Howling Frog Books

The Young Ardizzone , by Edward Ardizzone I shall now dip my toes back into book blogging with a delightful little volume -- Edward Ardizzone's memoir of his younger years.  I grew up on Ardizzone illustrations, what with Little Tim picture books* and The Little Bookroom .  When Lori mentioned this volume in her post about Slightly Foxed Editions , it promptly went on my wishlist...but they're only available in the UK.  Happily, my mom went on a trip to London in June (she accompanied my brother and his family, and thus saw a lot of Harry Potter attractions!) and she went armed with instructions to hunt down a couple of these. Edward Ardizzone was actually born in what is now Vietnam, in Hai Phong.  His father was Italian and French, and his mother British, and Ardizzone says they were each very good people, but totally unsuited to each other, and so they frequently lived apart.  His mother took them to England when he was five, and they lived a somewhat uns...

I've been pretty quiet lately, despite the three posts I need to write.  I've been in one of those slumps we all have every so often, both in reading and in blogging.  I'm surrounded by wonderful books and all I do is re-read fluffy mysteries and P. G. Wodehouse!  I guess I've just been focusing on other things lately, but I'll be back soon.  Meanwhile, I'll burble a bit about my life and its new shape. With the start of school, my life changed a lot.  I now have two kids in public high school, which makes me a retired homeschooling mom.  I did it for 12 years, and it was great, and now I'm really, really tired.  Being alone during the day is a new (and fairly wonderful) experience, though I'm not getting as much of it as I'd like; after all, I have a part-time job, and everybody else has great ideas for things I should do.  I picked up a volunteer job one morning a week -- sorting donated books for the library booksale, which will convince any...

Voices From Chernobyl: the Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster, by Svetlana Alexievich Svetlana Alexievich is a major presence on my mental TBR shelf, and I was really sorry I didn't think to put this on my 20 Books of Summer list.  I wanted to start here and then move on to Secondhand Time and her newly published (in English) Unwomanly Face of War.   This is not her entire output; there is also Zinky Boys , about Soviet soldiers in Afghanistan, so there's plenty to read. Alexievich is a Belarussian journalist who has made it her life's work to collect testimonies and oral histories of the USSR.  She arranges them in a collage sort of form to communicate the emotional history and impact of the events described.  She's been doing this kind of thing since the early 1980s, but much of it was repressed under the Soviet government, and then Lukashenko's Belarussian government persecuted her as well, so that she had to leave from 2000 - 2011. In 2015, she was award...

It only took me over a year, but I have done it!  I finished the Faerie Queene !  Woohoo!  I do wish Spenser had been able to finish his great work, but I don't know if I could have read all of it. When we stopped last time, it was right after a fight in a castle between Arthur and Turpine (the bad guy).  Turpine now wants revenge, and he meets two knights, who he talks into pursuing Arthur.  They attack, and Arthur kills one before the other cries mercy and informs on Turpine.  Arthur kills Turpine and hangs him from a tree.  Arthur is really getting pretty violent!  Meanwhile, Serena and Timias (remember them?) meet Mirabella, who is the messy maiden from a couple of cantos back.  She is beautiful, but of low birth.  Her pride has led her to be cruel to many men, so Cupid has decided to seize control and teach her a lesson (normally, remember, Cupid shoots his arrows at random, so the natural order is being overturned here). ...

A Deadly Wandering , by Matt Richtel The start of a new school year means a new Book In Common in our city.  The university and the community college cooperate to choose a book, get people interested, and have the author come and speak.  I don't always read the BIC pick, but this year's title piqued my interest.  And I was pretty entertained when my older daughter came home and said it was on her English syllabus, so could we get a copy?  And I flipped over the book, which was right on the table.  Heh. In 2006, people were just starting to use texting on cell phones to communicate when Reggie Shaw, a very ordinary nice kid from Utah, drifted a bit across the center line and caused a car accident that killed two men -- both scientists with families.  It wasn't immediately clear how it had happened, but Reggie was a habitual texter.  The investigation and findings turned into a landmark case, showing that texting while driving is much more dangerous ...

I thought it would be fun to tell you about our trip to Oregon for the eclipse.  If you don't think that would be fun, feel free to skip this post, though I will tell you that it does also have its literary moments! We stuffed five people -- our two kids, plus my dad -- into my little CRV, as well as equipment to survive anything up to an apocalypse.  We kept hearing about the terrible congestion that was going to happen, so we planned to be able to live out of the car if we needed to.  Our original plan was to drive to a small town on the southern side of the band of totality where my sister-in-law spent some years of her childhood.  She still knew a few folks and we figured on having reasonable access to plumbing there.  But first, we planned to spend a couple of days in Portland at my brother's place. So we drove allll day, and it was quite a good drive except for about half of it involving a lot of smoke from wildfires.  We couldn't really see Mt. S...

Now that summer is over,* it's time for fall reading, and that means the R. I. P. Challenge!  This is the 12th year, and just like last year, Andi of Estella's Revenge and Heather of My Capricious Life   are hosting. I'm going to sign up for Peril the Second : Read two books of any length that you believe fit within the challenge categories.  My main desire for this fall is to read one of the 'horrid novels' mentioned in Northanger Abbey.   Catherine and Isabella love their horrid novels, and they have a whole list.  Most of them were thought to be fictional titles made up by Miss Austen, but they turned out to be real, and now I have all of them in an ebook collection.  I'll just start at the beginning, with The Castle of Wolfenbach by Eliza Parsons, written in 1793.   I also have Jackaby (I am so behind the times) and a lovely Marvin Kaye collection, Masterpieces of Terror and the Unknown .  Who knows if I'll manage them all?...