Howling Frog Books

No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State , by Glenn Greenwald A couple of years ago, a successful NSA contractor in his late 20s, Edward Snowden, collected a whole lot of top secret NSA files and revealed to the world that the super-paranoid, tin-foil hat wearing people who were convinced that the US government was keeping tabs on everyone...were not anywhere near paranoid enough. Because the NSA is keeping tabs on all of us.  In fact, its explicit goal--ironically, an inefficient and ineffective one, if the stated mission is to fight terrorism--is for no phone call, email, chat message, or internet session in the US to go unmonitored.  They store billions of exchanges per day, quite unconstitutionally.  None of this has ever caught a terrorist attack in the planning stages.  But it does ensure that we feel surveilled. Greenwald tells the story of how Snowden contacted him and how they broke the story in a series of news stor...

Book, by Robert Grudin Back in the mid-90s, I had a copy of this novel and enjoyed it a lot, but at some point it disappeared.  Happily, I found a library copy (pro tip: do not name your novel Book , for it will give library software fits if you can't remember the author's name) and took it home to enjoy once more.  This is possibly the first academic satirical comedy I read, unless David Lodge came first. Adam Snell, professor of literature and failed novelist, has disappeared just two days before his post-tenure review--at which half the English department was planning to savage his reputation and get rid of him.  They're just as happy to think he'll turn up dead soon so they can get a really cutting-edge literary theorist in.  But where is Snell?  Why are copies of his novel disappearing? Grudin, an English professor himself (and fellow graduate of Berkeley's comparative literature program, albeit 25 years earlier than I), just has a fun little romp th...

Henry V , by William Shakespeare  I've been wanting to read Henry V for a long time; I never have before, so I wanted to fill in that gap.  Everybody knows what happens--I don't like writing posts about Shakespeare plays because I feel like whatever I say, it's kind of pointless.  However, just in case, this is a "historical" play about the young Henry V, his claim to own all of France, and his campaign to win it.  In a surprise fluke, the English actually defeated the numerically superior French at the battle of Agincourt, for God, Harry and St. George. Even though I knew what to expect in the plot of Henry V , I had a really hard time getting into it.  My daughter and I got out the DVD of the movie--the 1989 one with Kenneth Branagh as Henry--and watched it together, and that really helped a lot (I got it for schooly purposes but we hadn't watched it yet).  What I mostly noticed about the film, which is beautifully produced with lots of setting a...

King Lear , by William Shakespeare  For the Literary Movement Challenge, Fanda asked readers to focus on drama.  Before I figured that out, I was considering reading Tyndale's Obedience of a Christian Man and worrying that I would never be able to read it in the time.  I still plan to read Tyndale but it was somewhat easier to read a couple of Shakespeare plays for February.  Cordelia in the court of King Lear, by Ford Madox Brown King Lear is a fairy tale cast as a historical event and tragedy.  Lear was a legendary pre-Roman king in Britain; he appears (spelled Leir) in Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain , and in Holinshed, where Shakespeare got the story.   Lear, a rather silly king, decides to divide his kingdom between his three daughters based on how fervently they declare their love for him.  The two older sisters walk off with the swag, and youngest Cordelia, who honestly loves her father but refuses to flatt...

The Story of My Experiments With Truth (Gandhi's Autobiography) , by Mohandas Gandhi Experience has taught me that civility is the most difficult part of Satyagraha.  Civility does not here mean the mere outward gentleness of speech cultivated for the occasion, but an inborn gentleness and desire to do the opponent good. I read Gandhi's autobiography for the first time when I was about 18, and I loved it.  I whipped through it in three days (which is unbelievable to me now).  So when I made up my Classics Club list, I put it on as a re-read, thinking it would be nice to re-visit a book I don't really remember too much about. Gandhi wrote this in installments for a weekly publication, and all the chapters are quite short.  It must have taken several years.  He starts with his childhood, especially his struggles with dietary and religious questions, and goes through to cover the development of his satyagraha philosophy and its application in several early...

The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories, by Bruno Schulz I asked my daughters' violin teacher for recommendations.  He said this was his very favorite book, so I tried it.  And it is something else, man.  Whoa. Bruno Schulz was a Polish Jew, shot by a Gestapo officer in about 1944, pretty much out of pique.  He had already stashed his pre-war writing and art with Gentile friends, and all of it disappeared, so that all that is left are these two collections of short stories, The Street of Crocodiles and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass .  That is a literary tragedy, folks, because Bruno Schulz was a genius of bizarre writing. These pieces are really strange, surreal, weird things. They are often dream-like, and always very very descriptive--positively lush with description--more like a painting than a story.  They are mostly domestic stories, about parents, relatives, or the neighborhood--his father most of all.   Insects feature...

Kristen at We Be Reading has posted the information for DWJ March , woohoo! This is going to be the fourth DWJ March and Kristen is thinking we ought to have a focus to talk about, which I think is a good idea.  So, there's a theme: The Ladies and Lasses of DWJ.  I think this is a great topic to focus on, because DWJ did in fact have some issues in writing about girls and women.  Early in her writing career, she tended to avoid writing female protagonists and always made them boys.  I remember she said that in some interview, and why she did it, but now I'm not sure where the quotation is.  It was a while before she really was able to write girl protagonists.  And then there are DWJ's mothers and older women characters, an awful lot of whom are....hungry.  Controlling, yet neglectful.  Malevolent in some way.  And did I mention hungry?  Yes, we can write a lot of posts about the ladies and lasses of DWJ.  I have no doubt that ...

S. / Ship of Theseus , by Doug Dorst and J. J. Abrams I did not know WHAT to think when I ran across this book...thing.  What I noticed first was that it was stuffed full of ephemera, kind of like Griffin and Sabine on steroids.  I thought it must be a big gimmick.  And I got curious, so I read it. The idea is that it's a nested story.  You have a book that looks like a novel printed in the late 1940s, complete with library sticker* and stamps.  The book is a real, complete novel.  Then, two people have written notes all over the margins of the novel, and those notes tell a story too.  As you read, you find another novel and at least one other story of two people who communicated more through books than they did directly.  AND there are codes.  And shadowy bad guys, maybe.  And a secret symbol, and a jerk of a professor, and a mystery about the author's identity. I read the novel-- Ship of Theseus --first.  It purports to hav...

The Black Spider , by Jeremias Gotthelf The NYRB Classics list is very dangerous.  I'm tempted by just about every title.  Such as The Black Spider , an early horror novel written by a Swiss German in 1842.  Also the cover is freaky scary, right?  It's an allegorical wax sculpture of Vanity. In an idyllic and fertile Swiss valley, a family is preparing for a christening.  During the party, a guest notices an old and blackened post which has been built into the neat and well-tended window frame.  The grandfather tells the story of the post, which goes back centuries and is a cautionary tale of demonic horror, warning against the sins of pride, vanity, and ingratitude to God. I hadn't realized when I started the story that it is a devout tale which takes demonic power quite seriously.  It's also a really Swiss German tale; you can just see all these prosperous, careful farmers with their incredibly neat houses and fields and their concern with maki...

Texts From Jane Eyre , by Mallory Ortberg SO FUNNY.  There, that is my opinion of this collection of texts from famous literary characters.  Mallory Ortberg writes The Toast , which I don't exactly subscribe to because there's more profanity than I like, but which I have often enjoyed perusing because it's very funny, mostly about art history, or literature, or history in general. It makes me extra happy to find humor about classic literature. I would love to quote half this book at you but it's not easy, because it's all little texts.  But here is one installment of Edgar Allan Poe. hey where are you? hi where are you? you're like two hours late it's almost midnight I can't get out of the house right now Is your car blocked? do you need a ride? no it's like there's this bird there's a bird on your car? no he's sitting on my statue it's like mm it just keeps looking at me got those fiery bird eye...

The Last Chronicle of Barset , by Anthony Trollope I officially love Trollope more than Dickens.  Trollope, it seems to me, writes more about everyday things.  He is nice .  Most of the characters are trying to do right, though they often get it wrong.  Dickens gives us lily-pure heroines, super-evil villains, and memorably eccentric quirky people, and there's lots of melodrama.  Trollope shows us ordinary people: mostly pretty nice, some kind of jerks, some real cheats, but mostly good, flawed people trying to get through life.  A Trollope heroine is good and noble, but she's not perfect or improbably angelic.  A Trollope enemy is an annoying sort of person who makes you mad, but who is not evil--just really not doing well.  I think it's more realistic.  OK, there's not a lot of seamy underbelly (there is some), but does Dickens describe seamy underbelly realistically either? Anyway.  This last Barsetshire story braids together ma...

Without You, There is No Us: My Time With the Sons of North Korea's Elite , by Suki Kim In 2011, Suki Kim, a journalist and writer, managed to get a job at the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology (PUST), teaching English to the most elite young men in the country.  She did this by going undercover as a missionary, because PUST is a Christian outfit that employs missionaries as teachers.  (They can't preach or mention Jesus or anything, so it's mainly an effort to open things up a little.)  How exactly the highest echelons of North Korea came around to agreeing to have their sons educated by outsiders is a bit of a mystery, but Kim does spend a little time speculating on that. I think this might be a unique book, though.  Not many outsiders get to see any of the higher levels of North Korean society, so I was very interested to read about Kim's experience.  At the same time, by writing the book she was not just going to anger the North Koreans, but...

Lory at Emerald City did this fun little meme and invited all to participate, so I thought I would.  Four Names People Call Me Other Than My Real Name: Mom Hon Mommy --I am now out of nicknames and have to resort to... Little Toad.  This was my camp name when I was 12 or so, because one of the counselors was named Toad and we looked a lot alike.  Toad was an awesome counselor.  I was very happy to be Little Toad. Four Jobs I’ve Had: Airplane hangar janitor (first real job! I swept airplane hangars!  It was a company that painted small planes and the areas had to be kept clean so as not to get dirt in the wet paint.) Snack bar at Camelot mini golf course Assistant at bakery -- I worked at two bakeries, one a general bread, cake, and donuts place and one a fancy wedding cake bakery.  I still don't eat donuts much. Librarian Four movies I have watched more than once: The Secret of Roan Inish Star Wars, any of the proper trilogy (not to...

Too Loud a Solitude , by Bohumil Hrabal Bohumil Hrabal, Czech poet and writer, was born in 1914, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, on the eve of war.  He died in 1997, about eight years after the Czech Republic cast off Communism and then split from Slovakia.  Even if he'd never moved from his hometown, he would have lived in about six different countries, I should think--or at any rate under about 8 governments.  What he must have seen in his lifetime is a bit boggling to contemplate.  He wrote Too Loud a Solitude near the end of his life, in the early 1990s, and saw it made into a movie shortly before his death in a fall from his apartment window. Hrabal is one of the major 20th-century Czech writers. Hanta is a little man with a great inner life.  His daily work, and his artistry, are bound together--Hanta works in a basement where he is continually inundated with waste paper and trash.  His job is to run the compacting machine that packs the paper in...

I like the bricks and chains motif... Little Dorrit , by Charles Dickens Firstly: Dorrit is a last name .  Little Dorrit's first name is Amy.  I am probably the last person on the Internet to figure this out, but because I have actually known someone named Dorrit, and always think of it as a first name, I was quite surprised to find out otherwise. Little Dorrit was born in Marshalsea Prison, for her father, a gentleman, is imprisoned for debt.  Most of the inmates get out sooner or later, but not Mr. Dorrit; his affairs are too complex and the amount too large for an easy solution.  So he simply lives there for 22 years, keeping up a pathetic insistence that he is a gentleman and his children should not work for a living.  Little Dorrit is the youngest and most sensitive of his children, and she works very hard to keep and comfort her selfish father.  Arthur Clennam, meanwhile, is a businessman who finds himself interested in Little Dorrit's welfar...

I haven't had a ton to post about lately, because I've been trying to read too many books at once.  They are all so great and I want to read them ALL, but the result is that I don't finish any in anything resembling a reasonable amount of time.  I had a couple of really short novels--I'm talking 100 pages here--and I was finding that I'd read, say, a paragraph a day for 4 days because every time I picked one up I'd promptly get pulled off to do something else. I really do have a wonderful pile of books, and more to come.  At work, I'm now purchasing for the language and literature collection, and one thing I've been doing is buying a lot of world literature.  This is both good for the collection and deliriously fun, and there are quite a few titles that I want to read.  It's hard work to limit myself and not just check them all out at once, but that would not be fair. A favorite character in a favorite cartoon! Over the weekend, I went on a l...

Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog) , by Jerome K. Jerome I enjoyed Connie Willis' To Say Nothing of the Dog so much that I promptly needed to read Three Men in a Boat too.  I had a lot of fun with it!  It's a great little relaxing and funny read. J. and his two friends need a break from the turmoil of life, so they decide to take two weeks on the river.  They will hire a boat and go up the Thames, camping or staying at inns and enjoying the open air and scenery.  So off they go, traveling from the edge of London to Oxford, having adventures on the way. Jerome is just a really funny writer.  It's great stuff.  He takes a camping trip and turns it into immortal literature.   Here's a bit on the awkwardness of staying in a house where there is a courting couple... It must have been much like this when that foolish boy Henry VIII was courting his little Anne.  People in Buckinghamshire would have come upon them unexpectedly...