, and to celebrate Arthurian literature generally, I'd like to host a readalong of Malory's Morte D'Arthur in the late fall. Sir Thomas Malory was in prison in the 1450s, and he passed the time by compiling all the French romances and English stories he had into one big collection.  The job took him about 20 years!  We don't really have a certain identification for him--there are a few candidates for exactly which Thomas Malory he was--but the most probable is that he was the one from Newbold Revel in Warwickshire, a veteran of Calais.  He was in prison for rather a lot of distinctly non-chivalric behavior.  He also spent time in prison for conspiracy in the Wars of the Roses. Le Morte D'Arthur is quite long, so I'm giving us a good chunk of time.  The scheduling turned out to be unexpectedly tricky; Caxton originally published the text in 21 books, each with a bunch of short chapters, and my edition uses that arrangement,...

The Joys of Motherhood, by Buchi Emecheta I've never read a Buchi Emecheta novel before.  It was recommended on Celestine's blog, Reading Pleasure, so I picked it up as part of my prospective summer reading. A young mother, mad with grief, runs away from her home to kill herself by jumping off a bridge... And then the story goes back 25 years to tell the story of Nnu Ego's life, starting with her mother's story.  Nnu Ego grows up as the favorite daughter of her eminent father, and he wants a good marriage for her, but she doesn't get pregnant and eventually her husband shoves her aside.  Nnu Ego is sent to the big city of Lagos to marry another man, who she desperately hopes will give her children.  Emecheta writes ambiguously, both defending and critiquing traditional Ibo ways.  Nnu Ego lives by them strictly, but comes to question her life and wonder if she will ever be free.  Everywhere she turns, she is chained by obligation, rules of status,...

In August, the Classics Club theme is the Enlightenment.   It so happens that Locke's Second Treatise on Government is on my CC list and my TBR challenge list for this year, so I figured this would be the perfect time to read it. Locke is clearly a genius, but since he was writing over 300 years ago, he isn't all that easy to understand all the time.  He would certainly repay repeated readings.   As some background, he wrote the treatise anonymously, partly to support William III's ascension to the British throne in the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and to discredit James II, and partly to rebut Hobbes' Leviathan treatise.  Hobbes said that since everyone was pretty rotten, people needed an authoritarian government--an absolute monarch--to keep control, while Locke argued that the only legitimate government was one derived from the consent of the people governed.  James II was in the absolutist tradition, and William was supposed to be a king subject to the...

Fanda at ClassicLit is doing a check-in for her history challenge : Time flies so really quickly, and here we are already on the eighth month of 2014, two third of our sail to the past with History Reading Challenge 2014 . This is our second check in, to check how we have been progressing since our start. Let’s share in the comment below (or if you want to write it in a post, you could link up your post here), How many books have you read so far? Are you on schedule or left behind? What is your most favorite so far? Which history are you looking forward to read? (You don’t have to answer all the questions; basically tell us what you think about this challenge so far). And I would like to remind you, that in the end of this challenge there will be two giveaways, one of them for the Analysis posts. If you haven’t submitted your posts, there is still enough time to do so.  I managed to miss the last check-in post, so I think this is actually my fir...

Two Lives of Charlemagne , by Einhard and Notker the Stammerer Charlemagne, King of the Franks, lived from 742 to 814 and was practically a legend in his own time--which is illustrated by these two accounts of his life. The first is by Einhard, who actually served under Charlemagne as a diplomat.  It's a straightforward, factual account, not very long, that still manages to get several major things a bit wrong.  Of course, Einhard also glides over some of the less heroic details of court life too; he is strongly biased.  The entire account is strictly realistic; for example, I noticed the incident that was later turned into the Song of Roland.  In the poem, written centuries later, Roland and his men fight off hordes of attacking Moors; Einhard's account shows it to have been a guerrilla-style attack on the rear baggage train by Basques. Notker the Stammerer was a monk, writing his account for the benefit of Charlemagne's great-grandson, Charles the Fat....

Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II, by Keith Lowe I've been slowly reading this book for at least half of the summer, and then suddenly someone put it on hold at the library, so I rushed through the last 100 pages in two days.  It is such an awful litany of terribleness that I could only read so much at a time. Post-war Europe was a destroyed wasteland.  Entire cities had been burnt down.  Many villages were simply gone.  Farmland had been ravaged, and large populations shoved around and killed.  Institutions like schools, police, government, and everything else--were missing, or else staffed by thugs.  In this desolation, people starved, got sick, and perpetrated yet more violence and oppression upon each other.  The Nazis made actions like ethnic cleansing and making populations disappear into routines, and many others copied those atrocities on a smaller scale (especially upon German ethnic groups).  Mixed regions th...

Selections from The Wild Swans at Coole , and others, by William Butler Yeats One of my Classics Club items is The Wild Swans at Coole, one of the books of Yeats' poetry.  I looked for it at the library, and what I really found was a Norton collection covering his entire career.  So I read the poems from Wild Swans, and then I read as many others as caught my eye. The Wild Swans period was in the late 1910s, and Yeats was rounding 50.  The woman he'd loved for years had refused him.  (Soon she married another man, and then he tried to court her daughter (of all people!) who refused him too.)  He was thinking he would never be able to marry, and that he was entering the autumn of his life, and everything was winding down for him.  The poems all have an elegaic, autumnal feel--one really is an elegy, for a friend killed in action.  In fact, Yeats was on the brink of entering his 'great' period, and much of his best work was in the future.  H...

Today we find out our lucky Spin number !  And that number is 17, which means I'll be reading Trollope's The Small House at Allington.   Fun!

The Man Born to be King , by Dorothy Sayers I've had this for a few years, so I put it on my TBR pile for this year.  I love Sayers, but drama makes me nervous, and this is a collection of 12 short plays written as a cycle.  They were actually written to be performed on the radio (and were, on the BBC).  They make up a life of Christ, written in a modern vernacular so as to be more immediate and less like stained-glass pictures (that is, all fancy and remote).  Jesus and his followers were not really fancy or remote people, after all.  Sayers was very careful with her project; she was a serious scholar and theologian, so while she's translating into a vernacular she is being extremely cautious about it, making sure to get the right feeling and not to let it turn into the utter disaster it could so easily be. So the introductions to each play describe the social station of each character and what the players should aim for, which is great information to have....

Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters, and The Cherry Orchard , by Anton Chekhov I wanted to read some of Chekhov's plays, and figured I'd better start with the ones I'd heard of.  All three of these plays take place on country estates, with families who are unhappy and feel stifled on said estates.  A funny thing happened while I was reading the first play, Uncle Vanya --I was at the swimming pool with a friend and we were reading.  Hers was a humorous mystery novel, and at one point she laughed and read out to me the line "Stop talking past each other; we aren't in a Chekhov play!"  (Or something like that.  I can't remember exactly.)  So from then on I was watching out for people talking past each other, which indeed they did pretty often, especially in the last two plays. As always, it would be much better if I could see these dramas performed.  It's hard to keep all the Russian characters straight.  The Cherry Orchard was the trickiest that way. I ...

  Tristan, by Gottfried von Strassburg Here's my third version of the Tristan and Iseult story, but the first one that has been available as a complete manuscript.  Gottfried von Strassburg was one of the great German Arthurian writers of the Middle Ages, and though we don't know much about him, he probably wasn't a courtier or a knight.  He seems to have been something more along the lines of a prominent town official. He might not have been a courtier, but his story is more 'courtly' than the other two I've read, which are more straightforward and rough.  This Tristan has a lot in it about manners and rich clothing, and it's generally more elaborate, with fancy little touches.  It's not so detailed on the fighting; Gottfried is clearly more interested in clothes than in war (maybe he came from a family of textile merchants?). Tristan gets a whole long backstory, with parents who fall in love and a foster father and a childhood.  That was quite...

 It's time for another Classics Club Spin!   I love these.  Haven't missed one yet.  Here are the rules: Go to your blog. Pick twenty books that you’ve got left to read from your Classics Club List. Try to challenge yourself: list five you are dreading/hesitant to read, five you can’t WAIT to read, five you are neutral about, and five free choice (favorite author, rereads, ancients — whatever you choose.) Post that list, numbered 1-20, on your blog by next Monday. Monday morning, we’ll announce a number from 1-20. Go to the list of twenty books you posted, and select the book that corresponds to the number we announce. The challenge is to read that book by October 6, even if it’s an icky one you dread reading! (No fair not listing any scary ones!) Ha ha! :D All for fun, and of course, the “rules” are, as always, very relaxed. Really, you can make up your own rules. We don’t actually care. :P   So, here's my list.  As usual, I...

In the Stacks: Short Stories About Libraries and Librarians, ed. by Michael Cart First, let us all repeat together the librarian mantra my co-worker and I often say: everything is better in the stacks. I thought this was a fun idea so I picked it up, but by halfway through I was wondering what I was thinking.  I think I don't like themed collections of short stories.  Soon I was asking myself why I was even reading it. There are several really good short stories in this book, though.  I loved the Italo Calvino story that kicks off the book.  There's an excellent Ray Bradbury piece, and a fun little murder mystery.  Of course the famous Borges story is included. Some of the stories seemed to be really kind of a stretch, included because they weren't terrible and mentioned something about something that might be connected to a library somehow.  It's really a fairly large collection--or at least it felt that way.  I got pretty tired.

Beauty in the Word: Rethinking the Foundations of Education , by Stratford Caldecott I read Caldecott's Beauty for Truth's Sake a couple of years ago; it's about the Quadrivium, or the four branches of learning (mostly applications of mathematics) that come after the Trivium in classical education.  This book is a followup, or maybe a prequel, because it's about the Trivium as a foundation of education, specifically within a Catholic tradition.  Caldecott was (he just passed away a couple of weeks ago) a very intellectual and very Catholic scholar at Oxford, and really he's a bit above my head.  I think partly I don't quite understand his very Catholic language, but I gave it a good stab and I'll have a go again sometime. Caldecott first talks about child-centered methods of education and making them into something that he thinks would be ideal.  He then tackles the Trivium itself in three sections, equating each branch with certain things.  For example...