Howling Frog Books

The needles excellency -- a new booke wherin are diuers admirable workes wrought with the needle ; newly inuented and cut in copper for the pleasure and profit of the industrious , by John Taylor My ambition! One of my other interests (besides books) is embroidery.  I like a lot of different kinds of embroidery and lately I've been getting into some historical forms.  I've been learning some crewel work and my next ambition is to learn stumpwork--a hideous name for a lovely kind of embroidery with three-dimensional elements.  I made my family get me some pretty stumpwork books for Christmas, and I'm even taking a gorgeous online course about embroidered caskets. Naturally, therefore, I also like reading about historical embroidery.  It's fascinating, people.  In Europe a few hundred years ago, embroidery was not only an important part of a girl's education and abilities, it was considered to be a virtuous pastime that encouraged moral thought.  Wom...

Picnic at Hanging Rock , by Joan Lindsay Summer in 1900 -- Valentine's Day, in fact -- and the students at Appleyard College for Young Ladies are going on a picnic.  Hanging Rock is a lovely setting for a day out.  Four girls--three confident and pretty seniors, and one 14-year-old hanger-on--decide to climb up a little way into the wilderness.  When only one returns, hysterical, and a math teacher is also found to be missing, a search is started, but there is no sign of any of them.  Days later, a young man bent on one last search finds one of the girls, but no one else is ever seen again. This is a mysterious story that describes the ever-widening ripples of events caused by the girls' disappearance. For the most part, I liked Picnic at Hanging Rock quite a bit.  It's a good novel, written in the late 1960s and also made into a film in the 70s, apparently a fairly well-known one.  (In fact, the back-cover blurbs highlight the film, quoting Lena Dun...

It's the last day of Book Blogger Appreciation Week, hosted by the Estella Society .  Final question: One of the unfortunate side effects of reading and blogging like rockstars seems to be a tendency toward burnout. How do you keep things fresh on your blog and in your reading ? Yeah, I have to take a week or two off sometime, and I'm not even one of those rockstar bloggers!  It's not easy to come up with posts all the time. Generally a new event or fun little activity will get me back on the bicycle.  March Magics is guaranteed to get me writing, or one of those goofy little questionnaires that go around.  The new year is always invigorating too. It's pretty rare for me to hit a reading slump, where I'm not reading something.  If I do it's generally a sign that I've picked two or three long, difficult books and have forgotten to put in anything lighter and more fun.  Bringing in a book that really grabs me will fix that.   Thanks to t...

Kaleidoscope , by Eleanor Farjeon I just love Eleanor Farjeon.  She mostly wrote short fairy-tale-like tales for children, and novels and tales for adults as well, and quite a lot of poetry too.  She also produced a children's version of the Canterbury Tales .  But I love her stories.  They are light and rather sweet and have insights anyway.  And they are nearly always illustrated by Edward Ardizzone, who I also love. Kaleidoscope is a book of vignettes about a little boy's childhood--little pieces of life that mix and are held like a kaleidoscope.  Anthony lives next to a lovely old mill-pond, and Farjeon tells of his childhood experiences and then touches them with magic.  It is all extremely English countryside and a literary vacation. Anthony was a real person, though that was not his name.  In the book, Farjeon simply calls him by his childhood nickname of Pod and doesn't identify him, but elsewhere I found out that Anthony was George...

Welcome to Day 3 of Book Blogger Appreciation Week, hosted by the Estella Society.   Today's question: What have you read and loved because of a fellow blogger? Well, quite a lot of things really, which I'm sure is the answer for most of us.  And very often I forget who blogged about a book--I put it on my list and read it months later, and by then I don't know any more.  But here are some: Kristen at We Be Reading hosts the annual DWJ fest, now to be March Magics (so as to include our beloved Pterry as well).  I guess she's sort of the head of the DWJ fanclub--you can recognize us by the fact that we all seem to have put Fire and Hemlock on our lists of five books.  As such she has come up with other things I wanted to read too. Tom at Wuthering Expectations does truly scary levels of literary erudition, and he came up with the most preposterous readalong in blog history-- What is to be Done? Brona is my go-to for Australian literature....

Day 2 of BBAW is interview day!  I was partnered with Darren from Bart's Bookshelf . Together, we came up with a list of questions; here are his answers, and you'll have to head over to his blog to see mine.  BBS: How did you get into book blogging? How long have you been doing it? Bart’s Bookshelf, started when my original but just about defunct personal blog was in it’s last gasps of life. After a few years of really not reading as much as I would have liked, I decided it was time to do something about it and force myself to get back in to the habit of reading, and I was going to do this by setting myself some targets and reviewing what I read. I also enjoyed (and still do) the work of tweaking and maintaining a blog, so this was a way of doing that. BBS: Tell me a little bit about the name of your blog and how it came to be. Longer ago than I care to admit, when I was still a teenager, I had a hairstyle that my friends decided looked like Bart Simpson’s ...

I'm just posting to say...it's spring!  The almonds and the tulip trees are in bloom!  It's so nice outside right now.  Everybody hopes for more rain soon, but meanwhile this is pretty darn great. Almond orchard!

Hey everybody, it's Book Blogger Appreciation Week, hosted by the Estella Society!   For the first day, I'm supposed to introduce myself by telling about five books that represent me as a person or my interests/lifestyle.  So here we go:   Dancing Goddesses: Folklore, Archaeology and the Origins of European Dance, by Elizabeth Wayland Barber .   I love reading history, I love reading about textiles and women's history, I have kind of a thing for Russia (and India, and the British Isles), and I love Barber's work.  This is a fabulous book that I'm planning to re-read this year.  Fire and Hemlock, by Diana Wynne Jones . Regular Howling Frog readers are well aware that DWJ is my all-time favorite ever.  And Fire and Hemlock is her strangest, most complex, novel.  I'll let this post cover my love of embroidery too, because I actually have a DWJ sampler in progress...that I haven't touched in a while, actually, but I'm looking forward to workin...

The Lost Art of Dress: the Women Who Once Made America Stylish, by Linda Przybyszewski This is a fabulous book and will definitely be on my top ten list for 2016.  I loved reading it and did very little else for a few days.  I read a lot of bits out loud to family members who wished I wouldn't.  But it hit all of my buttons: history, fabric, sewing, woman stuff, did I mention fabric?  I even got some family history in there.  Przybyszewski writes about the women she calls "the Dress Doctors:" professional women who mostly worked as academic home economists from 1900 to 1960 and made it their mission to teach American girls and women to dress according to principles of beauty, dignity, practicality, thrift, and egalitarianism.  All you need are a few excellent outfits, suited to your life and put together according to "the art principles," and you will be free to do your work with confidence and poise.  The Dress Doctors are why Agatha Christie nov...

I signed up for this!  Look out, because I even signed up to interview another book blogger.  I've never done BBAW before, and this year it's being hosted by The Estella Society.   The topics: Day 1 Introduce yourself by telling us about five books that represent you as a person or your interests/lifestyle. Day 2 Interview Day! If you choose to be part of the interviews (in the form down below), you’ll be assigned a fellow blogger to chat with and post about! Sign-ups for interviews close on Wednesday, February 10!  Day 3 What have you read and loved because of a fellow blogger? Day 4 How do you stay connected to the community? Examples: social media, regular commenting, participation in blog events, etc. Tell us your faves! Day 5 One of the unfortunate side effects of reading and blogging like rockstars seems to be a tendency toward burnout. How do you keep things fresh on your blog and in your reading? Watch for BBAW articles all over ...

Poor Heinrich , by Hartmann von Aue I have missed being here!  It's not that I ran out of books, or had a reading slump, or even a blogging slump.  I just couldn't seem to grab some time to blog in.  So I have some fun things to tell you about, and the first is going to be Der armer Heinrich , by this Hartmann guy. Hartmann von Aue himself! If you were here for my Arthurian literature project of 2014, you know that the mania for knightly romances and Arthurian tales spread through Western Europe in the 1100s.  I read French and German tales as well as English ones.  There were three great German poets of the courtly romance: Wolfram von Eschenbach wrote Parziva l , and Gottfried von Strassburg wrote Tristan , but before them came Hartmann von Aue, who introduced the idea into Germany in the first place in the 1190s.  He has not become nearly as well-known in English as the two later poets, and in fact I had an interesting time finding a copy.  ...

The Adventurous Simplicissimus: Being the description of the life of a strange vagabond named Melchior Sternfels von Fuchshaim , by H. J. C. von Grimmelshausen Full disclosure: I had already started this book before I put it on my Spin list, but I felt it was pretty fair because it's not an easy read at all, and I could use the help!   This is a very early German novel, from 1668.  Like Don Quixote , it's a picaresque novel, consisting of one adventure after another and not too linear in plot.  It is set during the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648), and the beginning, at least, is a fairly savage satire on war and soldiers, but then it moves into the picaresque adventures. The narrator is born a German peasant, but his home is plundered and ruined by soldiers looking for food, women, and loot.  Believing his whole family dead, he wanders in the forest and ends up living with a hermit, who teaches him religion and names him Simplicius Simplicissimus, because...