Howling Frog Books

I finished the Back to the Classics Challenge , hosted by Karen at Books and Chocolate, a little while ago with War and Peace , but I forgot to write a wrap-up post!  Here it is: Required: 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 --  The Custom of the Country , by Edith Wharton. 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 -- Go Tell it on the Mountain , by James Baldwin A Classic Mystery, Suspense or Thriller -- The 39 Steps , by John Buchan A Historical Fiction Classic.   War and Peace , by Leo Tolstoy. A Classic That's Been Adapted Into a Movie or TV Series.    Slaughterhouse-Five , by Kurt Vonnegut. Extra Fun

Hexwood, by Diana Wynne Jones It's been a while since I read Hexwood !  This is one of the most confusing books DWJ ever wrote, featuring an ordinary English village, an intergalactic empire with corrupt rulers, and a reality-manipulating, half-alive machine that is looking for revenge after a thousand years of imprisonment.  We jump back and forth in time--only not--and people are not who they think they are.  And there is a castle, and dragons. I don't actually even know how to describe the plot, it's so complex.  We start with Ann, whose parents run the greengrocer's shop.  She goes into the wood, and it becomes much larger...and she meets a newly-resurrected wizard, Mordion (except that she saw him walk into the wood that morning), a little boy named Hume who keeps changing age, and their found robot, Yam. DWJ gives us a whole set of villains: the five Reigners, who rule the entire interplanetary empire as a corrupt business.  Each one is a portrait of the di

Anglophiles won't be able to resist this challenge: o's Reading England 2015 .  The explanation is extensive, so be sure to check out her post, but here are the basics from o: The Goal: To travel England by reading, and read at least one book per however many counties of England you decide to read. Example : You aim to read three books set in three different counties, and you read Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy , Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf , and The Darling Buds of May by H. E. Bates. Reading these means you have read a book from Dorset ( Far From the Madding Crowd ), London ( Mrs Dalloway ), and Kent ( The Darling Buds of May ). I think I will not get too ambitious, and join the Level Two group of 4-6 books.  That seems like plenty. :) This requires that when I read a book set in England, I figure out what county it is set in.  Oh dear.  And, as o says, counting English counties isn't as simple as you'd think.  Not to mention the fic

As You Wish, by Cary Elwes I spent the afternoon before the Trivia Bee reading this to relax.  It was a great read for that!  Cary Elwes just writes this really nice book about the filming of The Princess Bride --how he got involved, about all the other people on the project, and so on.  There are funny stories about the filming and lots of reminiscing about how they didn't really expect this odd movie to go much of anywhere, but they all felt lucky to be involved. There are bits and pieces from everyone involved who is still alive, which is neat. The stories are pretty great and it is fun to read about everyone.  A lot of special feeling is reserved for Andre the Giant, who seems to have been just about the nicest person around. This is in no way a dishy, gossipy kind of a celebrity book.  This is a nice book.  It is very pleasant and happy to read, and it really made me want to watch the movie again despite going through most of the scenes in detail.  My 11-year-old, for

Fanda at Classiclit has got a lovely new challenge for next year--the Literary Movement Reading Challenge.  It's pretty ambitious.  Take a look at what she says (I'm giving the first part but there's lots more at the post): The aim is to study how our literary world has been evolving from Medieval era up to the present. There are so many lists/timelines out there, but I particularly use this literary periods timeline from online-literature dot com ; firstly, it is simple and nicely presented, and secondly because the number of the movements fits more or less with the challenge purpose. If you see the info-graphic, there are thirteen movements. I will dedicate each month for each movement; but as the Beat Generation period is mostly overlapping the Bloomsbury 's, I will merge them into one month. 1.   Reading (or rereading) at least one book each month according to the literary movements we are covering; here is the list: January: Medieval February: Ren

Heavenali is hosting a Willa Cather reading week in December, and I am looking forward to participating!  Check out her post to see what's on offer and to sign up.  Heavenali says: Willa Cather is now certainly regarded as one of the great American writers, a writer I re-connected with a couple of years ago, and I am now trying to read everything she wrote. I have read several of her novels already, have another five sitting here waiting to be read, but as yet have not read any of her short stories. A reading week therefore is just what I need to focus on reading some Cather, and share my enthusiasm for her work. I would love to get lots of people reading her novels and stories, talking about her and sharing thoughts about her books on blogs. I am not sure yet what I want to do.  My Ántonia is on my CC list, so this is a nice opportunity, but the truth is that My Ántonia is a re-read and I have never read the other two books in the triad--or any other Cather, for th

The Case of the Missing Servant , by Tarquin Hall Note: I wrote this several days ago and then forgot about it before publishing.  I have just finished the second volume, so I'll tell about that too at the end... My mom told me about this new mystery series she was sure I would like.  Vish Puri is India's Most Private Investigator, and he is good at his job.  Much of his routine business is background checks for marriages, but there is plenty of other work too. In this first story, Puri has three problems to solve.  The main case is the disappearance of a servant girl from a high-profile lawyer's home.  Kasliwal has a habit of suing corrupt officials and judges, and they're dying for a chance to discredit him and put him in prison, so Puri has to find out the girl's true fate--a tough job, since no one seems to know where she came from or even her last name.  In his spare moments, Puri investigates a surprisingly quiet prospective groom, and starts to try to

A Beautiful Blue Death, by Charles Finch Charles Lenox, gentleman and amateur detective, is asked by a friend to investigate the mysterious death of a servant girl.  It looks like suicide, except for the part where she left a note even though she was illiterate, and died from an incredibly rare, expensive, and fictional poison called bella indigo .  With the help of a tipsy doctor friend, a handy brother in Parliament, and an informer or so, Lenox investigates the girl's death in spite of Scotland Yard and finds a whole lot of secrets. I felt like this was a meh mystery.  The setting, the characters, the plot--all were OK but lacking real spark or interest to me.  Also I got really tired of the words bella indigo . There is one scene that was sort of odd.  A wealthy man holds a ball in his lavish London townhouse.  The ballroom is on the first floor, and it's 300 feet across --the size of a football field, with no supporting columns.  There are at least 3 floors above t

Decline and Fall, by Evelyn Waugh The only book I've read by Evelyn Waugh is Brideshead Revisited, which is mostly on the melancholy side, so I thought I would try a funny one.  Decline and Fall is Waugh's first novel. Paul Pennyfeather is a divinity student at Oxford, the most innocent fellow around, but through an unfortunate mishap he is sent down (expelled) for indecent behavior.  He is fit for nothing but to become a minor schoolmaster at a not-very-good school, so off he goes to Wales to meet a cast of oddballs.  Fate tosses him hither and thither, between wealthy socialites and, well, prison.  Most of it is funny, some of it is pretty strange in that 1920s way, and a few bits defy the comedy and go melancholy again. I enjoyed it, but not like I enjoy a Wodehouse novel, which is more straightforward fun.  Waugh seems to have a layer of gray under his humor, like he's showing us that things might be funny on the surface, but watch out for those depths.  There

Few booky bloggery types have missed the recent rash of articles about reading; each one gets a response and some discussion.  Most of the pieces seem to be about how readers are just doing it wrong .  Everyone has a different complaint, but the main point is that you are all reading wrongly and you should stop it.  A few examples: Charlemagne is skeptical of these arguments. If you're an adult, you should be embarrassed if you read YA books, because YA books are fundamentally not deep, gritty, or ambiguous enough for adults.  They are too pleasant and tidy.  (On this theory, Nicholas Sparks is deep, because his novels are for adults.) On the other hand, YA books are probably too violent for actual teens and may encourage them to be violent.  (From which it follows that the 70s and 80s must have seen a huge rise in teen incest and axe murder--after all, every kid I knew read almost nothing but VCA and/or Stephen King.) Science fiction has way too much gender binaryism,

You have to be a little mad to participate in this survey. The Classics Club has posted a survey of 50 questions.  It's huge!  I've enjoyed reading everyone's answers, but I quite understand if you get bored and move on.  Also, I can't get the formatting to behave very well, so it's often all a giant block of text--sorry about that. Fun fact: images and numbered lists fight with each other.  I was going to throw a bunch of nice pictures in, but that turned out to be a bad idea. 50 Club Questions: Share a link to your club list.   Here you go . When did you join The Classics Club? How many titles have you read for the club? (We are SO CHECKING UP ON YOU! Nah. We’re just asking.) :)  I was in on it from the beginning, which I think was March 2012, so I ought to be at least halfway through by now, right?  I'm at 82 out of 150. What are you currently reading?  The long-awaited Tristram Shandy !  And poetry by a Senegalese poet, Senghor. What d

First edition cover Perelandra, by C. S. Lewis I am so ridiculously late with this post.  I read this book somewhere in the beginning of October for a Goodreads readalong, but I've been chronically behind with book posts since then and poor Perelandra keeps getting left on the bottom of the pile. Ransom, who journeyed to Malacandra, is now "called" on a journey to Perelandra--Venus.  He will be transported there, and he'll have a job to do, though what the job will be is a mystery.  Once he gets there, he discovers that Perelandra is a new, young world--an ocean world with floating islands--and that it is an Eden, populated only with the first two people who will live there.  Once again, Weston has traveled to this new world with plans to exploit it somehow, but soon he is taken over by another intelligence whose goal is to turn Perelandra into another silent planet.  Ransom sets himself the task of stopping him. This is a stranger story than Out of the Si

People are already putting up their challenges for next year, which is very exciting but also makes me feel like I do when I realize that Christmas is looming at me and I haven't actually done anything about it yet.  It's too soon!  I can't think about that yet!  But I am going to try to start posting on things for next year, if only so that I feel organized and accomplished. Late last year I discovered the Vintage SciFi Not-A-Challenge and was enchanted.  I read a bunch of PKD and Bester, and a Clarke.  Now I'm going to do it again!  The Little Red Reviewer says: The What: Anything or anyone who created science fiction, or something speculative fiction-ish that was published (or recorded, or put on TV or the silver screen) before 1979.  It can be hard scifi, or not. Have aliens, or not.  Fantasy is OK too.... The Why: Why? because everything came from somewhere. Your favorite spec fic author was influenced by someone, who was influenced by someone, who w

War and Peace, by Lev Tolstoy,  translated by Pevear and Volokhonsky It took me 3 months, but it was completely worth it.  I'm not sure else what to say about the mother of all chunkster classics, but I'll give it a go: We've got a cast of characters in Russia during the Napoleonic Era.  It takes a while to get to know them all!  There are three or four main families and their paths touch here and there over the course of the novel, eventually cohering into one.  The story takes years, and some of the characters change very much.  We get to know the main players so well that we sympathize with them and want them to be happy even when they're not choosing very well. There is a lot about the war, first in Prussia, then in Russia itself.  Napoleon himself is a character, and Tolstoy has some very pointed things to say about "great men."  By the end, he is expounding on power, freedom, and war--the epilogue, which you hope will have more story in it, has ess

I'm a little late with this post, mostly for good reasons.  I planned to write it up yesterday, but instead I spent the whole day with the jitters because I was due to spend the evening competing in a trivia contest.  The event was the annual fundraiser for our county's literacy program, and this was my second year on the team.  Last year we came really close to winning, but the final round killed us, and I was really hoping to do better this year.  There were 21 teams and the questions are pretty hard!  I'm pleased to report that our team took first place!!  yay!!  and so it was a great success.  But for all of yesterday, about all I could accomplish was to potter nervously or read As You Wish , Cary Elwes' new book chronicling the making of The Princess Bride.  So, on with King Arthur.... I read Books X through XV, and X was really something of a slog, honestly.  It is huge, and mostly consists of endless jousting, spear-brasting, blood brasting out of noses and e

The number, as they say, is unlucky 13, but it works for me.  I'll be reading Arthur Miller's play, The Crucible .  I've been meaning to get to it for some time but I keep putting it off, so this will be good for me.

Adrift on the Nile , by Naguib Mahfouz Storytime: one of the titles on my Classics Club list is The Cairo Trilogy , by this Mahfouz guy.  It's huge (being 3 novels in one volume), so I thought I would try one or two of his shorter novels first, to see what I thought before committing myself to 1000 pages.  I checked out this novel and one titled Arabian Days and Nights , both quite short.  This book is billed as "an exciting and dramatic change of pace" from the Cairo Trilogy.   "Exciting and dramatic" is exactly what the story is not , so I sure hope the blurb meant that the style is different, not that the Cairo Trilogy is a slower read than this.  On to Adrift on the Nile ... Anis Zaki is a mid-level government office worker during the mid-1960s--the Nasser years.  He lives on a houseboat on the Nile, and every evening his friends visit; they are all educated, fairly well-off writers or filmmakers or artists left behind by the changing times.  Every nigh

The Magnificent Ambersons, by Booth Tarkington I've heard people praise this novel quite often, but for some reason I never wanted to read it myself until I happened across it at the library a little while ago.  Guess what, this is a really good novel!  I liked it so much. The Ambersons are a stupendously wealthy family in a small Midwestern city.  They splash money around like water.  The daughter, Isabel, marries a nice, quiet man who is not her True Love, and has one son--George, who grows up like a prince, worshiped by his mother.  His self-confidence and arrogance are really astounding, and his ambition in life is to be a gentleman on the family fortune.  At the same time, he falls in love with a lovely girl (the daughter of the man Isabel didn't marry), whose father is an up-and-coming automobile manufacturer.  Lucy loves George but has doubts about the wisdom of actually marrying him.  And then, George manages through his pride to destroy the lives of everyone he lo

The Slave Girl, by Buchi Emecheta I really liked The Joys of Motherhood, and checked another Emecheta novel out right away, where it sat on my overstuffed library shelf for a long time before I picked it up. Like The Joys of Motherhood , the story of Ogbanje Ojebeta starts with the story of her mother, who has given birth to many girls, all of whom have died at birth.  When this one looks as though she might stay, the parents shower her with charms, magic, and special tattoos to shield her from harm.  But she is only about six when both her parents die suddenly (I think it's the 1918 flu epidemic, but it's not entirely clear), leaving her with her brother, a young man averse to responsibility and desperate for money.  He sells Ojebeta to a wealthy relative, Ma Mee, where she becomes one of a group of slave girls who run a market stall, sew, and do all the household work. Ojebeta does not have a horrific life as a slave, but it's no picnic.  Emecheta shows a whole v

I have so enjoyed Lory's Witch Week event !  Every day there was a new post with a great discussion of a DWJ book, and there was a giveaway (which I won, whee!) and we had a readalong of Witch Week . So, onward to the book: The pupils at Larwood House boarding school are troubled students, many of them witch orphans.  Nan is a social outcast even in this bunch, and so is Charles.  But their tedious and unhappy lives actually get dangerous when an accusation surfaces that someone in the class is a witch.  Pretty soon it becomes obvious that indeed there is witchcraft about, and while it's funny--and Nan and Charles are starting to hope for something--in this world, witches are hunted and burned.  How can they escape?  Witch Week is a really odd book, because on the surface, it's hilarious.  My 11-year-old read it with glee.  It is funny ; all these ridiculous things happen and there is total mayhem.  At the same time, this is a story involving a lot of vicious bullying

The Back to the Classics Challenge has an option for reading a classic, and then watching a movie adapted from it.  Several months ago I read Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five , and I finally got around to watching the movie. The film was made in 1972 and works hard to be much like the novel; Vonnegut called it "a flawless translation."  Of course, it can't fit everything in there.  The largest difference (besides the part where you never see a Tralfamadorean, because that would be distractingly bad) is that the phrase "so it goes" never shows up once in the movie, while it is scattered everywhere in the book. It's a surreal puzzle of a movie, because Billy Pilgrim is unstuck in time.  Luckily he explains this at the beginning of the film while writing a letter, and the rest of the film jumps every few minutes--or sometimes every few seconds--between Billy's time in World War II, his marriage and children, and various other events.  For the mo

Seventeen , by Booth Tarkington I found the Booth Tarkington section at the library, and I took out The Magnificent Ambersons and this Seventeen, which just looked fun.  It's summer in small-town Middle America in about 1914, William Baxter is 17--and there's a pretty girl visiting her friend for the summer.  For the whole summer, we travel with William as he (and a couple of friends) pays court to Miss Pratt.  William is alternately daydreamily romantic, self-important, chagrined, or hideously embarrassed and angry when things don't go his way.  It's a funny and realistic story, and we both sympathize with, and laugh at, William (and several other characters too). The story is really funny, and I enjoyed a lot of it.  William is selfish and self-dramatizing, and young.  The girl he is in love with is hilariously affected; she is very pretty, but she also likes to speak in a playful baby-talk--often to her spoiled little lapdog Flopit--that would make anyone not