Howling Frog Books

The Lark, by E. Nesbit I'd never heard of this novel by E. Nesbit until it started making the blog rounds several months ago.  It's not a children's story; it's more for adults or adolescents.  Perhaps it would have been a YA novel if such a category had existed 100 years ago.  Anyway, I've always been a big Nesbit fan, so I was excited to see this book, and it's so easy to get, $3 on Kindle.  Even I, cheap as I am, am willing to shell out $3 for a Nesbit book I've never read. Cousins Jane and Lucilla have spent the entire Great War sequestered away in school, despite being quite grown up by the end.  Now, in 1919, their guardian has finally sent for them to leave school -- only for them to find that he has lost nearly all their money, and having scrammed out of the country, has left them with a cottage and 500 pounds to live on.  Jane firmly announces that this whole thing is going to be A Lark, and they set out to earn their living.  Next thing they kn

The Long Earth, by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter I've been meaning to read this series for so long, and somehow just never picked up a copy.  But then The Long Earth came to me -- somehow or other -- and I put it on my TBR shelf and finally got to it.  I love it!  It's great stuff!  I can't wait to start the next one, which I just checked out of the library. Twenty minutes into the future, instructions appear online for a gadget that appears to have no purpose or meaning -- and its power source is a potato.  Kids promptly start building their own gadgets, and the startling result is that they are transported sideways, to another Earth in another dimension.  Pretty soon everyone has a 'stepper' and is experimenting with dimension-hopping; there appears to be an infinite number of pristine Earths, each ever so slightly different than the last, and all uninhabited by humans.  Suddenly resources are infinite, as long as you can get to them. As groups of p

The Foundation Pit , by Andrei Platonov I've had this novel floating around on the edges of my mental TBR list for years, and last year I acquired two different translations of it -- my brother had them.  I eventually chose to read the Mirra Ginsburg translation on the rationale that I have previously read her translation of Zamyatin's We , and I have a couple of her picture books; she has worked a lot with Jose Aruego, whose work I love.  So Ginsburg it was. Platonov was a Russian writer of the 1920s and a disappointed Communist.  He wanted a world where people shared willingly with each other (as in the days of early Christianity) and he got oppression and violence.  When he wrote about his disillusionment, he was of course banned, and he then remained a pretty obscure writer for a long time.  Long after his death, he was 'rehabilitated' and eventually venerated. Voshchev, fired from his factory job because of his overly-thoughful habits, walks down the road un

Half A Crown , by Jo Walton This must be the longest, most put-off mystery trilogy in the history of my reading.  I really liked Farthing years ago -- pre-Howling Frog -- and then, a few years later, discovered the existence of Ha'penny and enjoyed it too.  I then got hold of a copy of Half a Crown , but I got maybe a third of the way in before stopping because it was getting so tense.  I kept meaning to pick it back up...and now, five years later, I've done it. It's 1960, a good ten years after the events of Ha'penny .  Fascism is well entrenched in Britain and the Axis rules the world.  Carmichael is now commander of the Watch, which is really the British Gestapo.  He is good at his job and nicely blackmailable, but he's also secretly using Watch resources to help Jews escape to Ireland.  When his ward, Elvira, is accidentally caught up in a street riot and arrested on the eve of her debut in London's social elite, everything threatens to unravel. Al

Rashomon, and 17 Other Stories, by Ryunosuke Akutagawa Akutagawa is one of the great modernists of Japan, so when I came upon this very neat Penguin edition of his stories, I snapped it up.  (I have a small pile of Japanese classics to get to...)  Isn't it fun looking?  The 18 stories are arranged by the chronology of their settings, so first there is a set of stories set in the Heian period (which ended in 1185), then several in the Tokugawa Shogunate (1600 - 1868), and finally a few set in Akutagawa's own early 20th century.  A final set of pieces are semi-autobiographical, fragmenty sort of things that often reflect Akutagawa's struggle with his mental health. Since most of us have heard of Kurosawa's film Rashomon , the two stories that inspired it are first in the collection.  One story only contributed its title (the plot is illustrated on the book cover), and the second, "In a Bamboo Grove," is the actual source of the murder mystery shown in the f

The Durrells of Corfu , by Michael Haag Hey folks, I have missed blogging so much lately!  I had a tiny little finger surgery (the most minor ever) a couple of weeks ago, and I thought I would be able to write again after a couple of days off.  Ha ha.  This is the first time I've felt capable of typing properly; I've been able to write the odd comment here and there, but first it hurt too much, so I would type funny to accommodate, and then I could hit the keyboard, but the big ol' bandage meant that I always hit more keys than I meant to.  Either way it was a huge hassle and I just didn't try very hard.  I also got sick with a nasty bug, so I forgot about a lot of my more ambitious reading plans and just read straight through most of the Anne of Green Gables series.  Even so, I now have a pile of books to write about, and I thought about doing a large multi-book post, but with two or three countries represented, I just can't.  I want individual posts for the Read

The Burning Point: A Memoir of Addiction, Destruction, Love, Parenting, Survival, and Hope , by Tracy McKay First, I want to tell you that this is a truly well-written book.  Tracy McKay can write , people.  Even if you're not a parenting/tragedy memoir sort of person, take a look at Tracy's writing, because wow .  (I have a link to the first chapter at the end of the post.)  I am completely unable to tell you how really good this memoir is; it's not sensationalistic or angry, it's just honest and insightful and true. The Burning Point starts with Tracy's moment of decision, when she knows it is time to get out.  Her husband, once a wonderful and caring man, has been spiraling down in the grip of his drug addiction  long enough, and she takes her three small children and leaves.  From then on, Tracy weaves together the story of how she survived the divorce, poverty, and attendant difficulties with flashback sections of her relationship with her husband.  A few

Right about the time that I was packing up my car to hit the road, everybody posted lists of top ten books so far in 2017.  So I'm a little late to the party, but I really have had some great reads in the last few months and I'd like to share them...the trouble being, of course, that it's hard to choose just ten.  In fact, I'm not going to choose ten; I'm jolly well going to choose eleven.  But they're in chronological order, not in order of 'the best' or anything. 1. Eneas, an Old French romance .   Hard to find, but a must for anyone interested in medieval romances, because this is the first time anybody blended adventure with romantic love.  It's the story of Aeneas translated into the French chivalric mode, and it's crammed with wonders too.  2. When Books Went to War, by Molly Guptill Manning .  I've been lucky to find some great non-fiction reading in the last several months!  This is about how the US got books to its soldiers, who n

Alamut , by Vladimir Bartol This book has so much backstory and explanation involved that I feel like I'm going to bore you stiff -- except that it's all so interesting! In the 1930s, Vladimir Bartol wrote this novel, which was a pretty weird novel by the standards of his day and thoroughly annoyed his fellow writers.  Bartol was Slovenian, and the fashion was to write realistic portrayals of the struggles of Slovenians.  It certainly was not to write long, elaborate, highly-researched historical novels set in 11th-century Persia that were in fact kind of allegorical meditations on the rise of fascism across Europe.  But that is what Bartol did, and then he wanted to dedicate his book to Mussolini; but his publisher talked him out of doing such a dangerous thing.  Although nobody quite knew what to do with Alamut at the time, it became a beloved classic to Yugoslavians and then to the rest of Europe, but was only translated into English in 2004.  It even inspired the Ass

We're halfway through the year and it's time for another Mount TBR Checkpoint.   I must confess that my TBR pile has not been shrinking lately; I have slowed down and need to get myself together!  I've been focusing more lately on my giant library pile of books for the Reading All Around the World project, but that's no reason not to read some TBRs too! Bev wants to know two things: 1. Tell us how many miles you've made it up your mountain (# of books read).  If you're really ambitious, you can do some intricate math and figure out how the number of books you've read correlates to actual miles up Pike's Peak, Mt. Ararat, etc. And feel free to tell us about any particularly exciting adventures you've had along the way.   I have made it more than halfway up!  I've read 15 out of my 24 titles, so I have 9 to go.  Considering the size of my pile, I ought to do better than that....   They Walked Like Men, by Clifford Simak Dirt

I had a fun weekend, hanging out at the beach, attending a wedding reception, and trying (mostly uselessly) to help out with said reception, which was for my friend's daughter.  We also had some exciting moments, like when we were driving down I-5 and got a flat tire.  We managed to pull over okay, but we were at the top of an overpass, on a shoulder that was barely wide enough for the car, with an endless procession of giant semi trucks passing by -- inches away, shaking not only us but the overpass too.  We waited for about an hour before the tow truck came to rescue us.  Hooray for the CHP and AAA! The view from our car, stranded on an overpass We visited my home town, or at least, the town where I went to junior high and high school.  My family has long since moved away, but I still have some friends there and I like to go down once a year to see people and hit the beach.  This time, we visited the new branch library.  You should know that when I was a kid, my mom (also a

Uncle Boris in the Yukon: and Other Shaggy Dog Stories, by Daniel Pinkwater Anybody who has read my blog for more than a couple of minutes probably knows my love of Daniel Pinkwater.  Well, the other day, I was sorting donated books for the library sale (an exercise that will convince anybody that there are way too many books in the world -- unless you collect self-help books from the 80s and microwave cookbooks from the 70s), and this great little book came my way. It's all about the dogs here; Pinkwater starts off with history, with Uncle Boris.  Boris and his brothers were Polish gangsters, but Boris got the call of the wild north, and off he went to the Yukon, where he had a favorite sled dog.  After that, we get a history of the Pinkwater family dogs, and of young Daniel's childhood too.  Most of the book, though, is dominated by his dogs in adulthood, mostly Malamutes and other tough Northern breeds.  He and his wife also ran a dog-training school and published a boo