Howling Frog Books

The Creeping Shadow (Lockwood & Co. #4) , by Jonathan Stroud I really enjoy these Lockwood & Co. books.  They are just so much fun, and they keep moving; the series isn't getting stale. In this fourth installment, Lucy has been on her own for some months; she's lonely, but she doesn't have time to do anything but work and sleep.  Lockwood offers her a commission for a particularly tricky job, and then a little kid shows up asking for help for his village, which is coming under massive attack.  What is causing this sudden and deadly outbreak in a remote village? In every book, we (and the characters) find out a little more about the world and how the Problem works.  They tackle different things every time and find out more. Lucy, the narrator, is a great character; she's smart and practical, and very matter-of-fact about her work.  She's never clearly described, but she's messy and bedraggled and impatient with anyone who isn't fine with tha...

The Secret River , by Kate Grenville I scootched in just before the deadline!  I wanted to participate in Brona's AusReading Month , so I picked out a book that's been on my mental (not literal) TBR pile for a few years--Kate Grenville's The Secret River , which (in case you care) won the Commonwealth Prize and was in the finals for the Man Booker Prize.  I got kind of bogged down when it became obvious that really unhappy things were going to take place, but then I gathered up my courage and read the second half in a day. William Thornhill is a London waterman who--like most laborers--steals here and there to get by.  When he's caught, he's sentenced to death, but gains a merciful sentence of transportation, together with his beloved wife Sal and their baby.  He lands in Sydney in 1806, and after years of labor, gains his own ship and a route carrying goods between tiny farms and the town.  Will's dream is to own some land himself, but eventually he has t...

The Importance of Being Little: What Preschoolers Really Need From Grownups , by Erika Christakis I'd heard great things about this book!  It's been widely praised, and also Erika Christakis is interesting anyway, because if you recall the Yale kerfuffle of Halloween 2015, she was the person who wrote the email suggesting that college students are adults who can choose and police their own costumes.  (I think her email was too long and diffuse, which made it easy to lose the core message.  But anyway.)  Christakis has since left Yale, which, judging by this fantastic book, is their loss. Preschool.  Some parents see it as the beginning of the road to Harvard; others are skeptical but worried.  Important people in Washington say it's the key to better equality and the US should have universal preschool.  On the ground, actual preschool teachers are frequently pressured to do things that they know are not best for their little charges, and they don't...

My word, it's already time to start signing up for next year's reading challenges, can you believe it?  I'm not quite ready to really get going on that, but I do know a few I'll be signing up for, so I might as well get started.  And if you know of any cool challenges, let me know!  I'm on the lookout for a good medieval lit one, and I wouldn't say no to a Russian lit challenge.  But for now, let's talk TBR piles!  Mine is bigger now than it was this time last year... (Personal update: I have lots of great books to tell you about!  I'm also currently run off my feet.  My kids have no school this week, and I thought we'd relax a bit, though I'm still working.  Ha ha ha.  I've barely been home, and I'm so tired I can hardly think straight.  I'm longing to write some good long booky posts, and also to work on my current fabulous quilt project which is very close to being ready to put together...I'll post pictures when the top is do...

Mystery cover explained below Nine Rabbits , by Virginia Zaharieva Waaaaay back in the spring, Thomas at My Two Stotinki hosted a giveaway of two Bulgarian novels.  To my delight, I won this copy of 9 Rabbits , and he sent it off.  It showed up at my house about four months later, having been through a postal odyssey, and I had about given up hope--but it did arrive!  And so I read it. I honestly can't quite tell whether this is a novel, a memoir, or--I'm pretty sure--a mix of both.  It reads like a memoir, sort of, and quite a bit of it seems to be from Zaharieva's own life.  It's all in little vignette chapters. The first part of the book is about childhood; little Manda lives with her grandmother, in the country, and every so often her grandfather or her mother shows up.  There are cousins and uncles, adventures on the shore, and a lot of gardening.  Grandmother is no kindly nurturer.  She's an unstable despot most of the time, angry ...

Great Speeches by Frederick Douglass , ed. by James Haley This is one of the younger books on my TBR pile; I traded my friend James my copy of The Souls of Black Folk for this and Up From Slavery .  I've read Douglass' Life and Narrative a couple of times, and sometime soon I'd like to read his other writings as well.  This is a small selection of speeches; Frederick Douglass must have given many, many more during his long public career.  They span over fifty years, from 1841 to 1894, which in itself is pretty awe-inspiring. Early speeches are hard-hitting pieces about the evils of slavery and then one just after the Civil War about what to do next.  Douglass must have been amazing to listen to; these talks are so eloquent and heart-piercing to read, and they were meant to be spoken.  Later talks are narrower in subject; there's an oration in memory of Lincoln, a very long piece on John Brown (I was surprised to learn that Douglass and Brown were acqu...

I have been unable to think of anything to say since the election.  Sure, I have plenty of thoughts, but I can't seem to put them into coherent paragraphs that say what I want to say (and probably nobody is too worried about my opinion anyway).  I'm certainly having a hard time facing the thought of the next four years, and while my natural bent is to be an optimist and give things a chance to work out, it's not looking great so far. I'll come back to posting about books soon.

How to Manage Your Home Without Losing Your Mind , by Dana K. White Note:  I'm posting this a couple of days before the release date on Tuesday, because there are a couple of little bonuses if you pre-order and I would be sad if you wanted to get them and couldn't, because I waited too long and you didn't see it in time. Dana White runs a blog and podcast for people who struggle with housekeeping (like me!).  I've been reading A Slob Comes Clean for about a year now, and it's the chronicle of Dana's own struggles and hard-earned lessons on how to really, actually keep your house reasonably clean.  She calls it Reality-Based Cleaning.  Now, if you are a person who doesn't have too hard a time with this stuff, this book is not for you.  It's written for those of us with Slob Vision -- the inability to really see a mess or a pile until it smacks us in the face.  It's for those of us capable of being completely surprised to find a sink overflowi...

Never actually seen this movie Something Wicked This Way Comes , by Ray Bradbury Witch Week culminates in our readalong of what might be the quintessential American fantasy novel about Halloween.  I first read Something Wicked This Way Comes about 25 years ago as a teen in Denmark, when I found the small English-language section of the local library and read my way through most of it.  I was nowhere close to being able to read well in Danish yet, and I was dying for books!  Something Wicked This Way Comes was the first one I read, and I only remember one other book from that section ( Evil Under the Sun , by Agatha Christie--I'd never really read Christie before).  Anyway, I loved it.  I'd always liked Bradbury's short stories, but I think this was the first time I read one of his novels. Is there anyone who writes like Bradbury?  I don't think so.  In my opinion he's pretty amazing.  That's not to say that his exuberant, sensory-overloa...

Well, I'm already late to the party, but why not participate anyway?  This week's question, hosted by Kate of Doing Dewey is: Y our Year in Nonfiction:  Take a look back at your year of nonfiction and reflect on the following questions – What was your favorite nonfiction read of the year? What nonfiction book have you recommended the most? What is one topic or type of nonfiction you haven’t read enough of yet? What are you hoping to get out of participating in Nonfiction November?  First I had to look back and see what nonfiction I've read this year.  I thought it wasn't very much and that I'd been doing a lot of fiction.  While I think I really have read less nonfiction this year, there has still been plenty.  I read travel, history, art, language, home organization, and literary criticism, and right now I'm reading about the needs of preschoolers.  So I've got plenty to talk about! Favorite nonfiction read of the year : This is a ve...

The Two Bouquets , by Eleanor Farjeon This is a sweet little novelette based on an operetta (!) by Eleanor and her brother, Herbert.  The musical ran in London for 9 months in 1936, and for six weeks on Broadway.  It was revived in 1952 and has probably never been seen since, but it is a fun, fluffy little story and I'd love to see it performed; I bet it's very enjoyable.  The music is all Victorian songs, because the story is set in 1876. Kate and Laura are cousins, and each is in love with a young man.  Both fellows are coming to the ball that Kate's mother is hosting tonight, but they're a bit worried about how their suits will be received, and so they each buy a bouquet that will do the talking for them.  But Kate's brother has been up to a few shenanigans of his own, and he mixes up the bouquets, with interesting results.  Everyone is at cross purposes, which get crosser and crosser until Regatta Day is rained out. A Bollywood director could pr...

The Glass Menagerie , by Tennessee Williams It's my second Tennessee Williams play!  Next thing you know, I'll be reading Cat on a Hot Tin Roof . This is an intense family play that makes you feel shut in.  It has only four characters and takes place entirely in the family apartment, and is narrated by the brother Tom from years later.  Amanda, the mother, is a former belle who loves to reminisce about her beaus, because now she works hard to make ends meet and worries all the time about what will become of her children.  Tom, an aspiring poet, works in a warehouse to support the family but is dying to get out and get free.  He spends all his time out 'at the movies.'  Laura is very fragile and cripplingly shy; she dropped out of high school and then secretarial school, hardly ever goes out, and spends much of her time polishing her collection of glass animals. Amanda hounds Tom into bringing home a coworker, Jim, in hopes that Laura will find a bea...

In Search of Ireland, by H. V. Morton I love reading H. V. Morton's travel books!  If you're not familiar with the name, he was a journalist who got lucky--he broke the story of the opening of King Tutankhamen's tomb in 1922.  After that he did a lot of travel writing, about the British Isles, parts of Europe, and the Holy Land.  In Search of Ireland is the chronicle of a trip made in about 1929, so Eire is newly independent, and that made it really exciting to read.  Morton starts in Dublin and talks a lot about the heroes of the Irish independence movement, as well as the current political climate.  He has a lot of sympathy for the Irish point of view and wishes several times for the Irish equivalent of Sir Walter Scott, pointing out that Irish history is an enormous trove of dashing, romantic stories that would make wonderful novels.  (Morton is writing so early that he's beforehand on the massive wave of Irish travel, memoir, and romance that ha...