Howling Frog Books

I hope you have your copy of the Morte D'Arthur and are ready to start reading!   We start on October 1st. I'd tell you to start your engines, but this is a medieval setting, so...have your squires saddle your horses?

Landline, by Rainbow Rowell I was not at all sure that I wanted to read this book when I heard about the premise.  But I picked it up to see, and I really liked it a lot.  So-- Georgie and Neal are your average tired and overworked parents in their late 30s.  Georgie has spent years writing for bad sit-coms in hopes of someday scoring the opportunity to write her own show (with her long-time writing partner, Seth), while Neal has taken care of the kids and put up with living in LA.  They're about to leave for a Christmas trip to Neal's home when the opportunity hits--the chance to write a show.  This week.  Georgie can't go. Georgie and Neal love each other, but their marriage may have crumbled anyway while Georgie was busy working.  In despair, she starts sleeping at her mom's house and tries calling Neal on her old phone, using his mom's landline.  Neal answers, but it's the Neal of nearly 20 years ago.  As they talk every night, Geo...

Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil, by Paul Bloom I pick these books up from the "New Books" shelf to read over lunch, and then I wind up taking them home.  Paul Bloom likes to study babies and small children to find out when and how they develop moral sense.  What a very interesting thing to do!  Babies, as we might expect, develop moral sense over time, but it's quite amazing how early they start.  Bloom describes experiments where they measure how long babies look at things (because babies will look longer at things they either prefer or do not expect) and how very slightly older children--young toddlers--will act in certain scenarios.  All this is really interesting to read about. It's a bit less interesting when he wanders off the topic of babies to talk about various sets of moral values and where they might come from.  I liked the experiments with tiny children best.  But overall it's a pretty fun read, not too dense.

Heirs of the Body, by Carola Dunn A new mystery in an old format, Carola Dunn's series is not one I've run into before.  Her heroine is Daisy Dalrymple, a mother of nearly 40 and wife to a Scotland Yard detective.  It's the late 1920s and this is a good old-fashioned country house mystery. Daisy's cousin is a peer with no heir, and finding an heir is an urgent necessity.  The candidates are scattered across the world and have little documentation to prove their claims.  Daisy's job is to figure out who is the real heir--and, suddenly, who is perpetrating attacks on the candidates! It's a fun mystery.  And the cover is very cute.

The Thing Around Your Neck, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie I've been looking forward to this book for some time.  It's a collection of short stories, and I am not really much of a short story person, but I should try more.  Anyway I enjoyed these very much and zipped right through the book as though I was eating a package of Pringles.  The stories are all different--written from every point of view and often in slightly different styles--but they are all about life for Nigerians.  Most are set in Nigeria, but a fair number take place in the US and involve adapting to a strange country.  All are intensely personal stories--perhaps about domestic life or a new marriage, or one person's experience during terrifying large events such as riots or the Biafran war.  The final story is called "The Headstrong Historian," but only gets to the historian at the end, after we live the life of the historian's grandmother. I loved these stories, and this only confirms...

You know I'll pick the pulp cover! Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley Can you believe I've never read Frankenstein ?  It's only been on my bookshelf for 20 years.  It was on the syllabus for a class I took, I diligently pre-bought all the books, and then it was removed for time when the class actually started.  I see that this book cost me $2.60 and had been owned by some guy named Jason at the University of Tennessee, so how it got to me at Berkeley is a bit of a mystery.  Who would bother transporting it?  Did they really truck piles of used Penguins and Oxfords around the country for impoverished lit majors? Well, we all know the story.  Dr. Victor Frankenstein becomes fascinated with the origins of life and is finally able to create it himself!  He fashions a creature from bits and bobs, animates it, and is horrified by what he's done.  Repudiating his own creation, he leaves the poor creature to fend for itself, with terrible consequences...

Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade , by Assia Djebar  (from the French L'amour, la fantasia ) In 1830, the French invaded Algeria, turning it into a colony.  Algerians have thus had a tricky dual heritage of Arabic culture and imposed French government and language, and Assia Djebar intertwines pieces of history with stories of the lives of women living within it.  This is a complex book that would keep a college literature class busy for weeks, so I can hardly do it justice here, but here are some themes: A 'fantasia,' to Arabs, is indeed what I might call a cavalcade: a procession of riders on horseback, showing off their skills at a gallop, and incidentally firing rifles and yelling.  In the Romance languages, it means a free-form musical composition that wanders around.  Both of these meanings are put into use, and sections of the book are named after sections of a musical composition as Djebar demonstrates her skills as a storyteller. Language, and cul...

Oh my goodness, dear readers (if you are still there!), I have 8 books to review and so much to talk about, and yet I have not been here at all.  Life got really interesting over the past couple of weeks, especially with the prep for Banned Books Week.  I spent many hours collecting news stories for our displays, with the result that we have one featuring no less than SIX cases in K-12 schools just from the last 4 months , since the last school year ended.  (I did the information gathering, and my counterpart did the art/assembly.)  Another display concentrates on free speech issues at college campuses, which goes right with BBW and brings the issues right into their reality.  I am very proud of this one, which covers all sorts of interesting cases from the last year.  I really had to pick and choose quite a bit. I also had a serious car breakdown, at just the same time that I had to attend a school board meeting.  I'm on the parent...

I have various things to talk about, some upcoming events and whatnot... I hope everybody is gearing up for Banned Books Week, which is coming up fast in the fourth week of this month: 21-27 September .  At least, that's how it feels to me!  For the past few years I've been kind of in charge of BBW at work, and now I've been voted official Queen of Banned Books Week.  So I'll be preparing like mad for the next little while.  I guess I don't usually talk about it here a whole lot, since I do it so much at work, but I did post the mug shot I took last year. Guess what??  Lory at Emerald City Book Review is hosting a special Diana Wynne Jones event!  During Witch Week, there will be a readalong of Witch Week and discuss a new DWJ book daily.  Here's the schedule: Preview: October 30 - Master post with link-up and giveaway Day 1, October 31 - Fire and Hemlock Day 2, November 1 - Power of Three Day 3, November 2 - Howl's Moving Castle D...

Most awesome cover. God's Philosophers, by James Hannam I found this book through a really long, really great review: The Dark Age Myth: An Atheist Reviews God's Philosophers .   I really encourage you to go read that article--you can even skip mine if you do--because it's far better and more entertaining than I am. God's Philosophers sets out to destroy the common myth that Christianity clamped a lid of oppression and censorship on Europe, ushering in the Dark Ages during which no one thought or invented anything until the Renaissance came along and rescued us by inventing science.   (Guess who invented this idea first?)  Hannam therefore leads us through a series of short biographies of medieval thinkers: people who delved into mathematics, engineering, natural philosophy (what we would now call science, only it wasn't then), and even a bit of medicine--because they believed strongly that God was a rational being who created a rational universe that co...