Howling Frog Books

I'm saying goodbye to Beowulf.  This last section of the poem skims over 50 years of Beowulf's rule as a good and righteous king to tell the story of his last days.  An escaped slave wandered into a barrow and woke up the dragon sleeping there (I really like this bit actually, as it explains that the barrow is a very ancient one built by a people now long gone.  The dragon found the treasure inside and has been guarding it for 300 years.), and now the dragon is terrorizing the Geats and looking for his lost gold cup.  Only Beowulf can face the dragon! So King Beowulf--who is at least 70--puts on his trusty armor and vows not to leave the barrow until he has killed the monster inside.  Only one of his thanes is brave enough to follow him in and assist--his young kinsman Wiglaf.  Beowulf battles the dragon, and Wiglaf gets in a thrust that weakens the monster enough that Beowulf can deliver a killing blow.  Dying from blood loss and dragon venom, he ...

The Bone Clocks, by David Mitchell The cover and plot blurb grabbed me and so I read Mitchell's latest.  I've never read any of his books before, so this was new territory.  I got really into the first part, but that did not last. Holly runs off after a fight with her mother, intent on declaring her independence.  It's 1984 and she's 15, and she lets slip some odd details about her childhood; she used to have Radio People talking in her head and a lady who would visit her.  After that, we spend time in various people's heads at intervals of about 12 years--they cross paths with Holly (and others) every so often.  A sociopathic rich kid Cambridge student is intrigued with Holly until another offer comes along; a war correspondent worries that he can't give up the job; an aging bad-boy writer is losing his hold on fame.  All of these people have some slight contact with ...guardians of time?  Predators who can slip between dimensions?  and Ho...

A set of cool new covers! This week's reading has a bunch of different stuff going on.  Heorot celebrates, but too soon, as Grendel's mother shows up to take her revenge.  Beowulf has bunked down elsewhere, so he doesn't learn about it until the next day, but he goes straight off to take care of things.  Grendel's mother lives under a deep lake, behind a waterfall, and her cave is filled with treasures taken from her victims.  Beowulf's borrowed sword (from Unferth) breaks, but he grabs a seriously gigantic sword from the wall and swops off her head and Grendel's too, whereupon their poisonous blood melts the sword like it was ice-cream.  Everyone has given Beowulf up for dead, but he shows up with a head or so for a trophy, and everyone celebrates again.  Beowulf goes home to his king and relates his adventures, which impress everyone; oddly, no one seems to have thought much of him before.  I've been trying to figure out what Grendel and his ...

Work: a Story of Experience , by Louisa May Alcott I was kind of lost for a Transcendentalist pick for the literary movement challenge.  I've read the most famous works and I'm not that big a fan.  (While I'm all for simplicity and self-reliance and all, I just don't like the song and dance they make about it.)  So I was looking at my bookshelf, rather hopelessly, when I noticed Louisa May Alcott's Work , a novel I never got around to reading.  It turned out to be a perfect choice, which is not to say that I enjoyed it much as a novel, but it's a perfect specimen of Transcendentalist feminism, a meditation on the very Victorian question "what can a woman do? " (I actually own a book titled What Can a Woman Do? or, Her Position in the Business and Literary World, by one Mrs. M. L. Rayne, from 1893.  Mrs. Rayne writes about professional women in every branch of business, including law, and also gives a selection of morally uplifting poetry and prose...

I saw this game/list on Lory's blog, the Emerald City Book Review, and I thought it would be fun: 1. How do you keep track of your TBR pile? A lot of it is on my nightstand or on the floor next to my bed, neatly stacked.  I have a lot of library books, and those have a special shelf on the bookshelf in my living room (right now that pile has spilled over into my bedroom, as I'm checking a lot of books out from work for summer reading).  My virtual TBR pile is on Amazon wishlists. 2. Is your TR mostly print or e-book? Good question.  I do prefer print, and I read a lot more in print.  But I often download older books to read and then forget about them.  I've got quite a few on my tablet by now, and I really do want to read them...but it's hard to remember they are there.  I don't buy many ebooks, unless they are really inexpensive and I can't get them in print. 3. How do you determine which book from your TBR to read? Usually it's whichever title f...

Fabulous cover! My Uncle Napoleon , by Iraj Pezeshkzad A large Iranian family lives in a compound of houses surrounding a garden, and they're ruled over by the patriarch, Dear Uncle.  He has so much admiration for Napoleon, and so much conviction that his own life mirrors that of the French general, that the kids call him Dear Uncle Napoleon.  In fact he is narrow, paranoid, and blustering; he's convinced himself that he was a great warrior against the English in his youth, and the whole family revolves around his tyrannical bad temper. And the narrator, a young boy who is never named, falls in love with Dear Uncle's daughter Layli. Unfortunately, the boy's father has a bit of a feud going with Dear Uncle, and spends most of the novel encouraging his paranoia about the English.  Boy's only confidant is his Uncle Asadollah, who is sympathetic, but also has a one-track mind.  His solution is always the same--"a little trip to San Francisco," which ...

I didn't get to focus on Beowulf as much as I would have liked to this week, but I just finished the section.  It covers the celebrations after Beowulf's defeat of Grendel. These celebrations are highly ceremonious, with rich gifts and fancy speeches (Hrothgar: "Thank heaven for our deliverance!" Beowulf: "Yep, I won.  I sure wish I'd done it better, though; I wanted to give you Grendel's whole body." Queen Wealhtheow: "Here are some gifts!").  Everybody has a feast in a freshly cleaned and decorated hall.  But the most space is taken up with Hrothgar's bard, who tells two tales suited to the occasion: that of Sigemund and Fitela, and that of Hengest and the sons of Finn.  Each of these tales is only partial, being extremely well-known to the whole audience, so the Beowulf poet only puts in the bits that he wants to.  The Sigemund story appears to be an earlier version than any that has survived to the modern day; Tolkien points ou...

The Provincial Lady in Wartime , by E. M. Delafield I just adore the Provincial Lady, don't you?  If you haven't tried her books, do so--they are very funny.  The P. L. does not have a name, since she is writing in her diary, and she has a casual style with most of the articles and personal pronouns left out.  I think it's supposed to be partly word economy and partly a lady's training to never say I (one says one , so as not to sound egotistical; of course, to modern ears saying one sounds incredibly snobbish!).  Fun fact: the first P. L. book I read was the 5th, The Provincial Lady Goes to Russia , so that was kind of an odd introduction.  I still haven't read the America book. The war has just broken out, and the Lady is swamped with gasmasks, evacuees that never arrive or that arrive in the middle of the night, and an elderly (but sensible and affectionate) aunt.  Like everyone else in the country, she is desperate to get war work, so off she goes...

Falling in Love: Stories from Ming China , trans. by Patrick Hanan Chinese society during the Ming era was highly restrictive when it came to marriage.  Girls were kept secluded, away from possible temptation, and marriages were arranged between families.  Naturally therefore, romantic stories were hugely popular (much like Bollywood movies in India, but more so!).  In most of these stories, the characters fall in love by seeing each other--after all, there was no chance that anyone would be talking and getting to know one another.  They then find some kind of strategem for meeting and quickly get to the physical stuff; there is no time for lots of dialogue or anything like that. The seven stories in this collection show a wide variety of plots and moral approaches to the material.  The writers' sympathies are with the lovers, but only some really approve of the action.  Others enjoy the story but warn readers that this kind of stuff can only end in tra...

Angle of Repose, by Wallace Stegner I should have had this novel on my TBR list, because I've been meaning to read it for years.  I've had it checked out of the library for months.  Then I thought I would just return it without reading it, but maybe I'd see how the first few pages were...and then I needed to read the whole thing.  Fair warning, though, it's really long.  My edition is over 600 very dense pages, which doesn't sound like that much, but it was. Lyman Ward, historian and old guy, is living on his own in the house where he grew up--his grandparents' house--and he's working on chronicling his grandmother's life.  She was a prominent Western writer and artist in the late 19th century.  Most of the novel is Susan Ward's story, told from her point of view--except that it's really Lyman doing the writing and he frequently breaks the narrative to put in his opinions and tell his own story.  His version of Susan's life is influence...

The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere, by Kevin Carey Kevin Carey firmly believes that the future of higher education is largely (or at least a lot) online.  MOOCs are getting better all the time, and so are the verification systems that make it difficult to cheat.  Here comes the future!  He's pretty convincing about a lot of it, and I do think this will happen.  I want it to happen; kids in Uzbekistan and Iowa and Chad deserve access to the educational opportunities available mostly to the relative few fortunate enough to go to an excellent college.  But I have a lot of questions! Carey starts off by taking a course himself: MIT's basic biology course that all students must take.    (You can take it too, for free; just follow the link.)  He gets video lectures, problem sets, interactive protein-folding games--everything that MIT students get, except he can press 'pause' to take better n...

The Makioka Sisters , by Junichiro Tanizaki The Classics Spin wouldn't help me out, so I finally got around to reading it on my own.  The back copy says that The Makioka Sisters "is arguably the greatest Japanese novel of the twentieth century," so wow!  I did in fact really enjoy it. This is a long and deceptively quiet novel.  We have four sisters of a once-prominent Osaka family: Tsuruko, the oldest, married with several children, she and her husband are the head branch of the family Sachiko, also married, usually hosts her younger sisters and is the most active in their future plans, Yukiko, elegant and quiet, "a real old-fashioned Osaka lady," but getting worryingly old for marriage arrangements, Taeko, lively, modern, and independent, she has her plans already laid out. In years past, the family has been too picky about marriage proposals for Yukiko and now they are not so frequent.  Getting Yukiko married to a good man is the spine of the story...

This has been pretty great so far.  I've been reading the Tolkien prose version, and I was/am going to also read another poetic translation, but the book disappeared for a few days, so I couldn't do that.  It just turned up again and I'll read to catch up. Tolkien's prose is interesting.  I read 100 lines at a time and then read the commentary on those lines, which took a lot longer!  The majority of the commentary is on the first part of the poem, so that will be much shorter from now on.  I also ran into a problem; the story is marked with line numbers and, without thinking too much about it, I read the first 700.  Only to realize that there are two sets of line numbers in the notes; naturally, the prose runs differently and I'd gotten all the way to the battle with Grendel.  So, blah. Anyway, lots happened in those 700 lines; Hrothgar's reign and building of Heorot are described, Beowulf shows up, there's some arguing with Unferth, and then ...

My Name is Asher Lev, by Chaim Potok Here we have my Classics Spin #9 title.  I am so glad I put Chaim Potok on my Classics Club list; I read The Chosen some time ago (and I'm glad I got that one first) and was looking forward to Asher Lev.  There will be more Potok in my future, but I have to go slowly, what with all the heartbreak. Asher's story starts with his birth and family background; he's born into a sect of Hasidic Judaism (in the book called Ladover, but resembling Lubavitch Hasidism).  His father works for their beloved Rabbi, traveling to help European Jews, especially those in Russia.  Asher is only little when his mother's beloved younger brother dies and she is thrown into a deep depression and breakdown, which marks him deeply.  He loves to draw--in fact he has to draw--but his father strongly disapproves of such time-wasting nonsense.  Fearful for his mother and pressured by his father, Asher stops drawing but has...some issues....

Justinian The Secret History, by Procopius Procopius was an official in the Byzantine government under Justinian and Theodora, who reigned from 527 - 565 AD.  He wrote a lot of history--that is, he wrote official histories for the court, which of course flattered Justinian.  On the side, though, he was working on a more personal project--a 'secret history' in which he spoke about his real opinions.  And Procopius did not think much of the Emperor and Empress. This is a short book that is filled with invective.  Procopius paints Justinian and Theodora as endlessly grasping and cruel tyrants.  Theodora's youth sounds like the most scurrilous gossip, and I don't see how Procopius could possibly have known what was true and what was false, but much of the rest of the material is what he himself would have witnessed.  He portrays Justinian as voracious for cash, but a spendthrift; as weak and indecisive, unconcerned about the welfare of his subjects, an...