Howling Frog Books

We Believe the Children: A Moral Panic in the 1980s, by Richard Beck Readers who were around in the mid-80s may remember that a lot of people were worried about Satanic ritual abuse of children, particularly preschool-aged children in daycare.  Some daycares were accused of being centers of ritual abuse; the children were interrogated, evidence searched for, and a lot of people went to jail.    This was big stuff, people. And it was almost entirely made up .  These huge, publicized cases were sparked by one person worried about a child--in at least one case, by a person with severe mental problems--and blew up into hysteria.  Almost certainly, some children who had actually been subjected to abuse were lost under the mountain of false conjecture and panic that mounted up. Richard Beck has written up a history of the most publicized cases in which he also tries to explain--not really very satisfactorily-- why this all happened.  I think that'...

...or now, really.  The Classics Club is running a long-term event/celebration on great literature by women.  And there's a questionnaire and all!  So I don't know that I'll point it out every single time I read a classic work by a female-type person, but at the very least I'll answer these questions and talk about it every so often.  My first post for this event was Wives and Daughters the other day!  It took me a while to get all this stuff written out. Introduce yourself. Tell us what you are most looking forward to in this event.  I'm Jean, I'm a librarian and sewist and homeschooling mom, and I will most enjoy reading others' posts about women in literature. Have you read many classics by women? Why or why not?  Yes.  The fact is that I gravitate towards women writers anyway; this is not exactly an event that will push me out of my comfort zone.  Maybe I will search out lesser-known works or something. Pick a classic female writ...

Mission accomplished!  We've finished The Monk !  At least, I hope you have; I know I did.  Here's the final installment: We last left Ambrosio in the now-familiar crypt, where he has interred Antonia.  Everybody thinks she's dead, and he plans to keep her imprisoned in a dungeon where she can be his slave.  He thinks she will probably enjoy it!  Antonia wakes up, and surprise, she is not very happy with her situation.  Ambrosio, monster that he is, therefore goes ahead and rapes her.  Of course then he looks at her with revulsion and blames her for the whole thing--yes, according to him, it is Antonia's fault that Ambrosio is a depraved criminal.  He's trying to figure out how to get rid of her when Matilda bursts in with the news about the burning nunnery and everyone running around like mad. Matilda offers to kill Antonia to get her out of the way, but Antonia manages to run away into the rest of the crypt, where she screams to attra...

Wives and Daughters , by Elizabeth Gaskell This novel has been on my pile all year. I wanted to read it for the Back to the Classics Challenge.       A couple of weeks ago, I was going to spend several hours on a bus, and I needed some nice wholesome reading to pass the time. Wives and Daughters seemed the perfect choice, and it turned out lovely. Molly Gibson is the village doctor's daughter, and she's been raised very simply (this is in the 1830s).  When she is seventeen, her father starts worrying that he can't chaperone or guide her properly, and so he marries a pretty, insinuating widow who is in fact shallow, manipulative, and selfish.  Molly does her best to get along with her new stepmother, but it's a continual struggle. Her comfort is her new stepsister, Cynthia, who is charming and sophisticated, having grown up largely in French boarding schools.  The two become very close, but Molly does not always understand what Cynthi...

A Bend in the River, by V. S. Naipaul This was my Classics Club Spin title!  V. S. Naipaul is a British writer, born in Trinidad, who started off writing Trinidad-based novels and moved to international waters.  He's pretty international himself, being of Nepalese descent by way of India and Trinidad.  He has won a Booker Prize, a Nobel, and a knighthood. A Bend in the River , published in 1979, describes ordinary life in modern, post-colonial Africa through the eyes of one man.  He does little himself; he is an observer of the events around him.  The location is deliberately general; it's not too far from Uganda and South Africa, and inland, so I guessed at western Tanzania, but the point is that it's Post-Colonial Anywhere, Africa.  The colonial government is gone, there has been violence, and now a new president promises a new life, but he progresses from popular leader to tyrant.  Naipaul shows us what that looks like for the ordinary people o...

There's only one more week in our Monkalong event! This week ended in a real cliffhanger so I can't wait to finish the book. But meanwhile, on with our story.... Raymond and Lorenzo are so busy trying to find Agnes that they totally neglect to pay any attention to Antonia and Elvira. This is a bit unfortunate, because Ambrosio is doing some plotting. He's got this magic myrtle branch that the Devil gave him to get into Antonia's room. There is a very suspenseful section where he magically enters the apartment and gets into Antonia's locked room, and he's looking at her and he's about to make his move. But! Elvira has been on the watch. She is the only competent adult around here. Her only flaw is that she keeps failing to tell Antonia the facts about Ambrosio, or any facts in general. Antonia needs to know these things, and her ignorance is not helping her! So Elvira interrupts Ambrosio, and she announces her plan to expose his hypocrisy to the world. We...

The Thrilling Adventures of  Lovelace and Babbage: the (Mostly) True Story of the First Computer , by Sydney Padua I should have written this post for Ada Lovelace Day last week, but I've been having some trouble with my arms and repetitive stress. So I've been putting off writing any posts. I'm now experimenting with voice recognition on my tablet, and I'm pretty impressed by how well it works. I could type these posts - I'm not that badly off - but I need to save my typing for work. Of course, the voice recognition doesn't work anywhere near perfectly, but I can get a good amount of material down and then go back and edit it by hand. The author of this graphic novel says that she wrote one comic for fun and then responded to popular demand by producing the entire work. It is a whole lot of fun to read. Padua posits that Ada Lovelace did not die at a young age, but survived, built the Difference Engine with Babbage, and then had some wild adventures with...

The Hand of a Great Master , by Konstanineh Gamsakhardia When I was reading Eight Pieces of Empire a little while ago, the author mentioned that Georgians place a great value on their literature. He mentioned one of their favorite national authors, Konstanineh Gamsakhurdia, and I thought I would like to read one of his books. The particular book I was looking for doesn't seem to be available in English. In fact, I could only find one book that had been translated into English at all. And so I read that. I got it through InterLibrary Loan, and it came all the way from Kansas. It was kind of a cool book, since it was printed in Moscow in 1962. As far as I can tell, it's the only time Gamsakhurdia has been printed in English.        Svetitskhoveli Cathedral The Hand of a Great Master is historical fiction, set an 11th century Georgia. It deals with the construction of the great Svetitskhoveli Cathedral, which still exists today. Although the st...

The Fellowship: the Literary Lives of the Inklings , by Philip and Carol Zaleski The Zaleskis have written a sort of group biography of the four main Inklings: C. S. Lewis, Charles Williams, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Owen Barfield.  They only touch very lightly on other members of the group, and really Lewis and Tolkien take up the lion's share of the space.  The subjects are tackled sort of chronologically, so you skip between childhoods and educations.  If you are already a big Lewis/Tolkien fan, you will know quite a bit of the material, but the Zaleskis have a solid common-sense approach to the wishes and speculations that have built up around the two in the last 50 years or so, which is a nice help. Where I mostly learned a lot was in the material about Barfield and Williams.  I've read some of their writings, so I was not totally unfamiliar with them, but I didn't know much.  Barfield was a talented man whose talents were not what people wanted.  Fo...

It's Thursday morning and that means it's time for another dose of Monkly insanity!  When we last left the actual monk two weeks ago, he had succumbed to the charms of Matilda.   It turns out that she isn't quite cured from snake venom though, and she has to go perform some secret rites down in the crypt that is shared with the nunnery, which for some reason Ambrosio isn't all that worried about.  He doesn't think "Gee, secret rites down in the crypt sounds kind of skeevy, maybe that could be a problem?"  He does get quite scared --he's worried enough, waiting in the dark on his own, that the sound of somebody crawling around and begging for mercy is only scary and then forgotten.  ( Who could it be??   It's obviously poor Agnes, left to starve in an oubliette crypt.)  Even Matilda doesn't think much of her chicken-livered boyfriend. Now they can embark on a life of secret lust!  Ambrosio is kind of worried about getting caught, but other...

The Martian , by Andy Weir  My husband and 15yo child told me I had to read this book right away, as soon as possible.  "But it's RIP right now!" I protested.  "I'm trying to focus on scary books!"  " The Martian is scary," they pointed out.  "It's supposed to be more like Gothic or horror," I explained.  "It's called Readers Imbibing Peril."  "There is peril on every page!  He spends the whole time in peril!" they said.  Well, that was pretty convincing.  So my final RIP title is  The Martian. In the near future, NASA is sending manned expeditions to Mars.  It takes a really long time to get to Mars!    During the Ares III expedition, a month-long mission is cut short by a bad storm.  As the astronauts struggle toward the module that will take them back into space, the most junior member of the team is struck by flying debris and thrown out of sight.  His biometric systems all show him to be dea...

The Bright Continent: Breaking Rules and Making Change in Modern Africa , by Dayo Olopade I'm a teensy bit behind on actual book reviews!  My desk is not happy with me because it's weighed down by too many books.  I've been trying to stay off the computer lately.  I hope I haven't forgotten everything I wanted to say about this book! Dayo Olopade was raised largely in the US, but also spent lots of time visiting family in her parents' home country of Nigeria, and this gives her a good on-the-ground perspective for her subject.  Her thesis, pretty much, is that most African governments are so corrupt and incompetent that their main function is to impede, rather than facilitate, civil society.  Therefore, traditional models of aid have largely either been useless or damaging; and who says Africa needs tons of Western aid that may not fit actual needs, anyway?  Africa's largest resource is its own people, and far from being helpless victims of fate, they a...

People, I have had a DAY.  I've been looking forward to writing this post, which was due this morning, but life happened instead.  Speaking of which, Don Raymond has been having a lot of life too!  So on to our story. This ENTIRE section of the novel--about 130 pages out of 400+ -- has been Don Raymond explaining to Don Lorenzo how he just happened to get Agnes the nun pregnant.  Remember Agnes the nun?  Lorenzo, her brother, demands a good explanation or else.  So Raymond goes into this incredibly long story: He traveled around Europe under an assumed name so nobody would suck up to him or rob him for being a noble.  In a forest, he gets into trouble with some banditti!  (Banditti must have been much more exciting to 18th-century novel readers than they are to me.)  This other duchess lady is in trouble too, and Raymond saves her.  Though not all his servants--they all die.  Anyway, the duchess is grateful and invites Raymond...

This is a master post for the readathon, so anybody who is interested can come by and check in, and anybody who is not doesn't have to keep getting inundated with boring daily updates.  Every day I'll just insert what I've done. Monday:  Today I surprised myself by reading quite a bit! I finished The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings (but I only had 50 pages to go) I read The Martian !  Boy is that an exciting book. I got about 10 pages into my next section of The Monk .  Beware the Italian banditti! Tuesday: Pretty good day. I started this really fun graphic novel called The Adventures of Babbage and Lovelace , or something very similar to that, and it's neat. Made a good amount of progress in The Monk --just 20 or so pages to go till the end of the weekly section.  It's been nothing but Don Raymond's story the whoooooole tiiiiiime, I'm bored now. Got a little further with this Georgian novel, By the Hand of the Grand Master . ...

Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque , by Edgar Allan Poe  This is a two-volume collection of Poe's early stories, published in 1840.  He said that the meanings of "grotesque" and "arabesque" were clear, which they most certainly are not, and people have been arguing about it ever since.  Does one mean horror and the other terror ?  Is grotesque more comic or satirical, and arabesque more psychological?  I rather thought that the grotesque stories might be the ones with a scary atmosphere, and the arabesque ones the more fanciful, but apparently I'm even wronger than most. Only a couple of these stories belong in the super-famous category; Fall of the House of Usher and MS in a Bottle are both here.  Otherwise, I don't think I had ever read any of the other 23 stories.  Several of them are very nearly not stories at all--they are more like atmospheric vignettes, scenes that evoke a feeling.  Others are long but verbose and convoluted, s...

I don't join readathons often--especially the ones that want you to stay up late!  I heard about the FrightFall Readathon a few weeks ago and have been waffling ever since, but hey, why not?  I've got a busy week coming up, but on the other hand I'm done with Banned Books Week (our best success yet, thankyouverymuch) and I'll just try to default to reading rather than putzing around, which is preferable anyway. FrightFall is hosted by the Seasons of Reading blog , which is a cooperative venture just for seasonal readalongs, run by several book bloggers including Michelle at True Book Addict .  It will last from tomorrow, October 5, to the 11th.  There are few rules, but you're supposed to read some sort of scary/horror/thriller book somewhere in there.  Signups are here , and the guidelines can be found here . I hope The Martian counts as a thriller, because that's all I've got at the moment.  (My husband and daughter say yes, because the guy spends...

It's the first installment of the Monkalong!  Reading Rambo is hosting the activity, and she says " COME READ THIS 1796 NOVEL WITH US. It's bonkers."   Which is true enough. I've read the first two chapters, and it's already getting pretty crazy.  So far, we have three pairs: Antonia is 15 (at most) and Don Lorenzo spots her at church.  She's pretty cute, although not rich, so Don Lorenzo figures she would make a good wife.  Then he has a dream-vision in which she is tormented by evil and taken up to heaven. Agnes and Don Raymond are in love, but Agnes thought he'd left her, so she entered a convent.  When Don Raymond came back, she started meeting him secretly.  Now she's pregnant and planning to elope, unless the prioress catches her first.  Agnes is also Don Lorenzo's sister! Ambrosius is the incredibly clean-living young abbot of the monastery.  His preaching is all the rage and he's in great demand.  Unfortunately, Ambrosi...