Howling Frog Books

It's the last day of August, and I'm supposed to have read 20 books for Cathy's annual event.   Let's see how it went, shall we? I accidentally put 22 books on the pile, and figured that would give me some room to dislike a couple of titles.  And indeed, although I'd been looking forward to both Limonov and Inherent Vice , once I started them, I didn't like them.  So that leaves 20 titles, and I managed to read 18 of them.  I think that's pretty good!  I read 12 other books too, so that leaves me with 30 for the summer. Limonov, by Emmanuel Carrere Half a Crown, by Jo Walton Bai Ganyo, Konstantinov Rashomon, by Ryünosuke Akutagawa Marie Grubbe, by Jens Peter Jacobsen Inherent Vice, by Thomas Pynchon At the Pulpit: 185 Years of Discourses by Latter-day Saint Women The Dybbuk and Other Writings, by Ansky The Book of Memory, by Petina Gappah Bad News, by Anjan Sundaram Train to Pakistan, by Khushwant Singh To Destroy You ...

The Story of My Teeth , by Valeria Luiselli Gustavo Sánchez Sánchez, otherwise known as 'Highway,' has a career change in mid-life and becomes an auctioneer and collector.  Not just any auctioneer, but a legend and story-spinner, who can auction anything by using the auctioneering styles he has learned and invented: hyperbolic, parabolic, allegoric, and more.  Having bought Marilyn Monroe's teeth and implanted them in place of his own, he decides to auction off his original teeth as historical artifacts from famous people.  And then his estranged son steals his teeth and imprisons him in a room with scary video clowns... I am not even kidding about that last one.  This is a surreal novel that reminds me a lot of Mario Bellatin's Shiki Nagaoka .  Bellatin even makes an appearance here, along with many other literary figures, or sometimes just their names attached to other characters.  Highway has an uncle named Juan Pablo Sánchez Sartre. There are a lot ...

Laurie at Relevant Obscurity had the excellent idea of reserving one day a month to talking about spiritual-type stuff, since many of us are a bit shy on this topic.  She says: A call for anyone with social media to post something on religion or spirituality. Post a book review, a personal post on how you practice, or what connects you to God/Spirit/The Big Cheese, a poem/photo/piece of art that inspires you. Use #bloggingthespirit on August 27th on Twitter and Instagram or my blog so we can find you.  Jews, Christians, Muslims Pagans, Tree-Huggers, Those-Inspired-by-Life, see you on the 27th! For the first post, Laurie talks about a book of Madeleine L'Engle's that I have not read in a long time.  Go check it out! At the Pulpit: 185 Years of Discourses by Latter-day Saint Women, edited by Jennifer Reeder and Kate Holbrook Early in the summer I bought myself a small pile of books on religion, and I was particularly excited about this one.  It's...

Here is a whole set of books I've read from various countries in the last few weeks.  Most of them will show up in my Reading All Around the World list, and one I picked for August's Women in Translation event, which I nearly missed!  Most of these were also on my original 20 Books of Summer list (which currently stands at 17!  No way will I finish that list in the next week, but I read quite a few other books too). Lyrics Alley, by Leila Aboulela  (Sudan) : This novel of a wealthy and powerful family in 1950s Sudan is a tapestry of interwoven lives.  The patriarch, Mahmoud Bey, is a forward-looking man invested in bringing infrastructure and wealth to his country.  His son, Nur, is about to marry a cousin and they are very much in love, but a tragic accident leaves Nur paralyzed and depressed.  The family dynamics are complex and sometimes disastrous. Nur has to break through the weight of expectations and pity in order to forge a new life and id...

Hey folks, things have been super-crazy around here as we've ended our summer with a road trip to Oregon for a couple of days in Portland and, of course, the eclipse (pictures forthcoming!), which meant skipping the first day of school.  Yes, my 14-year-old missed her first day of high school!  So it's been a whole lot of school shopping, road trip packing, and homework up-making.  Both kids had summer assignments due on the first day of school and arranged to turn them in early through email.  The 17-year-old, who played summer grasshopper a little too long, wrote an entire paper on the road (thank you, technology!).  We got back very late Monday night and were all exhausted for the big school and work day.  We're still recovering.  But it was all worth it! Meanwhile, I got a lot of reading done and the books have been piling up like nobody's business.  I'm going to have to surrender to the inevitability of....mini-reviews.  A riffle of re...

The Book of Memory , by Petina Gappah Memory is in prison for murder.  She is the only woman on death row in the Harare prison, and her lawyer has asked her to write down everything, to be sent to an advocate in America, in hopes of getting an appeal.  So Memory writes for her life, starting with the day her parents sold her to a white man when she was nine years old -- the same man she is in prison for murdering.  But even Memory does not know the whole story of her life. It's a really good novel, and Memory's account is full of fascination.  She jumps back and forth, talking about her childhood with her family, as an albino child in a slum, then to life in the Harare prison, then to her adolescence in Lloyd's care, where she was given an excellent education but had little explained to her.  She keeps coming back to the same questions: why did Lloyd buy her?  Why did her family give her away? and does not expect ever to know. Good stuff.  I reco...

The Go-Between , by L. P. Hartley The first line will be familiar to all: The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. Leo, now well into his 50s, opens up a box of memories and tells the story of the summer of 1900, when he turned 13.  It was first a sort of awakening, and then a life-changing trauma.  As Leo remembers his lost innocence, he also wonders whatever became of the people involved... Leo goes to stay at a country house with a much wealthier school friend, and since Marcus' older sister is engaged to the local baronet, there is a constant social whirl around her.  She enlists Leo as a messenger in her secret romance, and it all ends in disaster. This is a really famous novel, considered a classic of the 20th century, but it mostly did not enchant me.  Its exploration of the emotional and mental life of a young teen boy did not reel me in.  It was fine, but I did not love it, and I was ready to be done well before it was ov...

Marie Grubbe , by Jens Peter Jacobsen This post is about a 19th-century Danish novel you've almost certainly never heard of.  But stick around till the end for a real surprise... J. P. Jacobsen is virtually unknown in the English-speaking world, but he was quite important in European literature.  I studied his more famous second novel, Niels Lyhne , in college, and re-read it a few years ago.   In that post, I gave a little background, and here it is again for your convenience:  ... a major classic of the late 19th century -- for literary middle-Europeans interested in Romanticism and Naturalism.  Thomas Mann and Rainer Maria Rilke considered it to be among the greatest of novels.  Henrik Ibsen and Stefan Zweig cited Jacobsen as an influence.  Both Zweig and James Joyce even wanted to learn Danish so they could read this novel in the original!  But J. P. Jacobsen remained obscure in the English-speaking literary world, and Niels Lyhne...

The Watchmaker of Filigree Street, by Natasha Pulley Jenny reviewed this book a while ago and I was intrigued enough to get it from the library, though I was not sure I would like it.  I'm still not sure whether I liked it! In an alternate Victorian London, telegraph clerk Thaniel Steepleton* has a mysterious gold watch show up in his lodgings.  Six months later, the watch saves him from an Irish bomb.  The bombing is not very interesting, but the watch is; where did it come from?  Thaniel finds Keita Mori, a Japanese watchmaker with some fairly stunning inventions and something odd about him.  Much of the story is dedicated to figuring out just what Mori's mystery is, and what it means. We also have Grace, who wants to be a physicist but is hemmed in by family demands that she marry.  I found her to be an awkward character; I don't love where she fits into the story, I don't know why she is at Oxford, despising classicists, when Cambridge is where...