Howling Frog Books

The Two Drovers , by Sir Walter Scott Some time ago, Scott's short story "The Two Drovers" was recommended to me as a way to step into the world of Waverley.  I've read Ivanhoe , but so far my (miniscule) efforts to  get interested in the Waverley novels have come to naught.  I think this is partly because I thought I had to start with the first one, and really I should start with Rob Roy or Heart of Midlothian , something like that.  Anyway, while I was looking for some Romantic stuff to read, I found "The Two Drovers" in that trusty old Norton anthology.  It's also found in Chronicles of the Canongate with two other stories. Statue of a Scottish drover Two drovers are setting off with their herds from the border of Scotland.  They'll walk to Lincolnshire to sell the cattle, and every night they'll rent fields along the way for pasturage.  Robin Oig is a Highlander, well-regarded and of a proud family, and he is good friends with the ...

Selections of poetry by William Wordsworth I thought I would read some poetry by one of the quintessential Romantic poets, so I broke out my trusty Norton and chose a few pieces by Wordsworth, whose name is synonymous with Romanticism and sentiment.  I think he's the only one who lived long enough to make everybody tired of him while he was still around.  I tried to pick poems I've never read before, or at least ones that weren't all marked up in my book. Tintern Abbey, certainly a place to visit Lines Composed Above Tintern Abbey has Wordsworth re-visiting the spot after a five years' absence.  He falls into a meditation on how often he has refreshed himself with memories of this spot, and how he has changed from a boy to a young man, and how now, in maturity, he does not just take in the scene with his senses, but adds his reason to his feelings.  Now, he not only loves what he sees, but uses it as his spiritual and moral anchor. Therefore am I still A l...

Some things by William Blake For this month's Romanticism theme, I thought I'd start at the beginning, with William Blake--especially with some things he wrote in the 1790s.  I've read Songs of Innocence and Experience a few times, and various other bits and bobs-- Jerusalem of course--but I had never read these sort of mythic pieces, long poems or whatever they are.   Blake etched and printed these as illuminated books, as he did so much of his writing.  (I must confess that though I know I should properly read them in the watercolor-painted images, I always find that very difficult.  It's hard on the eyes!  So, Norton Anthology it is.)  The Book of Thel is a mythic story about Blake's favorite theme of innocence and experience.  He was working on this at about the same time as the poems.  Thel is an airy spirit dwelling in "the Vales of Har," --at least, it's hard to tell.  She might be an unborn soul, or a desi...

Can You Forgive Her? by Anthony Trollope  Happy 200th birthday, Mr. Trollope!  I've read two novels this month and very good they were too.  Can You Forgive Her? is the first in the Palliser series, which is six books long and has a lot of politics in it.  I'm not sure how interested I am in the politics, but I loved Can You Forgive Her? and so I'm planning to read the rest of them too. Alice Vavasor is engaged to be married to a perfect paragon of a man, Mr. John Grey of Cambridgeshire.  He is honest, kind, calm, respectful, and intelligent.  Alice rather feels in fact that he might be a bit too perfect to live with, and she allows her cousins Kate and George Vavasor to fan those doubts until she doesn't know what she thinks, except that when older people try to tell her what to do, she rebels.  Alice thus gets herself into the worst of muddles, making me wish to take her away for at least six months to someplace--a full-time job in retail, pe...

newly back in print! The Dean's Watch , by Elizabeth Goudge It's Elizabeth Goudge Week, and I've already finished a book!  This is the first of her "cathedral" books; it's set in about 1870 and is based on Ely Cathedral in Cambridgeshire.  It took me a little while to get into it and figure out the shape of the narrative, honestly, but after a while I really got into it and read a huge chunk yesterday afternoon. We have two protagonists, opposite yet parallel.  Isaac Peabody is a little, nervous clockmaker--a great craftsman, but prone to bouts of depression.  Adam Ayscough is the Dean of the Cathedral; one of the most eminent men in the city, yet miserable because he wants nothing more than to serve and truly connect with the people of the city, which his crippling shyness and intimidating appearance make almost impossible.  The Dean's watch--an actual watch--becomes the catalyst for a friendship between the two men that makes it possible for a lo...

Dr. Wortle's School , by Anthony Trollope This was my first choice for Anthony Trollope's 200th birthday month, partly because my other choice was Can You Forgive Her?   and Dr Wortle is much shorter, so I knew I could read it in the time.  Sure enough, I'm over halfway through Can You Forgive , and I'm loving it but I don't think I'll be done by the end of the month!  Anyway, I read Dr Wortle in about two days; I couldn't put it down.  This novel has a really boring title, but it's a very good read. Trollope tackles a moral question that people ran into more often before the days of fast communication, Internet, and credit cards.  What do you do when you discover that you're an accidental bigamist? Mr. Peacocke is a classical scholar, newly appointed at Dr. Wortle's exclusive boys' prep school.  He has lived in America for the past several years and has brought his lovely American wife back to England, and they are well-liked but odd...

Galileo, by Bertolt Brecht Hey, everybody--I've been reading a good bit, but blogging has been just about impossible lately.  Still, I've got plenty to tell you and I'm determined to have my say for Elizabeth Goudge Week (starts today!) and Trollope's birthday month (go enter the giveaway!) before it's over. And now, to Bertolt Brecht's famous play, Galileo ... I've figured it out.  It's all Brecht's fault.  I blame him.  Or at least partly.  It's Brecht's fault that everybody thinks that medieval people were anti-science and all that.  Because he wrote this play, which shows Galileo kind of knuckling under to the evil Catholic Church because of cowardice, and we've all seen that scene acted out....  But!  Brecht wasn't the least bit interested in showing a historically accurate Galileo.  In fact, he happily gets a whole lot about Galileo's actual life quite wrong.  What Brecht was interested in was using the Galilean ...

Sanaaq , by Mitiarjuk Nappaaluk This book is one of the perks of my job.  Now that I get to buy literature, I can spend time searching for books from all over the world, and I can find neat stuff like this! Sanaaq is an Inuit novel, the first written in the language.  It started off as a vocabulary exercise.  In the early 1950s, a priest studying Inuttitut asked 22-year-old Mitiarjuk Nappaaluk, a respected member of the community, to write down some phrases for him to learn.  Instead of making a vocabulary list, Mitiarjuk starting writing little vignettes about Inuit life.  She invented characters, gave them a story, and over a period of years wrote an entire novel--without ever having read a novel in her life.  She re-invented the novel, in fact. This is the story of the young widow Sanaaq, her young daughter Qumaq, and the people around them.  They go about their everyday lives, hunting, building, and producing just about everything they use....

Between the Woods and the Water, by Patrick Leigh Fermor I've been putting this book off for a while.  I loved the first book of the three, A Time of Gifts, so much, but it also filled me with longings for travel (in Europe, in the 30s); so I was really looking forward to this one, but also saving it for a treat.  And it really was a treat.  It was a lovely vacation of a book. Fermor spends the whole book in Hungary and Romania.  It's summer and he spends weeks at Hungarian manors, soaking up history, friendship, language, and fun.  Sadly, at 19 he felt that this was kind of cheating on his trip's rules, and he didn't keep his journal as assiduously as he should have, but he recreates a beautiful summer with lovely and interesting people.  All the while, the reader knows that within a very few years, Hungary will be conquered and all of this ruthlessly stamped out. In Romania, Fermor tramps through endless forests, meeting all sorts of people and ...

My 14yo asked me to hide the cover The White Goddess: a Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth , by Robert Graves Oh, wow.  I could talk about this fabulously nutty book all day!  I had no idea when I picked it up what I was getting into. The short version: Graves was looking for evidence of a European-wide goddess-worshiping  Ur-religion that he believed existed before all that male god patriarchy stuff came along.  He found his material in myth and poetry, and claimed that bards and poets disguised their lore by deliberately mixing it up.  All true poetry is based on the Triple White Goddess as Muse, and no monotheist can be a true poet.  Graves, being a true poet, realized all this through poetic intuition. Now the long version: This is 500 extremely dense pages of speculation about myth, poetry, and ancient tribal movements, presented as plain fact deduced by intuition and research.  It's from the same school of...scholarship...as The Golden B...

R. U. R. by Karel Capek I was really looking forward to reading this play.  I have a collection of four Capek plays here and plan to read them all; they sound intriguing.  I first got hooked by R. U. R. , when I found out that not only did it introduce the word and concept of robot* to the world, it also invented the robot apocalypse! The story is that Reason's Universal Robots is a successful company that produces robots--mostly-organic workers with limited intellect and no will or emotion who are grown and constructed.  The owner dreams of a day when there will be such abundance in the world that there will be no poor and no-one will have to work hard for a living--the robots will do it all. Lady Helen, young and elegant, comes to visit on an ideological crusade to educate the robots; she feels certain that if they are treated well and taught, they will be people.  She is disappointed to find that the robots are totally unresponsive to emotional persuasion a...

Is 2 ! Therefore, I shall be reading Chaim Potok's My Name is Asher Lev .  I'm very excited!  I have no real idea what the novel is about, besides the obvious, but I enjoyed The Chosen very much and have been wanting to read more Potok.  I suppose it's a little ironic that I loaded my slate up with long, difficult books and got the one title that will probably be a relatively fast read.  Hope the rest of you Spinners got a good one too! It was a good thing I checked for the Spin result fairly early this morning.  Just afterwards, the power went out...for hours.  An insulator at a large power station blew and the whole county went dark.  All is now well, but I'm glad I remembered to check before that happened! Meanwhile, in other news, I've chosen to read Dr. Wortle's School for Anthony Trollope's 200th anniversary.  I also have the first Palliser novel, in case I suddenly get loads of time.  Dr. Wortle's School is in fact ...

Alexander Pope The Essay on Man , by Alexander Pope For Fanda's Literary Movements challenges, I wanted to read something else Enlightenment-style before moving on to the Romantics.  I decided to read Alexander Pope's poem, The Essay on Man . Pope was known as a writer, but the Essay established him as a philosophical poet as well.  He wanted to express his theory of Man's place in the universe.  This is a long poem, divided into four parts, each tackling a different side of the question, and of course it is written in Pope's trademark heroic couplets.  (I'm always amazed at how much the poets of this period managed to produce in just one poetic form.  Then everybody got completely and utterly sick of heroic couplets and we hardly ever see them again, except in bad amateur schmaltzy poetry.)  It was to have been quite a bit longer and cover more material, but that never happened. The first epistle is the most famous and makes the argument that ...

There are some fun things coming up in April and May.... Lory at Emerald City Book Review had the brilliant idea of hosting an Elizabeth Goudge Reading Week!  This is fabulous news to Goudge fans like me.  I don't know whether to re-read an old favorite, or track down one I haven't read yet, or why not do... both ?  Head on over to Lory's place and see if you can find an Elizabeth Goudge title to enjoy! And all of April will be Anthony Trollope Month, for Karen at Books and Chocolate is hosting a 200th birthday party for him !  I love Trollope and would very much like to be in on this event, but I've also discovered that I may have a little trouble getting the book I want in time.  I've put a hold on it though, so wish me luck. In May, Cleo at Classical Carousel will be hosting a month-long readalong of Beowulf !  This will give us all plenty of time to read it carefully--it's not that long--and I think I will read the new Tolkien prose edition...

The Zhivago Affair: the Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle Over a Forbidden Book, by Peter Finn and Petra Couvee The novel Dr. Zhivago has an amazing history!  Boris Pasternak was a beloved Russian poet, and he had this tendency to slither out of committing himself to Soviet demands.  He would fail to sign denunciations and so on, but Stalin kind of liked him anyway so he was relatively safe for a long time.  When Pasternak decided to write a novel about the civil war after the Bolshevik revolution, though, and he was putting in all this stuff about the value of the individual, Soviet authorities decided that they were not going to publish anything like that .  As a result, this highly-anticipated masterwork was smuggled out of the USSR (in a move of incredible slickness and luck) and published abroad.  And then the CIA decided to publish it too! This is a really interesting history, covering Pasternak's life (and many loves), reactions to Dr. Zhivago , t...