Howling Frog Books

  Bovo-Buch (Bovo d'Antona) , by Elia Levita Bachur Oh, this was so much fun!  Back in the early 1500s, Yiddish-speaking folks liked tales of knightly adventure too.  Elia Bachur (properly, Elijah ha-Levi ben Asher Ashkenazi) was a famous grammarian and linguist in Hebrew, and he also wrote popular Yiddish works under the pen name of Elia Bachur.  He was born near Nuremburg in 1469, but spent most of his life in Italy, where he could more easily pursue his studies.  (Nuremburg expelled all of its Jews in 1499, just a few years after Bachur left.) Bovo-Buch was first written in verse in 1507, but did not see print until 1541, when Bachur's grandsons, Joseph and Elia, decided to print all of his Yiddish works.  Bovo-Buch was the first they printed, and the only one to survive to today.  It became hugely popular.  Two hundred years later it was still going strong, and was reshaped into prose.  By that time it was known as Bove-Mayse and...

There Once Lived a Mother Who Loved Her Children, Until They Moved Back In, by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya Ludmilla Petrushevskaya's writing was suppressed for years under the Soviet Union, although her stories are entirely domestic and not at all political.  These three novellas are about family; other collections are about love or other situations.  They're stories of desperation and misery, of the extremities of domestic hell, but they are also about how utterly ordinary such lives are.  These are tired women trying to raise children amidst violent men and sick relatives, with no money whatsoever. The first story, "The Time is Night," is much the longest.  Anna is trying to raise her grandson on the few rubles she gets from poetry readings, while her son, freshly out of prison, terrorizes her and her daughter has another baby on the way.  Anna loves her children desperately but can only either criticize or spoil them.  In "Chocolates With Liqueur," L...

March is always a month to look forward to in BookBloggyWorld, because since 2012, Kristen at We Be Reading has been running DWJ March, later morphed to MarchMagics to include Terry Prachett too.  Kristen announced the March schedule a few weeks ago , and this year it's going to be a reading fest!  Four Chrestomanci books, and four Death books.  Sounds like a good combination to me: Friday, 3/3 - Charmed Life  (DWJ) Monday, 3/6 - Mort  (TP) Friday, 3/10 - The Lives of Christopher Chant  (DWJ) Tuesday, 3/14 - Reaper Man  (TP) Friday, 3/17 - Conrad's Fate  (DWJ) Weds, 3/22 - Soul Music  (TP) Sunday, 3/26 - The Pinhoe Egg  (DWJ) Friday, 3/31 - Thief of Time  (TP) As you can see, this has to skip The Magicians of Caprona (and a few short stories) and Hogfather.  Hogfather gets its own holiday event, and I might read Caprona anyway.  I'll probably read all of these.  (And Fellowship of the Ring too!...

The Hobbit, by J. R. R. Tolkien It's been about nine years since I last read The Hobbit, which is quite long enough to have forgotten some things.  (Last time I read it aloud to a 7yo, and she found the story so exciting, she had to spend much of the time jumping around the room.)  It was just delightful to read it again and notice all the details. I love my copy and wish I'd bought the others. The Hobbit was written as a children's story, and I think some people find it surprising or jarring to see it told in child's terms.  The dwarves are not as serious and solemn as we expect--in fact they complain a lot and are not overly brave--and the elves actually play tricks on people and sing silly songs.  It can be hard to reconcile Tolkien's later elves with these ones, but it's also not something I'm inclined to worry over.  Still, since my last exposure to Middle-Earth was the movies,* it took me by surprise every so often.  Smaug's ending i...

I joined the Classics Club in March 2012 and set a goal of 150 books by March 2017.  I'm just about done now, and the of the four titles I have left, I really don't want to read two of them.  Pretty soon there's going to be another Spin (right?  I hope!  I love Spins!) and I want to be ready.  So as of today, I'm going to declare my old list finished and publish a new one!  I've rolled the last two titles over. This new list is ....a bit unhinged, but you probably should have expected that.  Mostly I've just been writing down titles as I run into them, so I haven't done any research for this one or planned it out much.  It's still woefully short on some things, but let's not call it finished. It's also far too long to plausibly finish in five years.  So while I'm going to give it a start date of March 2017, the due date of March 2022 is wildly theoretical.  I can't think that far ahead anyway. So here we go... .meet the Classics Cl...

Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston I don't quite know why it took me so long to read this lovely novel.  For one thing, I didn't know what it was about, and American literature in general is a weak spot of mine (my husband read this in high school, but I took almost no American literature at all, so I'm always missing major things).  Janie Crawford is raised by her grandmother, who pressures her into marriage with a much older man in order to keep her safe.  This fear-based decision is a disaster for Janie, and she soon leaves to marry Jody, a talker with big plans.  They set up in Eatonville, a new town entirely run by black people.  Jody impresses everyone and becomes the mayor, and for twenty years, Janie runs the town store while Jody runs everything else.  He's not a bad mayor, but he oppresses and belittles Janie, and insists on living above everyone else.  Janie has more interest in living with her neighbors than in having ...

I have read almost nothing in the past few days, much less been able to blog; real life has been too exciting to allow for it.  On Sunday afternoon, the nearby town of Oroville was put under an evacuation order when officials realized that the reservoir's emergency spillway might fail--within the hour.  Regular spillway broke and eroded the hillside This situation had been developing all week, but all of a sudden it turned really dangerous.  Our family was perfectly safe; we live north, and the water would go south, so everyone was to evacuate north to our area.  As the evacuation order expanded further downriver, other people had to head south to Sacramento.  The best part of three counties was evacuated as the dam managers frantically tried to mitigate the danger.  Happily, the spillway did not fail, but we're all nervous; a lot of rain is coming in and it's possible this will all be replayed.  Everyone is back home now, but could have to lea...

Crosstalk , by Connie Willis It's Connie Willis' latest book!  I had fun with it. Twenty minutes into the future, Briddey's life looks perfect.  She has a great job at a big tech company which competes with Apple smartphones.  Her boyfriend Trent is the catch of the office and he wants to get married.  Her only problem is that her family doesn't know the meaning of privacy; they always either want to give her advice or ask her to fix things for them, and they really don't like the idea of her getting the new empathy-enhancement surgery with Trent.  It's just a simple little brain surgery to increase their emotional connection before they get engaged, no big deal... But Briddey wakes up connected to someone else.  Suddenly she has a telepathic link to the weird geeky programmer downstairs.  As the chaos and the pressure mount, everything goes very pear-shaped indeed. This is classic Willis stuff.  Lots of rushing around trying to avoid dis...

My Universities , by Maxim Gorky I've finished Gorky's trilogy of memoirs!  (Earlier posts: My Childhood and My Apprenticeship )   And indeed they are bitter, just like his name.  Gorky is usually miserable, and I was pretty surprised when he was happy for a while, but that was soon remedied. This volume covers four years of late adolescence.  Young Gorky reads as much as he can, but he has never been to school and has nothing resembling a real education.  When he meets a student who invites him to come to Kazan and try to get into the university there.  Gorky eagerly heads off, but is only disappointed; he's not qualified.  He continues to read as much as he can--now with a little more system--and finds various jobs. He's now starting to get into political issues, and works at a bakery that is a secret meeting place for revolutionaries.  Much of Gorky's "universities" are his talks and arguments with the people he meets.  However, life...

Stasiland: True Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall, by Anna Funder Oh my gosh, guys, this was such an amazing book.  I was GRIPPED, I tell you.  I just could not put this down and I kept reading bits aloud to whoever was nearby. Anna Funder is an Australian journalist who has studied and worked a good deal in Germany, and in the late 1990s she noticed that nobody really wanted to talk about the East German past at all.  She decided to interview people and get as many stories as she could while the people were still around to tell them; it had only been a few years since the Wall had come down, but East Germany was mostly run by old men, and they were only getting older.  Stasiland was published in 2003, which doesn't feel like a long time ago to me, but I guess it was. The people of the GDR were the most surveilled people around.  "In Hitler’s Third Reich it is estimated that there was one Gestapo agent for every 2000 citizens, and in Stalin’s USSR the...

Getting to Green: Saving Nature: A Bipartisan Solution , by Frederic C. Rich I really liked this book!  It has a hopeful tone and is all about the massive common ground we really have in the US about environmental issues.  I also read it right before the inauguration, which made it read a little differently than it sounded when Rich wrote it (it was published in 2016, so I'm assuming he wrote it in 2015).  After that it became a weirdly ironic book as the last couple of weeks have unfolded.  Thus my delay in writing about it... Rich's premise is that the trend of hyperpartisanism we've had for the past few administrations has really hurt our ability to get anything real done.  The last really effective piece of federal environmental legislation passed was in 1990, when Bush signed the Clean Air Act that called for a reduction in emissions that produced acid rain.  That bipartisan-designed legislation was a huge success; atmospheric acids were sharply ...

Brona Joy is hosting a readalong of the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings for the next few months, and I'm on board for that!  February will be the Hobbit , and I've started reading.  I'm so hideously late with this post that it's a good thing too. I love Pauline Baynes and will be posting her pictures a lot So far I've found out how golf was invented.  We're laying plans and studying the map with secret runes....and it's not too late to join up, if you're interested! .

January is over, and I didn't post about all my books!  I got sick and have been curled up on the couch, coughing a lot, instead of doing much else (besides, of course, watching a lot of news).   So I'm going to do a riffle of reviews: Spectrum , edited by Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquest I looked at this and thought, "Kingsley Amis and science fiction?  What?"   It turns out that he'd written a book about SF and then wound up producing a series of these Spectrum collections.  This is the first, and it's stuffed with big names: Pohl, Simak, Budrys, Heinlein.  Most of the stories were very good, though it kicks off with the Pohl story which is over-long.  I liked the Simak story, the Budrys one was typical (which means it was weird and macho, but interesting), and the Heinlein is a very early story featuring a causal loop. Shakespeare's Planet , by Clifford Simak This was a pretty good read, one of the best on this list.  An explorer ship...