Howling Frog Books

Hooray, it's time for another Classics Spin!   Head on over and take a look at the rules.  The goal is to read the chosen title by May 15.  And...t his time I decided to stuff my list with the giant scary chunksters.  Not all of them are giant and scary, but really quite a lot of them are. This does mean that there's a good chance I won't be able to finish my title by the deadline, but what is life without a little danger? Henry James, 1902, The Wings of the Dove.   Chaim Potok, 1972, My Name is Asher Lev. Eugene D. Genovese , Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made.    Venerable Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People. On the Origin of Species , Darwin (1859) Elizabeth Gaskell , Ruth.   Gregory of Tours , History of the Franks Thomas Mann, Germany, 1924 . The Magic Mountain . Gunter Grass , The Tin Drum Grimmelhausen , Simplicissimus Feodor Dostoevsky, Russia , Brothers Karamazov Junichio Tanizaki, Japan, 194...

I can't believe March is over , and with it our lovely DWJ event, and I've hardly participated at all.  I've had pretty good reasons for falling off the face of the earth lately, and I'm not sure I'll be posting a ton anytime soon, but I do have a huge pile of books to talk about!  And I happily read several DWJ titles in March: Cart and Cwidder Black Maria The Islands of Chaldea Conrad's Fate Reflections I'm kind of sad that I didn't talk about all of these as much as I would have liked to, but there you go, that's life.  Instead of regretting what I couldn't do, I'll look forward to next March!

Faust (Part I), by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Goethe seems to have made his play about Faust the great work of his life.  He started writing pieces of it in the early 1770s, when he was in his early to mid-20s, published a preliminary version in 1808, and continued revising it until 1828 or so, when he published a final version.  That's Part I, which is what I read.  Part II took up most of Goethe's attention during his later years and was finished in 1831. Goethe's version is very different from Marlowe's, which I read several months ago.  It starts with a framing device that echoes the book of Job; the devil makes a bet with God that he can lead the virtuous scholar Faust astray.  When Mephistopheles arrives on scene in the form of a large black dog, Faust is already complaining that earthly knowledge is not enough and that he wishes to delve into the deeper knowledge afforded by black magic.  Mephistopheles has no trouble convincing him to agree t...

A woodcut illustration from "Chess" The Royal Game and Other Stories , by Stefan Zweig After reading Beware of Pity last year, I wanted to read a little more Zweig, preferably the short novel Chess .   Happily, I ran across it while shelfreading the German literature at work.  Here, it's under the title The Royal Game and collected with four other short stories: Amok The Burning Secret Fear Letter from an Unknown Woman I read them one at a time, with a lot of space in between, so that I could enjoy and absorb them slowly without blurring them together.  All the stories are excellent.  It's no wonder Zweig was one of the most popular European authors of his day.  (That day was the 1920s and 30s.  Zweig committed suicide in 1942, out of despair about the state of the world and Nazi victories.) I can't tell you much about the stories; they're fairly short (well, long for short stories) and to describe them would be to spoil them for you....

Player Choice, by Jeff Deck Glen, video-game coder, is on his way to the business meeting of his life, where he will pitch his beloved baby of a project, the one he's been designing in private for years, the one he hopes might even help people change the world--Novamundas.  Even his commuter train crashing can't stop him.  But then Glen starts switching realities.  Or reality is changing around him--how can he tell?  Is he really reality-jumping?  Is someone trying to torture him?  Or did his brain implant malfunction?  Glen tries to figure out what's real and survive to get back home--whatever that might be.  He can't remember... This is quite a good science-fiction story.  I was grabbed.  There are some great ideas to play with here, and the characters are interesting and real.  It's set in 2040, and nearly everyone has celphs--brain implants that function as personal devices and assistants--like Siri, only far more so. ...

The Islands of Chaldea, by Diana Wynne Jones I took some time to read this on Sunday, and it was just lovely to sink into the story.  This is only the second time I've read The Islands of Chaldea , so it was practically new and there was plenty of treasure to find. Aileen is a really nice heroine for the story.  She starts off really down in the dumps, because she has just failed her initiation; she is supposed to be the next Wise Woman of Skarr, but she couldn't even have the most measly little vision.  And then the King sends her Aunt Beck off on a quest, so she's going too, though nobody wants to (and in fact they're all being sabotaged).  So Aileen has a long way to go--she needs confidence and daring and the ability to command, but as her friend says, she keeps wailing about being talentless and plain.  Through the frustrating, uncomfortable, irritating (and dangerous) journey, Aileen comes into her own. I love the four Guardians of Chaldea.  The...

I really like the little alien. The Book of My Lives , by Aleksandar Hemon Hemon collects personal essays into a sort of memoir/collection of personal essays.  He is mostly a fiction writer. The essays are all over the place; a couple are about dogs, some about his childhood, others about life in the US, one about pick-up soccer in Chicago.  Hemon is Bosnian and grew up in Sarajevo; he was in his late 20s when war broke out and he happened to be on a visit to the US when his home city was invaded, after which he could not go back, so he stayed.  The war certainly overshadows most of the book, and I appreciated being able to read about it and gain some understanding of what went on (I was in college at the time and mostly didn't even see the daily news, so my knowledge is patchy). The essays are good.  Very worth reading.  The last one, however, is so completely tragic and heartbreaking that a warning label would have been a good idea.  I was blind...

Black Maria , by Diana Wynne Jones Mig, her mother, and her brother Chris go to visit Aunt Maria in her little village of Cranbury-on-Sea.  She's really Mig's father's aunt by marriage, but Aunt Maria is very good at guilting people into things.  Now that they're there, Mig sees that Maria has no intention of letting them go again.  She is the Queen Bee of Cranbury and she expects to get her own way... Black Maria is really where DWJ lets loose on her opinions about gender roles and equality.  Cranbury is a society run by women--completely by women, and it's horrifying.  Jones is pointing out rather forcefully that a complete matriarchy would be just as bad as a complete patriarchy.  (I always suspect that she had been subjected to one too many enthusiastic lectures about the divine feminine and how wonderful the world was in [fictional] prehistoric times when society was matriarchal and peace-loving.)  Under Aunt Maria's reign of manipulation and ...

The Analects of Confucius The Analects is not at all a long book.  It consists of twenty short books, each containing about twenty-five sayings attributed to Master K'ung, or Confucius.  Some take the form of short conversations with particular disciples, or anecdotes, others are plain statements, and much of it has been changed or added to by legend.  Since most of it is abstract statements, often involving men of rank in various ancient Chinese states, it is interesting, but not something you can read for long stretches.  I found it best to try to read one book a day. Confucius's sayings are mostly about how to behave, and they are entirely focused on the life of a gentleman.  He isn't particularly worried about the common people, because they will behave well if their rulers do.  He isn't worried about women at all.  He is only concerned with how a gentleman of wealth and rank should behave.  These men should ideally pursue the Good (as ...