Howling Frog Books

After the giveaway time window closed last night, I (or rather, the forces of chance) chose a winner for The Dean's Watch , and it is: JDeb who said, Well, honestly, I don't know enough about the different places to make a choice. I've heard the most about Oxford, so maybe one of the other places. I don't know. I've just recently discovered Elizabeth Goudge and have only read a couple of her works for children, so I'd like a chance to read something else. Thanks!  Congratulations, JDeb, and I hope you really enjoy The Dean's Watch !  Thanks so much to Hendrickson Publishers for providing the prize, and for keeping some of Elizabeth Goudge's lovely novels in print.  Thanks to everyone who participated in this year's anniversary!  I hope to be more on the ball next year and do a little more publicity.  See you next time?

 Pan Tadeusz: The Last Foray in Lithuania, by Adam Mickiewicz It's the Polish national epic poem!  Also the last great European epic poem, if you believe the comments.  I guess there weren't a lot of epic poems written after 1834, so it's probably fair enough.  It's twelve books long and was written in Polish alexandrines, but my translation is just prose.  It ends up reading like a rather odd novel.  Adam Mickiewicz was a poet and philosopher, and he was living in exile in Paris when he wrote this; otherwise the Russians would never have allowed it to be published.  At the time of writing, Poland had been partitioned into three pieces and shared out between Russia, Prussia, and Austria, but the story takes place at a time when Napoleon had interrupted that partition and established a Duchy of Warsaw.  Note, though, that the geographic area in the story is always called Lithuania.  It's the name of the region, not of the country, and not political.  It's co

And So Flows History , by Hahn Moo-Souk The three-generational family epic is, I think, quite a popular kind of story, and it's not one that I usually read.  I kind of have a feeling that it may be really popular in Korean media!  This novel is a classic and very popular example of the genre, but it's also an unusual one.  The family saga is kind of messy, I guess I would say -- it's realistic.  The family members are all over the place.  And the whole story starts with a rape. Near the end of the 19th century, as the Chosun dynasty is waning, the Cho family is one of middling wealth and importance.  The head of the family, Tongjun, takes advantage of everyone's absence at a festival and rapes Puyong, a young household slave girl, which produces a daughter and ruins Puyong's plans.  From there we launch into a complex story involving the Cho extended family, the fortunes of several family servants, and the Cho in-laws, the Yi family.  Most of the Chos do not

I saw this fun game this morning at o's On Bookes and promptly had to do it, despite the many other more pressing bloggy duties awaiting me.  So here we go, Howling Frog Books spelled out in books from my TBR pile.  This game was invented by Fictionophile ! The rules: 1. Spell out your blog’s name.  2. Find a book from your TBR that begins with each letter. (Note you cannot ADD to your TBR to complete this challenge – the books must already be on your Goodreads TBR) 3. Have fun!   I don't really have a Goodreads TBR -- I don't use it in the proper way at all.  So I went and looked at my actual, physical TBR shelf: The books: The H igh Book of the Grail (Perlesvaus), trans. by Nigel Bryant The O bedience of a Christian Man, by William Tyndale W eatherman, by somebody (it's an old library discard that intrigued me) L es Miserables, by Victor Hugo I ndividualism and Economic Order, by F. A. Hayek A N ovel Bookstore, by Laurence Cosse G ermany S

Jorie now has her signup post for the readalong up, so by all means go sign up!   For a taste of what awaits you, here is a lovely blog post written by Maggie Swofford at the publisher: Joy and Sorrow (and Everything In Between) in Elizabeth Goudge's Novels . The readalong will be for two weeks, from now until May 8th.  Hope you'll join us!

Greetings, fellow Elizabeth Goudge readers!  (Or prospective readers; we're looking for new club members!)  This is the Master Post for Elizabeth Goudge Day; you can start a readalong of Towers in the Mist at Jorie Loves a Story, enter the book giveaway elsewhere on this blog, or comment here about what Goudge books you love. I have now read most, but not all, of Goudge's adult novels and a good few of the children's stories.  I find her writing difficult to describe; most of her adult books are realistic historical or domestic stories that would be quite unremarkable mid-20th-century novels, except that a) Goudge was such a very gifted writer, and b) she had an unusual ability to write stories infused with Christianity that were nevertheless hardly ever didactic or preachy.  Her books tend to be uplifting and hopeful, giving everyone involved some redemption, even when totally undeserved. I've looked back over my blog to see what books I have read, and it appe

Luckily for us, Hendrickson Publishers has generously offered a copy of The Dean's Watch for our  giveaway! COMMENT ON THIS POST TO ENTER, and I will choose a winner with the help of random.org on Saturday, April 28.  The rules are at the bottom of the post. The Dean's Watch is one of the Cathedral Trilogy, which seem to bear no particular relation to each other except that each is set in a cathedral town and has a lot to do with said cathedral.  Towers in the Mist is set in Elizabethan Oxford, The Dean's Watch in Victorian disguised-Ely, and City of Bells in Edwardian disguised-Wells.  ( City of Bells even kicks off a different trilogy, with two children's stories to round it out!) What's it about?  Let's ask the publisher: A compelling saga of an unlikely friendship threaded together by redemption and grace The setting is a remote mid-nineteenth-century town in England and its grand cathedral. The cathedral Dean, Adam Ayscough, holds a deep

Binti Binti: Home Binti: The Night Masquerade by Nnedi Okorafor  Centuries in the future, Binti is a member of the tiny Himba tribe: mathematical geniuses who specialize in producing advanced electronics, hemmed in by the much more populous and disdainful Khoush warriors.  Himba never leave home, but Binti's sole ambition is to attend Oomza University, the galactic center of learning where humans are relative new-comers.  She has little time to dwell on the risk she is taking as the ship carrying her to Oomza is attacked by the Meduse, a jellyfish-like race locked in war with the Khoush. Through three books, Binti tries to make sense of her situation, which gets ever more complex, as the Meduse, Khoush, Himba and Desert People converge.  Binti may be able to play peacemaker...or she may be overwhelmed by the forces of war. These three short novellas came out about a year apart.  Together they would make up a good-sized SF novel, and I'd recommend reading them all a

I'm excited to host Elizabeth Goudge Day on Tuesday!  Are you planning anything special to read?   Will you perhaps join a readalong of Towers in the Mist, or enter the giveaway for The Dean's Watch ?  I hope to see you Tuesday!

Fellow travelers on the road to reading all around the world -- we now have badges!  The fantastic Esther of Chapter Adventures , who has been quite busy accomplishing an international move, also designed these images for us to use.  I just love 'em, but that might be the former Girl Scout in me.  Badges are the best.  Here you go: Bonus! I'll put them up on the Reading All Around the World project page , where you can get them any time.  As you finish reading a continent, put your badge up on your blog -- on the project page or even on your sidebar.  Anybody who finishes the entire thing should definitely put the 100% badge on a sidebar where it can be duly admired! Thanks so much to Esther for making the images!  What do you think, folks?

The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia , by Samuel Johnson In 1759, Doctor Johnson spent a week writing Rasselas in order to pay for his mother's funeral.  It's not really a novel; it's a meditation on whether human beings can attain happiness, in story form.  I guess that makes it a fable.  It's sometimes compared with Voltaire's Candide , which was published in the same year, because they both ask questions about the human condition.  But Candide is an angry satire about the problems of evil and suffering, so while the two works are wandering around the same neighborhood, they don't quite meet. In Abyssinia (Ethiopia), all the children of the royal house live in the Happy Valley until such time as they are called upon to rule the country.  Rasselas the prince and his sister Nekayah have thus never seen ordinary human society; they've spent their lives in this lush valley, where luxury and constant entertainment are the rule.  Rasselas finds h

I Grew Up in Latvia , by Zigrid Vidners A while back, I was at the public library and saw this book in a display of local authors.  "I could use a Latvia book for the Read Around the Whole World project!" I thought, and so here I am with a nice memoir.  It's the first of two, and covers Zigrid Vidners' life until 1944, when at the age of 18 she had to leave her Latvian homeland.  The next one talks about her subsequent experiences in a German village, refugee camp, and then England and America.  Vidners retired to my own town, which is how I know about the books at all. Vidners describes her early childhood and surroundings with a lot of love.  She lived in Riga much of the time, with her father an officer in the Latvian army, but his real dream was to run the family farm where grandparents already lived, so summers were spent there and after a while they lived there full-time.  After the move, Vidners would go to live with an aunt during the school year. Moth

Elizabeth Goudge was born on April 24th, 1900, and for her birthday, we are going to celebrate her many lovely books!  Jorie at Jorie Loves a Story and I will be co-hosting this event.  If you've never read one of Goudge's novels, I do hope you'll pick one up and give her a try.  She's a real favorite of mine, and wrote lovely children's books as well as adult novels.  (Her Little White Horse was famously a childhood favorite of J. K. Rowling's, and it does make a great place to start!) Jorie will be hosting a readalong of the historical novel Towers in the Mist , set in the late sixteenth century.  We've been saving our copies for this and we hope you can track one down too! I will be hosting a giveaway of The Dean's Watch , generously donated by Hendrickson Publishers.  I also hope you'll share your reading and favorite Goudge books with us!

  It's time for the first checkpoint for Bev's Mount TBR Challenge !  Bev always asks for some information: 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 read 8 of my proposed 24 titles and am thus 1/3 through.  However, I read a bunch of easy old SF early in the year, which bulked it up, and I can't expect to keep up that pace, so I'd better get going. Titles read:   Early Christian Writings (a collection) The Age of Bede   The Ginger Star, by Leigh Brackett The Hounds of Skaith, by Leigh Brackett The Reavers of Skaith, by Leigh Brackett Crashing Suns Danubia, by Simon Winder The Story of Science, by Susan Wise Bauer (my gur

The Story of Western Science: From Aristotle to the Big Bang Theory, by Susan Wise Bauer Did you ever want to thoroughly educate yourself in the history of science?  Well, this is your book!  Some years ago, my guru SWB wrote a how-to book, The Well-Educated Mind , about giving yourself a classical education in the humanities, with chronological sections on drama, poetry, history, autobiography, and fiction.  This is a similar book, except it takes you through the history of science. We start with the ancient Greeks and other early thinkers, move forward to the development of the scientific method, and then into sections that concentrate on the development of (respectively) geology, biology, and cosmology.  Each section is broken into chapters that explain the ideas and the thinkers, and end with recommendations on what to read.  This is a historical perspective, so she's recommending Aristotle's Physics and History of Animals , Ptolemy's Almagest , and so on right t