Howling Frog Books

Queen of Hearts , by Rhys Bowen I've been on a fun-mystery binge lately.  I mean, massive hits of Agatha Christie and Patricia Wentworth!  Plus, I found a new Royal Spyness mystery, and realized I was completely behind with those, so I grabbed the two newest.  I had particular fun with Queen of Hearts, the 8th in the series (I missed a few in the middle, they don't seem to be at the library). Georgie, penniless minor royal, is for once not worried about where her next meal is coming from.* Her usually-absent glamorous actress mother has swooped in and picked her up for a trip to America, where she will head to Reno for a quick divorce.  During the Atlantic crossing, Georgie starts a hunt for a clever jewel thief and meets lots of glamorous types, including Cy Goldman (William Randolph Hearst in disguise).  Goldman begs Georgie's mother to act in a Hollywood film while she waits, so it's off to Los Angeles...and Alhambra (aka Hearst Castle), where somebody pr...

The day has finally arrived!  O at Behold the Stars is hosting.  I, together with Cleo , Cirtnecce , Ruth , and Consoled Reader will be reading The Faerie Queene at the terrifying rate of a book per week. I figure I'll post every Monday on my progress.  Who wants to join us in some EXTREME POETRY?  Book I can't be too hard--it's the bit everybody knows, with Una and the Redcrosse Knight.  Here we go!

Green Dolphin Street, by Elizabeth Goudge It's Elizabeth Goudge Day, hosted by Lory at Emerald City Book Review .  Because April 24th is Elizabeth Goudge's birthday, you see.  So I read Green Dolphin Street , which was on my TBR shelf anyway.  I really had no idea what to expect, except that there was something about New Zealand. In the mid-1800s on the tiny Island in the English Channel, there are two sisters--Marianne and Marguerite.  When William moves in next door, they both fall in love with him.  But once they're all grown, William joins the Navy and, on a long voyage to China, disappears.  Nearly ten years go by before he writes to say that he is established in New Zealand and asks for one of the sisters in marriage.  But the story follows all three throughout their lives, so there's much more after that. It's a long, leisured novel--mine is 500 pages of small print--and it took me a while to get into the story, but I did and eventually s...

Guess how I just spent my evening?  I was at a reception for Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, and she did a reading from her new book, Before We Visit the Goddess .  I've been a fan since I read Arranged Marriage about 20 years ago, and I've been super-excited for a couple of weeks, looking forward to this.  It was even better than I thought it would be!  We had a real conversation with her!  We sat in the front row!  We took photos! I am pretty much flailing around with excitement here, so I thought I'd just tell you.  I'll write a proper post when I get the photo, which will be soon I hope (the pro ones should be hugely better than the one on my camera).  Meanwhile, if you live in California, she's got several events coming up right away, so go check her schedule.

Home Fires: The Story of the Women's Institute in the Second World War , by Julie Summers You know what?  I have been pretty lucky this month to have read several really great, inspiring books.  That has been really nice.  Here is one of them. I was super-excited to get this book--it just has everything I like.  Women working together to solve problems!  History!  Yes!  OK, so first we have to find out what the Women's Institute is, which I was pretty fuzzy on.  I'd heard of it, but I didn't realize that it's an organization specifically for women living in rural areas.  Back at the beginning of the 20th century, a movement started (in Canada) to organize self-education groups for rural women, and it hit Wales and England around the time of the First World War (Scotland has a separate group).  The WI aimed to bring life back to declining rural areas and encourage women to work together for education, culture, and so on. When war ...

Bibliotech: Why Libraries Matter More Than Ever in the Age of Google , by John Palfrey I'd heard great things about this book and I was excited to read it!  John Palfrey...is not a librarian, but he does a bunch of librarian-type things, including chairing the Digital Public Library of America .  And in this book, he lays out the case not only for keeping public libraries in a digital age, but expanding their funding so that libraries can continue and expand their mission of enabling access to information for everyone. It is a good book, and I'd recommend that you read it if you're interested in libraries, the digital future, and such-like issues.  It's got solid ideas.  The only tricky bit for me is that as a librarian, these are not surprising or new ideas to me; they're what we mostly all think, and he's trying to share them with a wider audience.  I'm already in the choir, so to speak. The point of public libraries has always been to offer equal a...

Up From Slavery , by Booker T. Washington A few years ago I read W. E. B. DuBois' The Souls of Black Folk  as part of my Classics Club list and realized that really, I should have read Up From Slavery first, since DuBois was responding to Washington in his book, although DuBois was writing analytical and historical essays on several topics, while Washington was mostly writing a memoir in which he also talked about his ideas.  But then I didn't get a copy for a long time, until a friend of mine traded my DuBois for his Washington.  Once I got started, I didn't put it down and devoured the whole thing as fast as I could. Washington recounts his early life in slavery, and young manhood in freedom.  He wanted desperately to go to school, and mostly persevered despite the difficulties poverty threw in his way.  At last he conceived an ambition to attend a black technical school that he heard would allow students to work for their board.  His determination ...

In the Garden of Iden, by Kage Baker I had a lot of fun with the Company series by Kage Baker a couple of years ago, and when somebody mentioned it recently I decided to do a re-read.  This time I'm going to try to spot the giant, overarching plot elements when they appear early on, which of course I couldn't do last time--it's a perk of re-reading! What happens if people in the future figure out time travel...but then it turns out you can't change history or visit a time after your own?  And those same people figure out immortality....but it only works on small children with suitable characteristics?   Well, they decide to go back in time and set up Doctor Zeus, Inc., which trains up immortal operatives who then collect samples and commission works which will just happen to pop up centuries in the future, bringing in wealth untold.  Obviously. And so Mendoza, who begins life as a dirt-poor Spanish peasant in the 1540s, becomes an immortal Company opera...

Off the Beaten Track in the Classics , by Carl Kaeppel A couple of years ago, Dwight the Common Reader did a series of posts on this little book , and it sounded so fun that I put it on my wishlist.  I finally got around to ILLing a copy for myself and it came from all the way across the country, and very glad I am too.  I wish I had my own copy of this fun little book! Carl Kaeppel was a classical scholar from Melbourne who worked in the British Museum (does this therefore count as AusLiterature?), and the book was in fact printed in Australia in 1936, but in association with Oxford, so it happily received wider exposure.  It's a collection of short essays about slightly lesser-known classical works; in fact some of them are lost works that we only know through references and excerpts.  Nearly all of them are about travel or geography somehow. The first essay is on the work of one Gaius Julius Solinus, otherwise known as Polyhistor, who collected wonder-tales...

Reynard the Fox: a New Translation by James Simpson  Reynard tales were really, really popular in medieval Europe; you can find many versions of the stories in various languages, and this is a modern translation of the 15th-century Caxton edition in English.  Reynard tales are satirical animal stories, very much like B'rer Rabbit stories, but starring a cunning fox who does awful things, mostly to nobles or priests, and then gets out of trouble with his quick wits and fast talking. In the royal court of the king (a lion, of course), every animal has a place, except for Reynard, who has swindled or murdered so many people that he is universally hated.    In every adventure, though, he manages to come out on top...eventually.  Reynard is really good at using people's greed or anger against them. It's really fun to find all the animal names and see how common they became.  "Reynard" came to be a synonym with fox , and in fact replaced the Old Fre...

The Screwtape Letters , by C. S. Lewis As long as I was reading about suffering and the meaning of life and all with Viktor Frankl, I picked up the Screwtape Letters again as well.  I'm pretty sure we should all be reading this book every couple of years, regardless of religion, because Lewis is just so good at understanding human nature.  I run into myself every couple of pages. Since it's one of the most famous books around, it probably doesn't need me to explain it, but....Lewis writes a comedic and sharply insightful set of letters analyzing human nature--from the point of view of a devil in the business of tempting.  One very nice element is the image of Hell; as a member of the century that saw the rise of organized, bureaucratic genocide, Lewis paints Hell as a massive bureaucracy, with the office workers all quietly scheming to do each other down. Every letter from Screwtape to the lesser demon Wormwood discusses some point about humanity--and very frequent...

The Hollow Boy , by Jonathan Stroud I just love the Lockwood & Co. series--I think it's really fun.  This is the third book. Setup: In an alternate London, it's been 50 years since the Problem started.  Ghosts are real, and they can kill you in a variety of unpleasant ways.  They are also invisible to adults; only talented children under 18 or so can sense them, so ghost-hunting teams are young.  Lucy, together with the dashing Lockwood and the brilliantly analytical George, makes her living hunting Visitors.  There's a slightly steampunk feel to the setting and it's a bit surprising to realize that this is a modern London, not a Victorian one. In this third book, Lockwood and Co. are getting to be known, but are still unable to compete with the larger firms.  They haven't even been invited to help fight the sudden massive surge of dangerous Visitor activity in Chelsea, though of course they tackle it anyway, in their own way.  Lockwood als...

Today I have a guest post!  It is Beverly Cleary's 100th birthday today, and my mom--Cleary fan and children's librarian extraordinaire--very kindly wrote a post for me in honor of the day.  I hope you will enjoy a Beverly Cleary book today! Here’s a big Happy 100th Birthday to Beverly Cleary, beloved author of dozens of children’s books and two memoirs. As someone who grew up in the 1950s, I am part of the baby-boomer generation, but that also makes me a member of the Beverly Cleary generation. Her stories of Henry Huggins, Beezus and Ramona, and Ellen Tebbits are the stories I grew up on. By the ‘60s I had grown beyond reading Beverly Cleary, so I never read The Mouse and the Motorcycle , or her later Ramona books, or her Newbery Medal-winning Dear Mr. Henshaw , until I became a children’s librarian (like Beverly Cleary) myself. I met Beverly Cleary once, at a library conference when I was living in Bakersfield in the early 1970s. I asked her to sign my...

The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good, by William Easterly I have really let the books pile up on my desk, but deadlines like "ILL return date" help me out.  So here goes. Every so often, a politician makes a big speech about how mosquito nets only cost a dollar and notebooks are even less, and if we just commit the money, we can solve poverty.  All we need to do is have a plan and the money, and it can be done!  Except, they've been making that speech for 60 years now, and while progress has been made, there are still millions of unvaccinated children, lots of unpotable water, and all sorts of terrible problems.  Is it that we just haven't given enough money?  What's the problem?  Easterly, an economist who has spent much of his career in the developing world and foreign aid, has a lot to say about what the problem is. From Easterly's perspective, a lot of the problem is that we t...

The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine , by Rozika Parker I only found out this book existed a couple of months ago, and then I ILLed it right away.  History of embroidery and talking about what it meant for women?  Yes please!  Sadly the ILL did not come up with the 2010 edition, but it is just the same except for an additional foreword, so wasn't really a big deal.  Parker passed away soon after that, so we cannot hope for a revised and updated edition, but I hope more people will write about it. Parker traces a history of embroidery, almost entirely in England (huge tomes could be written about every country in the world, so it's good to focus), starting with the Middle Ages.  At that time, large-scale embroidery was mostly an industry with employees, and the majority of those employees were probably men.  Embroidery was not a gender-specific activity, as it became later. She covers the development of different technique...

Man's Search for Meaning , by Viktor Frankl I've been wanting to re-read this for a while.  I think it qualifies as one of the important books of the 20th century, a must-read, though I'm not sure how Frankl's ideas about psychotherapy are viewed now. The first half of the book is Frankl's personal account of his time in Nazi concentration camps.   It's not chronological and exact; it's more a series of stories and impressions, and his views on how he and his fellow prisoners kept going--or not--under such horrific conditions.  Frankl's assertion is that the way to find meaning in life, under any circumstance, is to turn the question around: .. .it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us.  We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life--daily and hourly.  Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in rig...

Bev always has a quarterly checkpoint for her Mount TBR Challenge. When I started writing this post, I thought I only had three titles read on my list.  But then I went back through my posts, and realized that in fact I'd read seven, but hadn't been keeping up.  I guess doing a checkpoint is a good thing!  This actually takes me more than halfway up my original goal, but I'm hoping to move on to 24.  My TBR shelf is pretty stuffed. Starship Troopers, by Robert Heinlein The Umbrella Man, by Roald Dahl Cromartie v. the God Shiva... by Rumer Godden The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. LeGuin Time and Again, by Clifford D. Simak The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, by Rainer Maria Rilke  The Broken Road, by Patrick Leigh Fermor Bev also asks that we play a little game or answer a question.  Here are the two that best fit:   C. Have any of the books you read surprised you--if so, in what way (not as good as anticipated? unexp...