Howling Frog Books

The World Between Two Covers: Reading the Globe , by Ann Morgan You all know I like to read books from all over the world, so I was interested in this title right away.  I thought it would consist of thoughts about literature from all over the world.  Then I was surprised to find that it is actually a blog-project book.  Then I was surprised again to find out that it's not really quite a blog-project book, since it isn't a description of the project; it's more thoughts on what 'world literature' is, what it means to read the globe, and issues pertaining thereunto, which developed as a result of the blog project. A few years ago, Morgan was doing a blog project where she read only women authors for a year, and then she realized that she hadn't read anything not written in English since college.  Her shelves were stuffed with Brits and Americans and a few other English-speakers, and that...was about it.  So she decided to read one book from each country in

Bibliocraft: A Modern Crafter's Guide to Using Library Resources to Jumpstart Creative Projects , by Jessica Pigza Talk about a fun book!  Jessica Pigza is a rare book librarian and crafty blogger at the New York Public Library.  She keeps dropping the names of my favorite designers, like Heather Ross, Gretchen Hirsch, and Mary Corbet.  I would like her job, please. Library collections, especially collections of older books full of public-domain images and patterns, are wonderful sources of inspiration if you're an artistic type.  Pigza spends the first half of the book showing the reader how to access all this wonderful stuff, and the second half has various small projects by popular designers, along with their inspirations.  The projects weren't really my favorite, but then I am not actually much of a crafter; I do sewing, mostly of quilts or other particular things. The library information is wonderful.  Pigza explains the different types of libraries and where t

Edward Gorey: His Book Cover Art and Design , with essay  by Steven Heller Oh, this was a fun book!  It's a lovely collection of many of Edward Gorey's book covers, with particular emphasis on his early work at Anchor.  This is by no means a complete collection of all the covers Gorey ever did, even of the Anchor titles; it's just a nice sampling.  And there's a rather interesting essay to go along with the covers--again, mostly but not entirely about the Anchor period.  My favorite bit: Gorey was given certain authors to illustrate as a matter of course.  He recalled, "I became very well known for my Henry James covers.  I hate him more than anybody else in the world except for Picasso....I've read everything by Henry James, some of it twice, and every time I do it I think, 'Why am I doing this again?  Why am I torturing myself?  I know how I feel. Why can't I just accept that?'...Everybody thought, 'Oh, how sensitive you are to Henry James

The Fleet Street Murders , by Charles Finch It's the third Charles Lenox mystery!  I actually liked this one better, mostly, except for one thing. It's Christmas, and Lenox is engaged to Lady Jane, so all is right and happy in his world.  He's hoping to run for Parliament soon--he's always dreamed of it, and his brother is an MP--but it all happens very suddenly when an MP for the northern town of Stirrington dies sooner than expected.  The election's in two weeks, so Lenox gets going.  I think over half the novel is actually about the process of running for MP!  It was pretty fun, really. There's a murder, too.  Two prominent newspaper men killed at exactly the same time.  The police are baffled, Lenox is dying to help, but Stirrington is far away.  So there are a lot of telegrams, and a couple of fast train journeys.  It's a pretty good mystery The only glaring problem here was in the continuation of the delicate society lady's pregnancy, conti

Hey, everybody, remember a while ago I said I was going to be on a local radio show, talking about books?  Well, the show has aired!  It's an hour long, and most of it is about our local history; my mom has written two books about John Bidwell ( check out her blog at goldfields ) and so that is the majority of the show.  I pop in every so often in the second half.  Bidwell is a fascinating character who was deeply involved in California history, so I encourage you to listen to the whole thing, but should you only have a few minutes to spare, the second half starts at 28:30.  Listen at Nancy's Bookshelf.

Well.  It took me two weeks to read Book II, yet I still feel I'm doing well.  Everyone seems to have agreed to slow down to whatever pace each can maintain; I think we all ran headlong into the brick wall that is the cold, hard reality of reading Spenser!  And now it's taken me another week, just about, to write this very very long post. Book II is kind of strange, but there's a ton to say about it.  It's hard for me to believe that Spenser tackled temperance as his virtue of Book II, right at the beginning, because temperance is a really tricky virtue to write a knightly adventure about!  Temperance is all about not getting into battles willy-nilly--it's self-control, moderation, and keeping your temper.  If everybody in Le Morte D'Arthur went around being temperate all the time, nothing would ever happen!  Perhaps Spenser is showing off a bit here: "Look, here's a wild and crazy adventure starring the Knight of Keeping Calm!"  Guyon doesn&

The Shepherd's Crown , by Terry Pratchett It's always bittersweet to read a favorite author's last novel, and I didn't get to The Shepherd's Crown right away.  It's the last Tiffany Aching story!  So there were lots of feelings.  And Pterry being who he is, he doesn't pull any punches, either.  Also if you haven't read this yet, there are some big events, so don't go looking for spoilers. Tiffany is now almost grown, and she's coping with more responsibility than ever, which is an awful lot; she's a one-woman poverty relief team, midwife, and watcher-out for the defenseless.  It is, in fact, getting to be overwhelming, and the rest of us can see that Tiffany needs to learn some delegation skills.  But there's no time to think about that, because the boundary between worlds is faltering, and the Fairies have noticed, and they're planning an invasion. Pterry always had a habit of asking questions about who belongs and who can cha

A week or so ago, Scott at Six Words for a Ha t pointed me to a blog I didn't yet know, for a reading event that sounds very tempting.  Thomas at My Two Stotinki hopes people will join him in reading Bulgarian literature in June .  I would love to, though we'll have to see how it goes since June is a little bit crowded.  I downloaded a classic Bulgarian novel ( Under the Yoke by Ivan Vazov) and filled up my wishlist a little more with the  modern titles.  If you'd like to read something Bulgarian this summer, drop by My Two Stotinki and see what's going on!

Stranger in the House: Women's Stories of Men Returning from the Second World War, by Julie Summers I enjoyed Home Fires so much that I promptly requested Stranger in the House , which is all about the British husbands, fathers, and boyfriends who came home when the war was over.  It could be a very difficult adjustment for everyone, and of course many men never recovered from their experiences. Summers organizes a large number of personal stories into chapters by relationships; there are the mothers, the widows, the wives and the children.  She doesn't try to do lots of analysis, but simply presents story after story with some short comments, mostly allowing people to speak for themselves.  It's an excellent approach, because the stories are as varied as the people, and generalities are difficult.  Most families had some difficult readjusting to do, but some had an easy time.  Some families fell apart or never really recovered, though it's not always the ones y

We are in the last two weeks of the semester here, and we are really feeling the crunch.  I have girls with lots of work to finish, and the result is that I can hardly get to my computer for any blogging, because somebody is always writing a paper or doing Spanish homework---even more so than usual.  We are really looking forward to the end of May, because it means not only the end of the school year and the start of some relaxing summer time, but also because...(drumroll here please): I'm taking my girls on a trip!  Sadly my hard-working husband has to stay home and work hard, but my mom and I are taking my daughters TO THE UK for a couple of weeks.  This is hugely exciting stuff, people.  We've never been able to take our kids much of anywhere and a few months ago I realized my kid is going to be out of the house really soon, and the result is this trip. We've got it all planned, and it's starting to really sink in that pretty soon we'll actually be there.  Ev

In the Garden of Iden , by Kage Baker Sky Coyote , Mendoza in Hollywood The Graveyard Game Black Projects, White Knights As you know from my earlier post, I fell down on the Faerie Queene project last weekend when I was kind of under the weather.  The universe handed me a make-up gift, though, when my ILL of the second Company novel arrived at just the same time, and I zipped through 4 books in 3 days.  I hadn't yet gotten to post about the first one, so I'll just put them ALL here.... First, the setup.  In the 24th century, some people figure out how to make immortals, but there's a catch.  It takes massive surgery and augmentation, and only works on tiny children who fit the physical profile.  Not very useful for rich old people who want to keep living.  They also figure out time travel...but you can only go backward, and you can't change recorded history.  So they form Dr. Zeus, a company that exploits these two technologies by taking orphaned historical tod

I promised I would tell you about my exciting event!  You see, the community college I work for sponsored a weekend creative writing seminar, and they asked Chitra to come and do one of the workshops.  This event also kicked off her book tour for Before We Visit the Goddess.   I was not able to attend the seminar, but there was a reception and book reading the night before.  I figured my mom and I would go in and be part of the audience, and I could get my book signed. When we arrived, though, my co-worker--who helped coordinate the whole thing--grabbed me and took us right over to Chitra, explaining that I am one of the college librarians.  We then had several minutes of happy conversation, as Chitra told us about her love and appreciation for libraries, and we traded stories about our various times studying at Berkeley.  I asked her something I've always wondered about her early book of poems, Leaving Yuba City , and she explained how she got to know that history.  (Yuba City

I was on track to finish Book II of The Faerie Queene , until I spent the weekend being sick instead.  So my Book II post will appear when it appears, and it looks like we have a general agreement to slow down anyway.  It's all good, and I'll be back here soon.

The September Society, by Charles Finch Charles Finch writes a Victorian mystery series, starring gentleman detective Charles Lenox.  A year or so ago, I read the first Lenox mystery, A Beautiful Blue Death.   I was a bit disappointed, but I did eventually get around to reading the second one.  (I have four of them.)  This time it's in Oxford... A distraught mother asks Lenox to investigate the sudden disappearance of her son, George, a popular Oxford student.  Lenox notices some odd things placed around George's room, as though he was trying to leave a message, and then finds that George's best friend is gone too.  It doesn't seem too serious, until George turns up dead in a nearby wood.  As Lenox pursues tiny wisps of clues, he starts to think that the beginnings of the case may lie in the past, in India, and that the small and unimportant September Society may be more significant than it seems. Last time I read a Lenox mystery, there was an amusing bit about a

The Narcissist Next Door: Understanding the Monster in Your Family, in Your Office, in Your Bed--in Your World , by Jeffrey Kluger We're hearing a lot about narcissism these days, and Jeffrey Kluger is here to explain what narcissism is, how people with it behave, and some of the research--as well as entertain us with anecdotes about famous narcissists.  This is the opening passage of the book, and mind you, it was written before the election cycle got started: It can’t be easy to wake up every day and discover that you’re still Donald Trump. You were Trump yesterday, you’re Trump today, and barring some extraordinary development, you’ll be Trump tomorrow. There are, certainly, compensations to being Donald Trump.... But none of that changes the reality of waking up every morning, looking in the bathroom mirror, and seeing Donald Trump staring back at you. And no, it’s not the hair; that, after all, is a choice—one that may be hard for most people to understand, but a choice al

I did it, I read all of Book I!  My minimum requirement was two cantos a day, but I managed three a couple of times.  I'm hoping to read ahead, because I'll be gone for two weeks in the middle of this event and I'd like to be able to prep a post ahead of time...but the schedule is already pretty demanding.  The reading is not terribly difficult, but it is slow.  I keep thinking that I've read a large chunk, only to look back and realize that in fact I have read six verses.  So here we go with analysis... Each book in the Faerie Queene features a knight, and a story, about a particular virtue.  The Redcrosse Knight, to be known as St. George after he accomplishes his feats, is all about Holinesse .  This does not mean that Redcrosse already exemplifies holiness; he doesn't.  Holiness is what he's working towards and struggling with.  His foes symbolize various forms of unholiness, and he falls into their clutches at least as often as he defeats or avoids th

First publication of Prufrock Prufrock and Other Observations , by T. S. Eliot For the Classics Club Spin, I drew a single poem: "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," by T. S. Eliot.  This poem was written around 1910 when Eliot was only about 22, and it's all about alienation and massive feelings of inadequacy around women.  Prufrock wants to find love (the carnal sort), but he can't even decide to talk to the women he meets.  He misses every opportunity and just ends up sad and frustrated, thinking about his own inertia and about getting old.  He says, "I have measured out my life in coffee spoons," tiny little smidgens of experience, and he'll probably never dare to do anything as exciting and sensual as eating a peach.  He also prefaces the poem with a quotation from Dante's Inferno , intimating that he's speaking from his own personal hell. It's a poem that feels squalid.  There's a lot of physical detail, but most of it is.