Howling Frog Books

I'm quite excited about March reading.  There's some good stuff coming up.... What better month to read Irish literature?  Cathy at 746 Books is hosting Reading Ireland Month!   It just so happens that I recently picked up a copy of The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien, so I'll read that.  Head on over to Cathy's place to see the plans. Of course, the highlight of March is always March Magics, the event dedicated to Diana Wynne Jones and Terry Pratchett!  Kristen We Be Reading is hosting this year, and the theme is "All the Shorts" -- I'm not sure what I'll do for Pterry, since I read A Blink of the Screen just two years ago.  On the other hand, I can't actually remember most of the stories, so maybe it's time to pick it up again!  And I will undoubtedly just binge right through every single one of DWJ's shorts.  I have all the collections, and I can't wait to read that nightmarish one about the magician and "Dragon Re...

Decluttering at the Speed of Life, by Dana K. White My favorite housekeeping blog/podcast is A Slob Comes Clean -- it's written for slobs like me who cannot figure out how other people manage to have such tidy homes.  In 2016, Dana came out with a book about cleaning , but this second book is about her real focus (after doing the dishes) -- decluttering.  It releases tomorrow, so order now to get your hands on it right away! One of our main problems as slobs is that we just have waaaay too much stuff, and we try to keep it all, because someday we will need it!  But if you have too much stuff, you can't manage your living space.  It will simply overwhelm you.  The key to a manageable home is not to have all that stuff.  So Dana talks about: the two decluttering questions how to declutter without making a giant mess in the process the container concept figuring out a room's purpose how to deal with difficult and sentimental clutter She actually...

A couple of really nice things happened to me this week.  Plus I even managed to write some posts! I finally finished the Tardis quilt tops.  They are gigantic.   I probably should have made them smaller.  They're a sort of very long twin size and would fit perfectly on your average college dorm bed.  I also managed to do the backs and drop them off for quilting, so pretty soon they'll be finished.  I still need to buy yet more blue for the binding; no matter how much blue I buy, it isn't enough. One of my very old friends lives in San Diego, so it's usually several years between visits.  Her family was our next-door neighbors while we were in junior high and high school, so I know them all.  And she was in Sacramento this weekend, so I drove down yesterday and spent the day with her and two of her siblings.  It was just really nice to hang out with such an old friend. Excitement this week: I'm going to go see Susan Wise Baue...

Soviet Ghosts , by Rebecca Litchfield Is there anything more fascinating than photos of decaying Soviet buildings?  I think we all know the answer is no .  Rebecca Litchfield took a bunch of photos in old buildings from all over the former USSR, and East Germany as well.  They're arranged in thematic chapters, almost like a social studies textbook: daily life, military, education, health, sport...and so on.  Each chapter has a little introductory essay, but the photos are the important bit. Random thoughts about these photos: Wow, there is a remarkable amount of robin's egg blue paint.  Many of the photos look like people just walked away, like maybe there was not a lot of official closing down and clearing out.  There's not just furniture, there are mattresses, medicine/chemical bottles, school equipment -- things you would think would be wanted elsewhere even if the institution closed.  There is one empty swimming pool with the lane-divi...

The painting is of Cuthbert The Age of Bede, by various people such as for example Bede I started off the year in a very Anglo-Saxon medievaly sort of mood.  I guess I'm still in it, since today I put two Old English language study books on my Amazon wishlist.  Still, it took me a long time to read this collection of pieces, because they are mostly not super-gripping.  Worth reading for several reasons, and the last one is fantastic, but still.  Anyway, here we have four early Anglo-Saxon sources from the north of the British isles: The Life of Cuthbert, by the Venerable Bede Cuthbert was the prior of Lindisfarne (and a bishop too!) in the mid-7th century.  He was greatly beloved, did a lot of missionary work, and was OK with accepting Roman practices in the British Church, which a lot of people were not.  He was considered a saint, too. The Life of Wilfrid, by Eddius Stephanus Wilfrid was bishop of Northumbria, also in the mid-7th century, but...

Meetings With Remarkable Manuscripts: Twelve Journeys Into the Medieval World , by Christopher de Hamel I had such a wonderful time with this book!  I actually started it in late 2017 and decided it would have to be my favorite book of the year, but then I was reading it so slowly (to make it last, and to absorb it properly) that I didn't finish until a couple of weeks ago, by which time I was so busy and frazzled that blogging sort of fell off the map for a while.  But now I can tell you about it!  Hooboy, this was such a fabulous book. Christopher de Hamel is one of the bigger names in the world of medieval books (or so I gather), and he's written several things for a lay audience.  In this very long book, he travels around to twelve really neat manuscripts and does an in-depth...interview...with each one, describing the history of the book, how it got where it is now, what's in it, lots of information about the writing and art, and plenty of yummy details....

Never Use Futura , by Douglas Thomas This title really caught my eye; a book entirely about the Futura font!  Thomas starts off by commenting that in design school, they always tell you never to use Futura -- and yet, all the giants do, so what's up with that?  Let's talk about this massively influential font. Thomas has a lot of fun talking about the development of Futura -- at first it was really quite avant-garde and had some features that many found kind of extreme (although attractive).  Soon it got a bit toned down for more general use, and it hit the big time, spawning a zillion imitators.  For one thing, Futura was a German font and you know nobody wanted to support that during World War II, so Americans came up with a home-grown version that was virtually identical. Futura is so familiar that even a total ignoramus like me can recognize it.  It has a lot of flavors, though, so I did not at first know that the blocky capitals on the cover are in t...

Mine at last! Crashing Suns , by Edmond Hamilton Well, hello again and fancy seeing you here, assuming anybody is left to read Howling Frog.  It's been a little while, I guess.  But I've been reading some great stuff in the meantime.  I hope to be back for reals now.  I didn't even finish my January event properly! Well, I've always loved the poster for the Vintage Sci-Fi event so I was all excited to get a chance to read the actual book, Crashing Suns , which is a collection of five short stories.  It's a 1965 paperback, but the stories are much older; they were published in the magazine Weird Tales from 1926 - 1931, as far as I can tell from the inner blurb, which isn't really all that informative.  Hamilton had written a serial novel featuring the Interstellar Patrol, Outside the Universe , and it was popular enough that he wrote these stories to follow up.  Here is the funny part: all five of these stories have exactly the same plot ....