Howling Frog Books

Dawn , by Octavia Butler When I looked through the library SF collection for older books to read in January, I came across this too, and I remembered that somebody in the book blogger universe had reviewed it very positively a little while ago, so I grabbed it too.   Dawn is the first book in the "Xenogenesis" series, and I'm really interested to see how it goes; this was a fascinating read. Lilith is one of the few survivors of an all-Earth war that rendered the planet uninhabitable.  She wakes up alone, in the cell of a spaceship.  Aliens have taken her and some few hundred other survivors and kept them in hibernation for long years, until Earth is again ready for habitation.  Their species survives by trading DNA with other species every so often, and they plan to help humans re-establish life on earth -- but human children will no longer be quite human.  Lilith is expected to learn survival skills and become the leader of a group, but she's also exp...

Well, the world might not be going too well just now but my reading year was pretty good, so let's focus on that for a bit. I read about 145 books , not counting fluffy mysteries and such.  I don't keep track of fiction vs. non-fiction or male vs. female authors or anything, so I haven't got any more statistics.  Literary highlights of the year included real-life events like a trip to the UK and meeting a favorite author, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni. I have a terrible time picking favorites, but a few great reads this year were: Something Wicked This Way Comes The Invisible Library Gentian Hill Our Town The Big Green Tent Before We Visit the Goddess The Shepherd's Crown Outwitting History Stonehenge The Importance of Being Little How to Manage Your Home Without Losing Your Mind The History of the Franks  The World Between Two Covers The Lost Art of Dress The Broken Road Home Fires Up From Slavery With challenges , I am pretty happy with how I did...

The Scorpion Rules , by Erin Bow I really liked Erin Bow's first book, Plain Kate , so when I figured out that this book everyone was talking about was by Erin Bow, I finally went and got it.  It lived up to the hype, too! Hundreds of years in the future, the world is kept mostly at peace by a hostage system: if you plan to rule a country, you must give up your child.  If you go to war (or are attacked), the child dies.  Talis, the super-computer that took over ruling the world when it decided that people were no good at it, is very strict about this. Greta is the crown princess of the Pan-Polar Confederation (mostly Canada) and she has lived most of her life at the Precepture school with the other hostage children.  She is prepared to die if necessary, but hopes that with her 18th birthday only months away, she'll live to leave the school and become an adult.  When a new hostage, Elian, arrives, he is in no way accustomed to living according to the stri...

*Deep breath*  OK, are you ready for a completely insane idea?  This is not a challenge; this is a long project.  Here we go.... There are nearly 200 countries on our planet; let's see if we can read books from all of them!  Or, since that's a large commitment, pick 50, 100, or whatever, as long as you have a minimum of 50. I've been wishing for a while for some sort of project that involves reading something from every country, but this is a tricky prospect, since it is not always easy to find books from some countries.  Clearly this isn't something that will fit into a year-long challenge -- not for most of us!  So Esther of Chapter Adventures and I got together and thought a more long-term, open-ended project would be a good plan.  Esther designed this brilliant image! The basic rules:  Pick 50+ countries or go for the gold with all of them! The number depends on you. Sign up at the project page here. Read either fiction by a wr...

Karen at Books and Chocolate hosts the Back to the Classics challenge!  A wrap-up post is required, so here we go. I completed all twelve categories!  So I get three entries into the prize drawing, woohoo.  Here is my list: 1.   A 19th Century Classic-- Great Speeches of Frederick Douglass 2.   A 20th Century Classic -- Man's Search for Meaning , by Viktor Frankl   3.   A Classic by a Woman Author . Northanger Abbey , by Jane Austen 4.   A Classic in Translation .  My Childhood , by Maxim Gorky 5.   A classic by a non-white author . Up From Slavery , by Booker T. Washington 6.   An adventure classic   Under the Y oke , by Ivan Vazov 7.   A fantasy, science fiction, or dystopian classic. Voyage to Arcturus, by David Lindsay 8.   A classic detective novel. Brat Farrar , by Jo sephine Tey 9.   A classic which includes the name of a place in the title.   Pi cnic at Hanging Rock , by...

Time for a flurry of challenge wrap-up posts!  Bev at My Reader's Block hosts a TBR challenge every year, and says: Wow. We're almost done with 2016 and it's time to get ready for the Final Mountaineering Checkpoint. Where does the time go? I'm ready to hear how all our mountain-climbing team members have done out there on Pike's Peak, Mt. Ararat, Mt. Everest....whichever peak you've chosen. Checkpoint participation is absolutely voluntary and is not considered necessary for challenge completion. For those who would like to participate in this checkpoint post, I'd like you to at least complete the first of these two things. And if you feel particularly inspired (or generous about humoring me during the holiday season), then please do both. 1. Tell us how many miles you made it up your mountain (# of books read). If you've planted your flag on the peak, then tell us, take a selfie, and celebrate (and wave!). Even if you were especially athletic a...

Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol, translated by Pevear and Volokhonsky Gogol wrote a whole lot of short stories, and he kind of did it in two phases of his career.  He started off in Ukraine, so the first half of the stories are called "Ukrainian Tales."  The second half are the "Petersburg Tales," written in the city. Ukrainian tales are mostly pastoral; they take place in villages and on farms, unless someone treks off to Kiev.  They're a bit folky in flavor, and frequently have some supernatural element.  I really enjoyed most of these stories, especially "The Night Before Christmas," where a proud village girl tells her swain that she won't marry him unless he brings her a pair of boots just like the tsaritsa wears -- and so off he goes to do it.  And there was a melancholy, highly realistic story about two neighbors who were the best of friends, until a chance word causes offense, and every time they get close to reconciling, they choose ...

Catholic and Mormon: A Theological Conversation , by Stephen H. Webb and Alonzo L. Gaskill I hope everybody had a nice break and holiday and so on!  We sure did.  It was relaxing and lovely, and my sister got a job so everybody's employed (yay!) and I took my kids ice skating today.  I've been feeling very lazy about the blogging thing, but I have a lot to do before the end of the year, so... This is a friendly theological discussion of similarities and differences between the Roman Catholic Church and the LDS Church, written by two theologian types whose work I am somewhat familiar with, and published by Oxford UP.  Stephen Webb was a professor at Wabash College, and then became editor of First Things magazine; as he narrates, he started life as a Protestant but eventually decided that the Reformation had accomplished its goals and then became Catholic.  Alonzo Gaskill is an LDS scholar at BYU, and has done a lot of historical work.  He was raised G...

I've been running around doing Christmasy stuff (and having a cold, fooey), so I might as well write a post too!  Lois at You, Me, and a Cup of Tea found this fun tag, and I thought I'd play along. Does it snow where you live around Christmas? Ha ha, nope.  We got a light dusting 15 years ago.  I live in the central valley of California and we don't get snow, but on the other hand I live quite near the foothills of the mountains, and they do.  So it's not very far to drive. Do you get a real tree or a fake tree? We used to always get real trees from Grandpa's Christmas Tree Farm (that is, my parents' back acre, which has a planting of pine trees).  They were always huge and sprawly things and it was pretty awesome, but the back acre has run out of trees that look halfway acceptable in a living room -- it's more like Hansel and Gretel's forest now -- and a few years ago the clever siphon arrangement we had slipped and we had a flood, so now we...

All Seated on the Ground, by Connie Willis I love Connie Willis.  She can be too long, but even then I don't mind too much.  And one thing about Connie Willis is that she frequently indulges in screwball SF comedy, usually with a romance attached.  She is the only author I know of that does this, and All Seated on the Ground is a good example of it.  It's also a Christmas novella! The aliens have landed!  Finally, they really have; aliens landed in Colorado, but all they do is stand there and glower disapprovingly at everyone and everything.  They don't speak, they don't respond, nothing.  Meg is on the welcome committee, which has been trying to communicate with the aliens for two months now, and all they've managed to do is to get the aliens to follow them on field trips to try to introduce them to life on Earth.  It's almost Christmas when they take the aliens to the mall to meet Santa, and finally, something happens, but what does it mean...

Outwitting History: The Amazing Adventures of a Man Who Rescued a Million Yiddish Books , by Aaron Lansky This is such a fabulous book and I had so much fun reading it!  It's been on my pile for a while now, and I'm only sorry I didn't get to it sooner.  OK, so... In 1980, the study of Yiddish and Yiddish literature was pretty well moribund.  Judaic scholars tended to focus on Hebrew and Jewish history, and considered Yiddish to be kind of an ugly half-language, not really worth preserving.  The Yiddish speakers of the world were elderly, and, having moved to new countries, had not passed on the language to their children.  Aaron Lansky and a couple of other grad students were interested in learning Yiddish, and pretty soon some other young grad student types were joining them, but they couldn't find the books to read.  Where were all the Yiddish books?  Libraries didn't have them any more.  Bookstores didn't carry them.  But they wer...

Do you know how hard it was to resist the temptation to type "Ch-ch-ch-changes" in that headline?  It was tough.  Anyway, to continue the posts in the Month of Faves: Wed. | Dec. 14 –  Best Changes We Made This Year #AMonthofFaves2016 –  to your Day / Life / Routines / Blog / Habits The dishes and accompanying kitchen tasks.  As laid out in How to Manage Your Home Without Losing Your Mind.   I'm not even very good at it yet, but the habit of getting the kitchen completely cleaned up (dishes, counters, floor, table) every night is a big one.  Of course, right now our dishwasher is busted and so it's a little trickier because our dish drainer is kind of small! Anyway, do those four things every night.  You'll be happier.

Estella's Revenge is hosting A Month of Faves in December !  Today's question: Tue. | Dec. 13 –  5 Books on Our Winter Reading List  #AMonthofFaves2016  – which books are your must read this winter? Oh, I have so many hopes and dreams and plans for my winter reading!  Perhaps one third of it will actually happen.  Here are some of them: I like to re-read two favorite children's books around Christmas time: The Dark is Rising and The Children of Green Knowe .  I don't do it every year or anything, but I do it pretty often.  I'm particularly excited about the Green Knowe book this year, for reasons obvious to regular readers -- I actually got to visit the real Green Knowe about six months ago , and now I get to imagine the whole thing in greater detail!   So I'm saving it for last; right now I'm reading Over Sea, Under Stone before I start The Dark is Rising .  Who knows, maybe I'll decide to read them all? The coolest thing...

OK, I totally LIED about that whole 'last challenge' thing.  Because to my joy, a Russian literature challenge has popped up, hosted by Keely at we went outside and saw the stars .  I'd been hoping for a Russian lit challenge, but I didn't think any would happen.    So now I'm signing up for my sixth challenge.  Which is still four less than the biggest year I had! Keely says: I'll just be reading Classic Russian Literature (mostly the 19th Century) but I welcome anyone that participates to read 20th century or contemporary Russian Literature and Non Fiction. I'll be listing the books I want to read on my 2017 Challenges Page . Like with many challenges there will be four levels (going to make it interesting and name them after my favourite Russian writers): Level One (Tolstoy): 1-3 books  Level Two (Chekov): 4-6 books  Level Three (Dostoevsky): 7-11 books Level Four (Turgenev): 12+ books You can count short stories, poetry...

Pedro Páramo, by Juan Rulfo As I've confessed several times here, Latin American literature is one of the things I'm not very good at.  So I purposely put a few titles on my Classics Club list, so that I would jolly well have to read some.   Several of those didn't work out as I hoped, so I've done some switching around as I've learned a bit more, and this is one of my replacement titles. Juan Rulfo, besides being mentioned in the Shiki Nagaoka book I wrote about the other day, became a major literary figure in Mexico in the 1950s.  His surrealism, vivid imagery, and inclusion of magic in his novels was a new departure in Latin American literature and was a large part of the movement to magical realism that is so well-known.  So here we go, one of the earlier works of magical realism: He is traveling to Comala, his mother's home village.  She is dead, but told him that his father, Pedro Páramo, was there.  The village is empty now -- nearly all...

Estella's Revenge hosts a Month of Faves in December, so we can remember some of the good stuff that happened this year!  Today's prompt: Mon. | Dec. 12 –  The Most Unique, Weird or Most Memorable Book(s) Read This Year  – not necessarily your favorite book because it could be memorable for how bad or how much you liked or disliked the characters. I read some fairly strange books this year.  Just the other day, in fact, I read the biography of a fictional writer that was as surreal as anything I've ever read:   A Nose for Fiction  Another surreal modern novel was Baba Yaga Laid an Egg , about women getting older.  Partly. Weirdest mystery prize goes to The Dead Mountaineer's Inn , a murder mystery at a snowed-in ski resort involving a cast of strange people and...aliens? The oddest regular novel I read entwined the Cluny tapestries with the fortunes of a mixed-race Indian girl in the 1930s: The Lady and t...

"Gee, does Jean really need another classics-themed book project?"  I hear you say, especially if you're my mom (hi Mom!).  The answer seems to be yes, I do!  Adam at Roof Beam Reader has an intriguing little project/theme/club thing starting.  Head on over there to see the whole thing, but here's the gist of it: ...I am determined to revisit some of my favorite pieces of classic literature; those works which I  love and have called “favorite” at sometime or other, but which I’ve only read once. But, I also want to continue to read new-to-me material. So, I came up with a plan for myself to read 12 books in 2017, 6 of which will be re-reads and 6 of which will be new to me. To make this even more fun, I thought I would invite anyone and everyone to join me, either for the entire year or for the books which you’re most interested in reading (or re-reading) along with me.  There are no obligations to stick with this for all 12 months. Come a...

Estella's Revenge is hosting A Month of Faves in December !  Today's question: Thu. | Dec 8 –  Favorite Book to Movie or TV Shows #AMonthofFaves2016  – what were your faves; did you both watch the movie and read the book; which was better? OK, confession time: because I don't read a lot of brand-new books, and I don't go see a lot of movies, it is extremely unlikely that I have seen any recent movies based on recent books.  Right now at work, we are running a display of books that have been made into movies (Find out if the book is better!), and I haven't seen ANY of the 2016 movies. Except Dr. Strange.   I saw that!  Comics are books, right?  That was pretty fun.  But I have never read any of the comics. And I'll probably go see Fantastic Beasts pretty soon.  I'm looking forward to that. As I told you yesterday, I did both read and see the film of The Neverending Story recently.  So while I am about 30 years out of date, I h...

Shiki Nagaoka: A Nose for Fiction , by Mario Bellatin This is one of the odder books I've come across lately.  Bellatin is a Mexican novelist who writes experimental fiction stuff.  This is a biography and analysis of the famous, mysterious, and reclusive Japanese (?) author, Shiki Nagoka, whose massive nose led him to spend his life within a tightly circumscribed neighborhood -- living alone, working at a photo booth, and writing.  He lived part of his life in a monastic cell. Nagaoka's work has a cult following and has inspired many famous novelists (such as Juan Rulfo and Jose Maria Arguedas), but none of it has ever been translated into English, except for one edition that was entirely destroyed.  His most famous work, a novel, in written in an untranslatable language and still hasn't been completely deciphered. The writer's day job at a photo booth gave him plenty of inspiration through images, so his work included many photos.  There are quite a few...

Ruth at A Great Book Study and Cleo at Classical Carousel are starting a history reading challenge in January.  It isn't the usual format of challenges, and it won't just go for one year; they're working on the list of books in The Well-Educated Mind (by my personal homeschooling guru, Susan Wise Bauer) and have gotten to the Histories section.  So they're reading through the list, somewhat in tandem, and the rest of us are free to join in or participate as we wish.  I read many of the novels with Ruth and company, and I pretty much skipped the biographies, but I'll be joining in on quite a few of the histories--I hope.  I don't know about this Gibbon fellow. Here's a list of the books:     The Histories by Herodotus     The Peloponnesian War by Thucydides     The Republic by Plato     Plutarch’s Lives     The City of God by St. Augustine     The Ecclesiastical Hi...

Rose City Reader is hosting her annual European Reading Challenge !  Since I have a large pile of books from various countries to read, I'm signing up.  (I'm also going to do a reading map, which I haven't done in a few years, since Google has made it a coherent process again.)  Gillion says: Welcome to the 2017 European Reading Challenge – where participants tour Europe through books.  And have a chance to win a prize. Please join us for the Grand Tour! THE GIST: The idea is to read books by European authors or books set in European countries (no matter where the author comes from). The books can be anything – novels, short stories, memoirs, travel guides, cookbooks, biography, poetry, or any other genre. You can participate at different levels, but each book must be by a different author and set in a different country – it's supposed to be a tour. (See note about the UK, below) WHAT COUNTS AS "EUROPE"?: We stick with t...

The Neverending Story , by Michael Ende A couple of months ago, I took my kids to see The Neverending Story at the movie theater for the 30th anniversary.  We had a lot of fun -- there was a little documentary first about the filming of the movie, and about a kerfuffle with Michael Ende (he hated the ending) -- and the movie was beautiful to see on the big screen.  Naturally, I promptly wanted to re-read the book, but I wanted my 13yo daughter to read it first.  It's one of her favorite movies, and so I've seen it several times over the years, but I haven't read the novel since the mid-1990s. My kid still hasn't gotten around to reading it my battered old paperback, but a couple of weeks ago at work I was going through the children's literature/YA section and moving a bunch of things down to the reading lounge, where they will get more use.  There was a mystery book with black tape on the spine and no title on the cover, but when I opened it up it turned out to...

Once again, it's time to sign up for the Back to the Classics challenge, hosted by Karen at Books and Chocolate, now run from Germany!  Hope Karen is getting lots of yummy chocolate there.  Mmmm, now I want German chocolate -- the Milka with the hazelnut filling, for choice.  Anyway, Karen says: It's back! Once again, I'm hosting the Back to the Classics Challenge.  I hope to encourage bloggers to discover and enjoy classic books they might not have tried, or just never got around to reading. And at the end,   one lucky winner will receive a $30 (US) prize from Amazon.com or The Book Depository! Here's how it works: The challenge will be exactly the same as last year, 12 classic books, but with slightly different categories. You do not have to read 12 books to participate in this s Complete six categories, and you get  one  entry in the drawing Complete nine categories, and you get  two  entries in the drawing Complete all t...