Howling Frog Books

Eight Pieces of Empire: a 20-year Journey Through the Soviet Collapse , by Lawrence Scott Sheets I finally made it to the 90s in my quest through Soviet history!  I've had this book on my TBR pile since late last year, but I wanted to read more about the USSR itself before I read about its collapse.  This memoir contains some things that I remember--but mostly makes it clear just how much I was not paying attention to world news, at all, in the 1990s (during which I went to college, mostly did not have a TV, got married, and went to grad school; lots of studying and working, not a whole lot else). Lawrence Scott Sheets, on the other hand, spent the 90s and 00s working as a reporter in the former USSR.  He sort of defaulted to being a war reporter, despite not actually planning to specialize in war.  Here he writes about what he saw and experienced during those years. We start in 1989, with a student Sheets trekking to Russia to work on his language skills....

Three Plays by Karel Č apek I read R. U. R. a while back, and I wanted to read the other three plays in the book, but I didn't get around to it for quite a while.  Silly, because they are pretty neat. The Insect Pla y: an entomologist observes several different kinds of insects, who illustrate types of humanity.  Butterflies are flirtatious Bright Young Things with just one thing on their minds; dung-beetles only think about gathering wealth, while crickets are all about family, and ants have a fascist war-machine going. The Makropulos Case : a lovely singer captivates everyone she meets.  Men all want her; women all want to be her, but she is incredibly cold and unfeeling.  It's about mortality and the necessity of death. The White Plague : a new illness, which looks like leprosy but only attacks those over fifty, is becoming an epidemic.  No-one can escape, and it's always fatal.  A young slum-clinic doctor develops a cure, but he will only gi...

Brona is hosting her annual AusReading event in November and this time I'm going to join.  I've wanted to the last couple of years.  Brona says: November is AusReading Month - a month long celebration of all things Aussie, Aussie, Aussie.   Join us as we read, review and blog about all things Australian - classic books, contemporary stories, children's books, poetry, non-fiction, short stories, popular, literary, award-winning - whatever.   The only stipulation is that it has to be written by an Australian based author  or predominantly set in Australia.   The rules are simple: read one, two or more Australian books throughout the month of November. Write a review on your blog and link it back here.   Visit and comment on your fellow bloggers posts to build up our growing community of Aussie book lovers. Visit Bron a's post to sign up and find links to suggestions! I t seems to me that it can be a bit tricky to find much Aust...

The Secret of the Underground Room , by John Bellairs I just had to include a John Bellairs title, and it's been a long time since I read this one. Johnny and the Professor's friend Father Higgins finds a talisman of stained glass that might be able to raise the dead.  When Father Higgins disappears, they realize he's been taken captive by an evil spirit, and they have to travel to England to try to save their friend. Bellairs uses the island of Lundy in the Bristol channel as his backdrop, riffing on the island's history with the Marisco family and piracy.  So  Johnny and company go to Bristol!  Include Johnny and company on the list of characters who have something important happen on the Clifton Bridge.  I'll have to visit it someday! Oh, and Kate Beaton of Hark! A Vagrant! included this cover as one of her comics featuring Gorey book covers.  Take a look... Clifton Bridge, Bristol Lundy, otherwise known as Puffin Island

The Tyranny of Silence: How One Cartoon Ignited a Global Debate on the Future of Free Speech, by Flemming Rose Guess what next week is?  That's right, Banned Books Week is coming up, and you know I love me some free speech melodrama.  I've been working on displays and a giveaway and all sorts of stuff.  I can't wait to go into work tomorrow, because the posters and whatnot have come in, and PLUS I am teaching a library skills class where BBW and global free speech issues will be the focus.  Woohoo!  So it is quite timely that I just finished The Tyranny of Silence , a fascinating book. Remember just about ten years ago, there was a big kerfuffle in Europe over some editorial cartoons?   Flemming Rose, a new editor at the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten , was hearing more and more that people were self-censoring on the subject of Islam.  An illustrator asked to work on a children's biography of Muhammad said that he would do the work, as lo...

The True Deceiver, by Tove Jansson Tove Jansson is always worth reading, and this is an intriguing short novel that I think is also her darkest. In a remote village that is nearly cut off by winter snows, Katri Kling is an outsider.  She lives with her simple brother Mats and her menacing, unnamed dog, and she's been planning for a long time.  Mats' security is her goal; her method will be to take over the life of Anna Aemelin, an artist.  I enjoy Jansson's prose a lot, with its extreme particularity and focus on certain things.  I think a lot of her own thoughts about art and questions about what obligations the artist has to the audience show up in Anna's character, which is neat.  The main theme, though, is deception: what constitutes honesty or deception?  Each woman considers herself to be honest, but that doesn't mean that they always tell the truth. Excellent short novel--pick it up if you can.

The House of the Seven Gables , by Nathaniel Hawthorne My first RIP title!  Considering that it's a Hawthorne title, I was surprised at how fast it went--time-wise, that is.  It's not terribly long.  I did feel like not all that much happened, though, and that it's crammed with a little too much excessive verbiage.  So it felt a bit slower than it was. The Pyncheon mansion is famous in town for being large and fancy--seven gables!--and for having a family curse.  Way back in Puritan times, old Pyncheon accused one Matthew Maule of wizardry in order to get his land, and the house was built on the site of the swindle.  Maule cursed the whole Pyncheon family, and the old man died in a sudden and gruesome manner. Moving up to the present--1850 or so--the house is mouldering away with only one inhabitant: the destitute but genteel Hepzibah, who is forced to open a little shop in order to support herself.  She is terrible at shopkeeping, but luckily ...

Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944 - 1956, by Anne Applebaum In my ongoing quest to learn everything about the awful things done to Eastern Europe in the 20th century, I've read the third book in a non-series that I think makes an excellent trilogy anyway.  First we have Bloodlands , by Timothy Snyder, and then Savage Continent , by Keith Lowe, and now I've got Iron Curtain under my belt as well.  All three of these draw on information that has only recently become available to the West. Appelbaum decided to write about Eastern Europe as a group of countries because she felt that although the various countries had differences in how they became part of the Communist bloc, they also had a lot in common, and looking at them together could reveal patterns and insights that might go unnoticed when considering each country individually.  So she divides her book into themes, such as violence, youth groups, socialist realism in art, religion, media, and...

This new edition has two books Tevye the Dairyman, by Sholem Aleichem I was excited to read these Yiddish short stories, published over 20 years (1895 - 1915), by the great Jewish writer and humorist Sholem Aleichem.  (That's a funny pseudonym that means, pretty much, "hello how are you" -- his real name was Sholem Rabinovitch.)  These are the stories that Fiddler on the Roof is based on.  So, excitement!  Except then I realized that Fiddler on the Roof always makes me cry.  And the stories, of course, are more realistic and rougher and more tragic and do not have fun songs.  They are still done in this humorous Tevye style, but oh boy.  So--be prepared. The musical writers did stick fairly close to the main events over several stories, so you'll see a lot of familiar points.  Tevye's "dream" really is in the Tzeitl story, so that made me happy.  The stories give us two more daughters (Tevye says he has seven, but one or two disa...

Guess what, Witch Week is happening!  Lory at Emerald City Book Review is hosting again , and this year the theme is "New Tales From Old," so we'll be reading retellings of folktales and mythology.  Fun! There will be discussions and a readalong.  Head on over to Lory's blog to catch the early news so you can vote on what to read!

Lucky Jim, by Kingsley Amis I've never read Kingsley Amis before!  Somebody (Lory?) reviewed Lucky Jim several months ago, and I've meant to read it ever since.  I found an old copy with an Edward Gorey cover at work and have been saving it for a treat! From what I can tell, Lucky Jim set a fashion for 'campus' novels--probably usually "novels about angry young men at newly-founded universities," as Diana Wynne Jones once commented.  Lucky Jim is indeed set in a "red-brick university" in the Midlands, which would make it newly-founded by British standards, because those mostly date from around 1900 or so. James Dixon is a lecturer in medieval English history--it's his first year and he's on probation for the job.  While he desperately needs to hang on to his employment, he hates everything about it.  He hates medieval history, and his head of department, and all the other academics, and his sort-of girlfriend Margaret, and especiall...

The Silencing: How the Left is Killing Free Speech, by Kirsten Powers You know if a book comes out about free speech, I've got to read it.  (I'm into another one now!)  Kirsten Powers is a lifelong lefty liberal who is currently a commentator at Fox News, and she is watching in dismay as illiberal leftists use silencing tactics to shut down debate and smear people they disapprove of--left or right.  Practice saying "illiberal left" ten times fast, because the phrase shows up a lot in this book!  Powers goes over several recent cases you've probably heard about if you've been paying attention--the UCSB professor who assaulted a teenage girl participating in an anti-abortion demonstration, and then claimed to be the victim; the ousting of Brendan Eich as CEO of Mozilla; the way California (and other) universities pushed the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship groups out, and so on.  She uses these and many other examples to list the tactics we see used all ...

Phinnea at Ravenscroftcloud clued me in to a readalong at the fabulously-named Rambo Reader of Matthew Lewis' The Monk .  It's a Monkalong!  I've been meaning to re-read that for a while now and RIP is a good time to do it, so what the heck.  Rambo Reader says: It's not very good! We've been threatening to read it for years! Here it is. October, 2015. It's Matthew Lewis's The Monk Readalong Time. MARK YOUR CALENDARS RIGHT NOW, for I have the readalong schedule, and chapters 1 and 2 are to be done on the FIRST of October. That's right, we're posting on Thursdays this year, so when you've forgotten to do the reading over the weekend, you still have Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday to get it done. What a relief. How great. Good planning, Alice. October 1st Vol. I Chapters 1-2 October 8th  Vol. I Chapters 3, Vol. II Chapters 1-2 October 15th Vol II, ch. 3-4 October 22nd Vol. III ch. 1-3 October 29th Vol III, ch. 4-5 Well, I ...