Howling Frog Books

The event I have been waiting for is here!  It's Witch Week!  Hosted by Lory of Emerald City Book Review, this is a week dedicated to the works of Diana Wynne Jones, who invented Witch Week, the days between Halloween and Guy Fawkes Day: Witch Week, when there is so much magic around in the world that all sorts of peculiar things happen... Today is the first day, and we're going to have a readalong of (nat urally) Witch Week , and there is a wonderful personal essay about Fire & Hemlock by Ana on Lory's blog today.  Go read it!  It really makes me wish I could remember my first reading of F&H, which I cannot.

How are you all doing with the readalong?  I'm finding the schedule to be a little more rigorous than I had meant it to be.  But I've finished Books VI through IX, and I thought I'd  better get going on X since it's soooo long. I had not realized that Malory was so much rougher than many of the earlier stories that I'd read.  He is way more into the fighting and the smashing and the spearing and thunder, isn't he?  And nobody seems to be as pure and well-behaved as usual.  Gawaine is awful.  Arthur, the ideal king (except for that one problem), is fairly awful too.  I've heard that Malory was in prison for behaving like a ruffian, and it seems to have worked its way into his stories more than I had expected! Interesting how, now that Arthur is settled into kingship and has conquered Europe, there is no more war--but everybody has to keep fighting, obviously, because if not there will be no point to their lives.  So they start hanging out...

Supernatural Enhancements, by Edgar Cantero I can no longer remember who reviewed this a few weeks ago, and while I tried to look through my RSS feed to find out, I subscribe to too many book blogs for that to work.  If it was you, please tell me OK?  Like most people, I saw the cover and had to read it.  The trouble with that is that I was quite worried that the story would not live up to the cover! In proper Gothic tradition, this novel purports to be a found collection of documents put into order for the reader.  The first page is missing.  We read a diary, letter, clues, and--since this is a modern novel, set in 1995--transcripts of recordings and videos. A., the diarist, is a distant cousin of the recently deceased Ambrose Wells, and has just inherited his old Virginian manor house--complete with ghost and missing butler.  A. and his companion, teenaged Niamh, an Irish kid with acquired mutism, explore the clues and puzzles scattered through the...

Tomorrow is the last day of the readathon!  Even though I haven't gotten to read as much as I wanted, I tried to make time even in very busy days for reading, and I'm happy about that.  Here's what I've done in the last couple of days: Finished volume III in War and Peace ; a little way into volume IV. Some progress in Morte D'Arthur --hoping to finish Book IX tonight. I read another novel by Emecheta, titled The Slave Girl --the life story of a favorite daughter who is sold into slavery by her own brother after their parents die.  It's set in early 1900s Nigeria, with the British becoming more powerful in their empire (that's in the background) and is very good.

Mysteries , by Knut Hamsum A few weeks ago, Tom at Wuthering Expectations posted a casual invitation to join him and a few others in reading Mysteries with this: All too soon Ricardo de la Caravana de recuerdos , and I hope many, many others, will join me in a reading of and conversation about Knut Hamsun’s 1892 novel Mysteries .  If it is like other Hamsun novels, some of that “conversation” will be closer to stunned silence and questions like “What is this?”  Well, I could hardly refuse an opportunity to ask "What is this?" so I joined in. Mysteries is an 1892 novel by the Norwegian Knut Hamsun (whose name confused me until the introduction explained that it was Hamsund, after the family's farm, but a printer's typo inspired him to drop the D permanently).  He was something of an iconoclast in Norwegian literature, determined to smash all orthodoxies and write "a new literary psychology" that was all about the stream of consciousness and its ...

We're getting toward the end of the readathon, and I don't feel like I've been able to read all that much for the last few days, but I have made efforts to make as much time as I could for it, so that alone makes it worthwhile.  Today's progress: I did, in fact, finish Supernatural Enhancements .  That was an unexpected ending for sure.  Tell you about it soon. I'm close to finished with Book VIII (not IX, oops) of Morte D'Arthur.   I'll try to finish it tonight, but I'm also going to watch a movie for the Back to the Classics Challenge, so we shall see. I forgot to mention yesterday that I had started Seventeen , by Booth Tarkington (of Magnificent Ambersons fame).  It's a quick read and pretty funny, so I took it to the girls' fencing class today and finished it.  That is my biggest thing today.

I love this cover. Little Brother , by Cory Doctorow I picked this up because of Banned Books Week.  Little Brother was supposed to be the assigned book in a school-wide summer project, but it was pulled at the last minute.  (Read all about i t!)  Doctorow, who runs the BoingBoing site, said that it seemed to have happened because of politics, so I was instantly intrigued.  Not because of sex?  Not because of any of the usuals?  This I have to see.  So here's the story (written, note, in 2006): Marcus is a high school student in San Francisco, "one of the most surveilled people in the world."  In this not-too-distant-future scenario, schools give students notebook computers to do all their work (and keep tabs on them) and have cameras in the hallways.  Marcus, however, is a hacker kid who takes great joy in circumventing all this control.  He and three friends decide to ditch school for a couple of hours to hunt down a new clue ...

It's not too late to join me! I got so little time to read yesterday that I didn't write a post to tell you so.  I did, however, do a whole lot of librarianing, so that was nice--I purchased, I weeded, I referenced, I taught!   Today was not a whole lot better reading-wise, because I was hard at work creating a blue dalek costume for my 11-year-old for Halloween.  It's almost done now, and I think it will be pretty good.  So, over the last couple of days, I have read: Some War and Peace --not a ton, but some. About half of Book VIII of Morte D'Arthur .  We are well into Tristram and "La Beale Isoud" now. Nearly all of the rest of Supernatural Enhancements --I'm hoping to finish it tonight. I have just got to write you up a review of Little Brother soon.  I have a lot to say about it.

I ran around a bit today, didn't get all that much reading done, but here goes: I finished Mysteries !  Yes indeed.  That is one weird novel. The obligatory couple of chapters of Morte D'Arthur --I'd better tackle that more seriously tomorrow. And I started Supernatural Enhancements, which I put on hold at the library because I saw the fantastic cover.  I am hoping the story will live up to the cover, but I'm not sure anything could.  I got about 70 pages in, but it's probably over 400.  It sticks to tradition--it's a found "collection of documents" in proper Gothic style.

The Time of the Ghos t, by Diana Wynne Jones, and The Ocean at the End of the Lane, by Neil Gaiman These two were both re-reads, but I specifically wanted to read them together and compare.  I had only read Ocean once, so it was really nice to go back and notice a lot of details that had become fuzzy or that I maybe hadn't noticed the first time around.  I know Time of the Ghost very well.  I have talked about both of them here before-- here is my review of Ocean , and here is Time of the Ghost --so I don't want to re-state those thoughts. When I first read Ocean , I thought it was probably Gaiman's sort-of tribute to DWJ, whom he famously thought a lot of.  Jenny thought so too, and then she actually met Gaiman and he SAID SO and that he thought it was most like Time of the Ghost .  I would like to know much more about his thoughts on that!  Thus this pairing of reading and this post. I'm not a dedicated Gaiman fan--I always read his books, but ...

The Victorian Chaise-Longue , by Marghanita Laski This short novel sounded so interesting when someone else read it, and I finally ILLed it so I could read it too.  It is short; about 100 pages long or so and I suppose really a novella. It's 1952, and Melanie is a pretty, rather fluffy young wife and mother under treatment for tuberculosis.  She spent nearly all of her pregnancy confined to bed, and now she is finally allowed downstairs, to lie on the large Victorian chaise-longue that was her last purchase before her diagnosis.  She happily falls asleep...and wakes up in 1864, in the body of another person. It's an unusual and frightening story.  It reads like a domestic novel, not a time-travel fantasy or science fiction, but it's really scary as well.  It's very good.  I'm glad Persephone reprinted it so that I could get to hear of it.

Today I decided to take a little break from King Arthur, and focus on War and Peace and a fun book. I read about 60 pages of War and Peace , and finished Book 2 of Volume III.  A little bit of Mysteries and also a little of Morte D'Arthur , just not much. But what I mostly did was start Little Brother ...and read it all day, and finish before dinner.  It's a YA novel that mixes a bit of dystopia and a lot of hacker into a near-future possible scenario.  Great stuff, probably everyone should read it for the education it gives in online security issues (some of it is information disguised as fiction), plus Doctorow is clearly a Pinkwater fan like me and I would like to ask him about that.  More when I get to the blog post about it. Really, I will write an actual post about a book soon.  I've got a pile here again...

Whew!  I gave my talk today, and I survived, and I feel much better now.  I got to do quite a bit of reading in the afternoon, too. I finished Book VII of Le Morte D'Arthur , which was the Tale of Sir Gareth, aka Beaumains. Just one chapter of Mysteries , but quite a long one. And over 60 pages of War and Peace (they are very large pages!), so I feel quite accomplished about that.  It's all preparations for Napoleon arriving near Moscow.

Today was my super-busy day.  I meant to mostly write a talk I have to give tomorrow, but I also wound up going to the mall twice if you can believe it, and other things.  So not a lot of reading today.  But I did manage: The Spell of the Sorcerer's Skull , by John Bellairs -- an old favorite that I got in the mood to read. 18 chapters of Le Morte D'Arthur -- Book VII is the Tale of Sir Gareth, and it's longer.  I read half. Tomorrow I'll get some book reviews done!

Are you joining in the Wonderfully Wicked Readathon , hosted by My Shelf Confessions, or any other?  I think there's more than one right now.  Here is my end-of-the-day news: I started reading Diana Wynne Jones' Time of the Ghost yesterday evening and finished it today.  What great characters inhabit that story--a set of sisters, who know each other inside and out, care for each other and fight all the time, and are very peculiar owing to the really terrible neglect of their parents. A couple of chapters of Knut Hamsun's Mysteries --one heck of a weird book. And Book VI of Le Morte D'Arthur : The Tale of Sir Launcelot of the Lake. I currently have a truly ridiculous number of books checked out of the library, and little business reading any of them when I have a huge chunk of Le Morte D'Arthur and War and Peace to read!  Just 500 pages to go in that last one, woohoo! Some of my ridiculous pile at the moment

Not the cover, but could be! Uncle Silas, by Sheridan Le Fanu Uncle Silas was suggested to me for an October read, and it was a lot of fun.  It is a wonderful example of the English Gothic novel (OK, Le Fanu was Irish, but it's the genre): big old crumbling mansion, strange uncle, heiress all alone...no Catholics this time, this being solid England, but there are Swedenborgians! Maud lives with her father and a few servants on their estate; their lives are incredibly sheltered and lonely.  Maud's father is old, self-absorbed, and distant, mostly interested in the beliefs of Swedenborg.  Maud hears a tiny bit about her Uncle Silas, a former rake who, rumor claims, murdered a creditor years ago.  Although Maud's father believes in his brother's innocence, few others do and Silas lives in utter seclusion, reportedly a fervently converted Christian repenting of his former ways.  There is also a scary, scheming, screeching old French governess who terrifies ...

Here's the first check-in post--how are you all doing with the first chunk of Le Morte D'Arthur ?  I found it to be pretty fun most of the time.  Malory is editing some very long French adventures down into what he must have felt to be more digestible chunks, and for medieval adventures they're not so long.  Parzival , for example, was much wordier. There sure are some weird things in here though, aren't there?  Here are some incidents that caught my eye. Book I, chapter 27 :  Arthur learns from a prophecy that a child born on May Day will be his doom.  Like Herod, he stages a slaughter of the innocents by requiring all the children born on May Day to be sent to him, whereupon he puts them all in a ship and sends them off to die. !!!  I was really stunned by this story and would like to know just where Malory got it (besides the Bible, obviously, but I don't think Malory was the inventor here).  Inevitably, Mordred is the one baby who survive...

Invasion of the Body Snatchers , 1956 As long as I'm doing the RIP event, I may as well tell you about the movie we just watched for the Peril On The Screen portion of the challenge.  Invasion of the Body Snatchers is, of course, one of the big classic alien invasion films!  I don't think I'd ever actually seen it before, even though I know all about pod people.  My daughter and I love Daniel Pinkwater, and he riffs on pod people in Lizard Music , so we both wanted to see it. In the small town of Santa Mira, a doctor comes back from a conference to find that a) his old girlfriend is back in town and available, and b) several people seem to be hallucinating that their closest relatives are no longer themselves.  Soon, he and his true love are on the run from terrifying plant-based aliens who first grow into copies of people, and then take over their minds while they sleep.  Can they make it to the outside and warn the world before it's too late?? It's a...

Rose Under Fire, by Elizabeth Wein Last year I read Code Name Verity , and it was amazing.  Rose Under Fire is the companion novel; you don't have to have read Verity , but Maggie is in both. Rose is an American girl and she knows how to fly planes, so she has a job ferrying planes around for repair or transport or whatever.  She is nowhere near the front lines, and although she would love to get to Europe, the chances are slim.  It's mid-1944 and the Nazis are being beaten back, though, so when France is liberated, Rose gets a chance to ferry a plane from there.  Then she disappears.  Rose has been captured by the Germans, who assumed they had a flying spy, not a girl gofer.  But they're not about to let her go, so they send her to Ravensbrück, the women's concentration camp.  There, she tries to survive, trading bread and getting to know many different people, including the Rabbits--a group of women subjected to horrifying medical experiments...

The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America , by Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld This book got some notice when it came out because one of the authors is the Tiger Mother woman.  Turns out she's also a law professor and does a lot of this global analysis stuff too.  (I have not read the tiger mother books, so maybe she said that and I just didn't know.) Chua and Rubenfeld sort of profile ethnic/cultural groups in America that have done unusually well: Jews, Nigerians, Cubans, Chinese, Mormons, and a few others.  They isolate three cultural traits: a superiority complex, impulse control, and feelings of inferiority.  Their claim is that these three traits, working together , in an open society, will produce a group that tends to be more materially successful than the average.  And then they delve into some detail. I didn't feel like they did anywhere near as much analysis as would be useful.  They'll...

Melmoth the Wanderer, by Charles Maturin I've done it!  I read Eugene Onegin's favorite novel!  Melmoth the Wanderer was published in 1820 and is, in some ways, the culmination of the Gothic novel.  It uses every trope--in fact I'd say it over -uses most of them.  What could be more appropriate to RIP month? The novel is a series of stories within more stories, and then more, until you wonder how you will ever climb out.  It is also, let me just warn you, the single most anti-Catholic novel I've ever read.  Hundreds of pages are devoted to the horrors of monastic life, the greed and cruelty of power-abusing monks, the Inquisition, and the power abuses of priests.  I am not even kidding.  Apparently Spain is populated entirely by power-hungry priests and their terrorized subjects.  Now, to be fair, there are a couple of good Catholic priests in the story, but on the whole it is just awful, the sort of tripe that was such common fare in...

Think Like a Freak , by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner These guys are like John and John of They Might be Giants.  Except they have different spellings, which makes it more confusing.  Anyway, I read this a while ago, procrastinated the review, and am now just going to give you a short rundown. I guess people kept mailing the Freakonomics guys with questions about how to solve giant, intractable problems--big things like world hunger or poverty.  Or about anything else anyone thought of, from breastfeeding to fracking to whether prayer works.  Since they can't actually solve world hunger, they thought they'd try writing a book that explains something about how they think about problems and how economics-type thinking might be a handy tool for some of us, too.  That way maybe people will stop bugging them. It's a pretty fun book with anecdotes about soccer and lotteries, potty-training and charitable giving, and tips about how to think about problem-solvi...

Wow, that title sounds like way too much information.  But I had a lot of fun reading the questions and answers at Fariba's Exploring Classics blog .  It's from the Literary Lollipop .  So here goes. 1. Favourite childhood book: Anastasia Krupnik, by Lois Lowry.  When I was a kid I read the Anastasia books over and over again, and they cracked me up every time. 2. What are you reading right now? War and Peace, Melmoth the Wanderer , and Le Morte D'Arthur . 3. What books do you have on request at the library? Little Brother, by Cory Doctorow, because I featured it for Banned Books Week and I've never read it; and S upernatural Enhancements , by Edgar Cantero, because I saw the cover on one of my blogs and had to have it. 4. Bad book habit: Leaving them all over the house, sometimes with random things shoved in as bookmarks.  I've stopped dogearing, I don't really write in them, and I have gotten better about the random bookmarks, but sometimes I still d...

It's time for another TBR check-in!  Bev has requirements:  1. Tell us how many miles you've made it up your mountain (# of books read).  If you're really ambitious, you can do some intricate math and figure out how the number of books you've read correlates to actual miles up Pike's Peak, Mt. Ararat, etc.  I've now read 21 out of my goal of 24 book s, so I'm not doing too badly. 2. Complete ONE (or more if you like) of the following: A. Who has been your favorite character so far? And tell us why, if you like. B. Pair up two of your reads using whatever connection you want to make. Written by the same author? Same genre? Same color cover? Both have a main character named Clarissa? Tell us the books and what makes them a pair. C. Which book (read so far) has been on your TBR mountain the longest? Was it worth the wait? Or is it possible you should have tackled it back when you first put it on the pile? Or tossed it off the edge...

Out of the Silent Planet , by C. S. Lewis Cleo invited people to join her in a 3-month reading project of C. S. Lewis' Space Trilogy, and I happily signed up.  September was Out of the Silent Planet . A linguistics professor, Ransom, is on a walking holiday when he runs into an old schoolmate, now working for an eminent scientist.  They promptly kidnap Ransom, put him in a homemade spaceship, and take him to the planet Malacandra, where they plan to give him over to the inhabitants as a sort of tribute.  Ransom escapes to the wilds of Malacandra, but how to survive in an alien environment?  He doesn't even know which planet he's on.... If you haven't read the Space Trilogy, I don't want to spoil it.  It's a strange set of books and Lewis plays around a lot with mixing science fiction (or, as he called it, scientifiction, which I don't even know how to pronounce) with his beloved subject matter of the medieval view of the universe.  I rather suspect th...

Hail, gentle readers!  Be it known that the day has come wherein ye must fulfil your vows to read that most excellent tale, Le Morte D'Arthur.   May you all find joy in these pages. In other words, you have from today until the 15th to read Books I through V: “From the Marriage of King Uther unto King Arthur that Reigned After Him and Did Many Battles,” and “The Noble Tale Between King Arthur and Lucius the Emperor of Rome.”  In my edition, that's about the first 150 pages.  Let us off to the castle!* *A virtual cookie to whoever knows that quotation. :)