Howling Frog Books

Meghadutam, or, The Cloud Messenger, by Kalidasa I must say, the Classics Club has been good for me. When I first compiled the list, I added a bunch of titles that I didn't actually know what they were.  Surprise is good, right?  Several of the surprise titles were ancient or medieval texts from Asian sources.  So, I have Kojiki (Japanese) and Muqaddimah (Arabic) on my list, and I'm tracking those down.  And I had The Cloud Messenger , by Kalidasa, who lived about 1500 years ago and wrote in Sanskrit.  Kalidasa wrote plays and poetry, and the web page where I read the poem says that he "created a new genre in Sanskrit literature" with The Cloud Messenger .  Instead of an epic or a hymn, this is a poem about love and longing.  It's too long to be called a lyric, but the website describes it as elegiac, which is pretty good. In the poem, a young Yaksha--an attendant on Kubera, the god of wealth--has committed some fault and has been exiled from t...

Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, and seuerall steps in my Sicknes, by John Donne In 1623, John Donne nearly died from a severe illness (maybe typhus?).  During his long recovery, he wrote these "devotions," which are meditations using illness as a way to think about fallen humanity, sinfulness, and how to 'recover' or be saved by God.  Elizabethans often thought of illness as a reflection of human sinfulness. There are 23 essays, each corresponding to a step in the progression of the illness, so the titles are things like "The patient takes his bed," "The physician desires to have others joined with him," and so on through fever, treatment, purging, and recovery (including the danger of relapsing).  By far my favorite title is XII, "They apply pigeons, to draw the vapours from the head."   And each devotion is divided into three sections: a meditation on the theme, an expostulation in which Donne debates with God, and a prayer askin...

How to be a Heroine, or, What I've Learned From Reading Too Much , by Samantha Ellis Reading memoirs are pretty hit or miss for me, but I was completely hooked by the first couple of pages of this one.  Ellis visits the Yorkshire moors with her best friend.  As they walk over land beloved by Emily Bronte, they argue about which heroine is better--Cathy Earnshaw or Jane Eyre?  Ellis thinks this is a no-brainer--obviously Cathy.  Who cares about plain, boring Jane?  Her best friend argues that Cathy just "makes everyone unhappy" with her bad decisions and her wailing, and points out that Jane is independent and principled and strong.  And revelation strikes Ellis: My whole life, I'd been trying to be Cathy, when I should have been trying to be Jane. I thought this story was fantastic and promptly needed to read the whole book. Well, it turns out that the story about Cathy and Jane is my favorite part of the book and the rest of it didn't quite live u...

A Moment Comes , by Jennifer Bradbury 1947, Punjab: a British cartographer working to map out where the boundary between India and Pakistan will be established has three teens in his household: Tariq, an ambitious young Muslim determined to get the best education so that he can be a leader; Anupreet, a Sikh girl anxious about her relatives and traumatized herself; Margaret, the daughter, a disgraced debutante liable to get herself and everyone else into trouble. Tensions are already extremely high.  Tariq is under pressure to participate in mob violence, and he's desperate to stay out of it.  Anupreet is, somewhat unfortunately, very beautiful and has already been in danger.  And Margaret is bored, frustrated, and clueless enough to blunder into situations she doesn't understand at all.  As the violence gets worse, the lives of all three are changed along with the future of India. Bradbury does a great job of evoking the dangers of border areas in 1947, a...

About Daddy , by Meena Arora Nayak I picked this up from the stacks at work because I'm always attracted to works about India.  I'm kind of ambivalent on this one though. Simran travels to India on a mission to scatter the ashes of her beloved father, whose last wish was that he rest on the border between Pakistan and India.  But then she's arrested for suspicious activity and spends three months in prison, where her perspective and priorities totally change.  Simran's boyfriend gets her out, but then she goes underground to join a peace movement led by the charismatic Kalida as she tries to heal the wounds left by Partition. I liked that the novel portrayed a woman stuck in an Indian prison, where she makes connections with a bunch of different people.  But the setup felt contrived to me; Simran is horrifyingly naive (her parents never talked about India, because her father was so severely traumatized by what he had been through and done during Partition) and ...

An African in Greenland, by Tete-Michel Kpomassie Resist this fabulous memoir if you can ( which you can't ).  In the later 1950s, Michel is your average 16-year-old in Togoland, living your average life, until he sees a book about Greenland.  The idea of a place so completely opposite to his home--cold and frozen all the time, with no trees, and with a culture that listens to children--intrigued him so much that he decided he ought to go there.  And so he did.  (It helped that his father had just promised him to the python cult, to be trained as a priest.)  Michel left home and worked his way north.  It took six years to get out of Africa, and another two to work his way up to Denmark, where he could embark for Greenland.  All the while, he was studying through correspondence courses, and picked up several new languages. Most of the book covers Michel's 16 months in Greenland itself, though.  He starts off in the south, and stays for a while...

The Song of the Volsungs After the Beowulf readalong, I went on quite the Anglo-Saxon/early medieval kick.  Beowulf mentioned Sigurd, so I wanted to read his story.  I read some little texts from the British Museum about the Lewis Chessmen and the Sutton Hoo helmet; those were great. Then I started the Venerable Bede's Ecclesiastical History , but I'm not finished with that yet; still about 100 pages to go there.  Anyway, for Sigurd's story I picked up this fancy new Penguin edition, featuring the 1990 translation by Jesse L. Byock. The saga traces the history of the Volsung clan, starting with Sigi and going down through lots of murders and power struggles and incest (!) and people murdering their own children (!) until we get to Sigurd, who kills the dragon Fafnir.  Fafnir has not always been a dragon; he is the brother of Regin and was once human.  Regin gets Sigurd to agree to kill Fafnir by promising him the dragon's massive hoard of gold. This was...

Muhammad: Prophet of God , by Daniel Peterson This has been an unofficial TBR title for a while now.  It's a scholarly biography of Muhammad written for the layperson--the author is a professor of Islamic and Arabic studies, it's a fairly short book (less than 200 pages), it's very clearly written, and it has plenty of footnotes. Everything that is known about the details of Muhammad's life is here, and a good bit about the early beginnings of Islam.  Peterson also includes some information about disagreements on various issues and his opinions on them, where relevant.  The best thing about it is how very readable it is; there's no jargon, it's all clearly set out in nice prose, and it's just a pleasure to read. I enjoyed it, it was very informative and respectful without polemics either way, and it was a good solid treatment without becoming exhaustive. 

The Jungle Book , by Rudyard Kipling For this month's literary movement challenge, I was pretty stumped.  It's Victorian month, and I've already read one Dickens and two Trollopes this year, so I was inclined to cry uncle.  My daughter suggested a children's story, which was a good idea...and then the light dawned.  Kipling!  I have read almost no Kipling!  It's doesn't get any more Victorian than that.  Said daughter was appalled to learn that I had never read The Jungle Book ( "What??  I've read it three times!" ), and so my choice was made.  (Don't tell, but I have also never read Just So Stories all the way through.) The first half of the book is stories about Mowgli and will be sort of familiar to people who have seen the Disney movie, though these are a lot more serious.  Jungle inhabitants have strict laws and standards.  And this is not a novel; it's two or three short stories that do not happen in chronological order. Af...