Howling Frog Books

At the last possible moment, I found out about the Book Blog Expo event, hosted by Donna at Girl Who Reads.   Looks like fun so I'm joining in! Day 2 - May 31 - Favorite Section in the Bookstore. Do you head straight to the new releases or bargain rack? Do you spend hours perusing the mysteries or perhaps you can't drag yourself out of the young adult section? Or is there something unique about your local indie bookshop that makes it a must stop every time you pass it? Whether you shop in a brick and mortar or an online bookstore, what is your favorite section? Consider discussing the genre itself or providing a list of favorite (or recent) finds. Who says I spend all my time at the bookstore?  I spend all my time at the LIBRARY.   Libraries are full of books I can take home for free!  That said, I certainly like bookstores too, and I am always happy to pop into the local (very large and wonderful) used bookstore to have a look around.  I ca...

Hey, I just discovered this event: the Book Blog Expo, hosted by Donna at Girl Who Reads .  It's instead of BEA.  Looks like fun, so I'll just start in... Day 1 - May 30 - Introductions & How to Network. Since networking starts with an introduction, we will roll these topics into 1 post. Gives us the 411 on you - who, what, where, when, why and how. Who are you, What do you blog, Where do you blog (also share where to find you on social media), When did you start blogging, Why do you blog, How do you go about your blogging and being involved in the book community (how do you network). Who/What/Where: I'm Jean, I'm a librarian, mom, and quilter, and I live in rural Northern California -- the part everyone forgets exists.  (This has pros and cons: it's not very crowded, which is nice, but the rest of the state likes to use our water and forgets to give us any money.) When/Why/How: I've been blogging since 2010 and I started because I wanted ...

The Sea and Poison, by Shusaku Endo I'm not sure why I have this book on my TBR shelf.  I thought it was one my brother-in-law had sent me; he used to send us books from Japan and so I have several volumes of Murakami, Endo, and Oe just sitting around.  But this one is a discard from the public library and I have no idea where it came from.  I'm also wondering what happened to my copy of Silence , which I remember loaning out in a pile to a friend's daughter who was studying Japanese (she is living there now!).  But she gave them back.  So where did Silence go? This is a really tough novel, and it's written in such a quiet, understated way that the awfulness stands out all the more.  It's the story of Suguro, a young medical intern at a wartime hospital, as well as two others who work there.  The hospital is near the city of Fukuoka, but it's far enough out that it has not yet been bombed.  Supplies and food are short, and the hospital inm...

Home and Exile , by Chinua Achebe If a Chinua Achebe book you've never seen before comes across the donation table, you've got to take it home, right?  That's what I figured, anyway, and it turned out to be a quite interesting little book of three lectures that turned into essays. The three essays have a continuous train of thought, exploring the beginnings of modern African literature.  Starting with his own young days, in which the only novels about West Africa came from an outside perspective, he goes through the first stories that became available in the 1950s, starting with  The Palm-Wine Drinkard, the initial book that opened the gates.  (This made me happy, since I have that novel sitting on my pile...though I forgot to put it in my 20 Books of Summer list and now I'm sorry.) He dissects a few novels: Mister Johnson , by Joyce Cary, which first gave Achebe a clue that stories could have an agenda, The Palm-Wine Drinkard, and V. S. Naipaul's A Bend...

Over the Gate The Market Square , by Miss Read These Miss Read novels are just like bon-bons for me.  They're light, but not at all sentimental, and they chronicle English village life with both affection and astringency.  There are two or three series, all set in the same fictional area, but some are about the villages of Fairacre or Thrush Green, and some are about the market town of Caxley. Over the Gate must be one of the later Fairacre books, as it features the teacher narrator doing relatively little.  Her plot is slight, but serves to string together entertaining stories from Fairacre history, from "Mrs Next-Door" to a magic salve and a truly shivery ghost story.  Reminded me of some of L. M. Montgomery's later Anne novels. The Market Square is set in Caxley and chronicles the intertwined lives of two men and their families -- Sep Howard, the quiet and almost timid baker, and Bender North, a boisterous ironmonger.  We follow them for many years, ...

Libraries in the Ancient World, by Lionel Casson My mom gave this neat book to me several years ago, and I hadn't gotten around to reading it.  I kind of thought I knew plenty about ancient libraries; after all, I took a history course in library school!  Well, I probably forgot all about whatever I learned in that, and this book is a nice informative and fun read. Casson starts off with ancient Mesopotamia.  We probably usually think of Ashurbanipal as the first well-known king with a library, but he definitely wasn't the first Mesopotamian king to have one.  We know of two large libraries earlier, one of which belonged to Tiglath-Pileser I.  Ashurbanipal did have a really great library, though, and Casson also talks about how the Assyrians identified the tablets and cataloged them. The Greeks also had libraries and cataloging methods!  They mostly went in for personal collections that they shared around with friends.  Then the Library of Alexa...

Jim Henson: The Biography, by Brian Jay Jones A couple of weeks ago, I took my 15 year old to see Labyrinth playing at the movie theater.  It' s one of my favorite movies and we had a great time.  That put me in the mood to read the Jim Henson biography I've been meaning to read for a couple of years now, so I brought it home from work and wound up enthralled, more so than I'd expected.  I'm a big Jim Henson fan. It's a solid, thorough biography that chronicles Henson's family background and childhood, but really gets detailed when he hit college.  Henson's ambition was to work in television, and in the mid-50s, of course there was no such thing as college coursework aimed at a career in TV.  He wound up a home economics major because that was where a lot of the hands-on stuff was happening, and he fell into puppeteering as a way to get started in TV.  Henson had no intention of being a puppeteer forever; that was just what happened. Jones takes the...

The Egg and I, by Betty MacDonald This somewhat fictionalized memoir came across the donation table, and I'd heard somewhere that it was fun, so I took it home to read in random moments.  Betty MacDonald may be familiar to some as the author of the wonderful Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle books for children (in which Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle, who may be a witch and was definitely once married to a pirate, knows how to cure children who have fallen prey to bad habits and become Answer-Backers or Slow-Eaters-Tiny-Bite-Takers). Betty MacDonald tells some hair-raising stories about her childhood in Colorado before she really gets going with her marriage to Bob.  Bob's dream is to be a chicken farmer in the Pacific Northwest and Betty gamely agrees, signing up for a life of isolation, no electricity, very hard work, and a stove that eats fuel but doesn't like to get warm.  And lots of rain.  And lovable but difficult neighbors, especially the Kettles. She makes it all extremely fu...

Patience and Fortitude: Power, Real Estate, and the Fight to Save a Public Library , by Scott Sherman Let's talk about the New York Public Library!  You know the one, it's in a lot of movies, with the lions out front.  That is the 42nd Street main building, but the NYPL also has a whole lot of branch libraries.  The only one I've been to is the Greenwich Village branch, which looks like a red-brick castle.  Anyway, here is an interesting fact: the NYPL is not exactly a "public" library in the usual sense; it is not owned and operated by the City of New York.  It's a private non-profit which is governed by a board of trustees.  It gets some city money for salaries, but much of its funding has to be raised privately and put into an endowment, which is controlled by the trustees, who are usually prominent, wealthy NYC people.  And the funding wasn't doing too well in the 1960s and 70s, and in the early 2000s it was pretty dire.  Branches needed m...

12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, by Jordan B. Peterson Oh, let's have a little controversy here at Howling Frog, shall we?  Oh boy. Until fairly recently, Peterson was a popular but unfamous lecturer of psychology in Canada.  He'd done a stint at Harvard, written a book about Jungian psychological stuff, and was your average moderately-left Canadian.  Then he went on TV to protest a proposed law which would mandate the use of preferred pronouns.  (This is coerced speech.  It's not even censorship, the government saying you can't say something; it's the government saying that you HAVE to say something.  That is a power no government should have, and it's definitely worth protesting.)  And everything exploded. Peterson is now enormously vilified and even more enormously popular.  His lectures are easily available on YouTube -- he talks a lot about archetypes and Jungian interpretations of myths and Bible stories.  He appeals to ...

Towers in the Mist , by Elizabeth Goudge This was our readalong title for Elizabeth Goudge Day, and I'd been saving it for a whole year.  It is one of the "Cathedral City" trilogy and set in Elizabethan Oxford, the others being The Dean's Watch (Victorian Ely) and City of Bells (Edwardian Wells).   And boy, does she have a good time with the Elizabethan setting! This is a family story, so we get to know all of the Leighs: the Canon of Christ Church, his many children, and the elderly and imperious Great-Aunt Susan.  But we start first with a young scholar, Faithful, who has walked to Oxford in the hope of getting an education despite his penury and is sort of adopted by Canon Leigh.  Mostly we follow Joyeuce, the eldest daughter, who has been burdened with the housekeeping since her mother died four years ago.  She finds it extremely difficult, and then a wealthy but perhaps unsuitable scholar, Nicolas, wants her to sneak out to see him. The house i...

I was really, really hoping that Cathy at 746 Books would repeat her 20 Books of Summer Challenge , and hooray, it's here!  The rules are simple: pick (or don't) 20 books to read between June 1 and September 3.  It's OK to change them, it's OK to leave blank spaces, and it's OK not to finish.  Go for 10 or 15 if you prefer! I have chosen 22 titles, because I want to be able to throw a couple out if I don't like them.  Here they are: Miss Mackenzie, by Anthony Trollope The Sybil, by Par Lagerkvist Angels in the Mist, by Ryan Southwick  The Pocket Enquire Within The Glatstein Chronicles, by Jacob Glatstein Child of All Nations, by Pramoedya Ananta Toer Autumn Equinox, by Jabbour Douaihy Tram 83, by Fiston Mwanza Mujila Stories by Lu Hsun Old Demons, New Deities (Tibetan short stories) Four Birds of Noah's Ark, by Thomas Dekker Maps, by Nuruddin Farah Lectures on Russian Literature, by Vladimir Nabokov 800 Years of Women's Letters ...

The Dawning, by Milka Bajic-Poderegin I now have a pile of books that is really pretty daunting; there are nine sitting here waiting for me.  But I have an interesting reason; I've been working on a guest post and it's taking up most of my blogging time.  It's for a much more professional kind of blog, and I'm quite nervous about the whole thing.  Stay tuned! I think I mentioned that my husband and I spent a weekend at Tahoe recently, and the long drive back and forth gave me some fabulous reading time.  I spent much of it immersed in this lovely novel.  I found it at my library and thought it would make a good pick for my reading around the world project; the back cover copy said it was set in Bosnia.  Well, it turned out to be a good deal more complex than that once I really got started! The Dawning was written in Serbo-Croatian about (mostly) ethnic Serbs, set in what was then Bosnia and Herzegovina, and is now Montenegro.  I finally decide...

My copy's cover, which I like Linnets and Valerians, by Elizabeth Goudge For Elizabeth Goudge Day a couple of weeks ago, I got into the mood to re-read Linnets and Valerians, which is really my favorite of her children's books I have read (there are several I haven't).  It reminds me very much of an E. Nesbit story!  For one thing, there are four siblings in 1912 whose father is going out to India; a very familiar setup. Nan, Robert, Timothy, and Betsy Linnet are staying with their very stern grandmother while their father is gone, but it isn't working out at all.  Pretty soon, Robert decides that they must all simply run away and leads them out on an expedition.  Luckily for them, they meet up with a grumpy, elderly gentleman who turns out to be their own uncle, and he agrees to keep them.  It soon becomes evident that although the area is mostly idyllic, there are a few nasty folks on the scene too.  The children's adventures lead them all over t...

The Upside of Stress: Why Stress is Good For You, and How to Get Good At It, by Kelly McGonigal Well, you have to read a book by Professor McGonigal.  This was actually recommended to me, and now I'm going to recommend it to all of you, even every member of my family, because I plan to make them read it too.  It's just a really interesting book that contains some fascinating research into the nature of stress, how we deal with it, and how we can deal with it a lot better by tweaking a few thoughts. One weird element of modern society is that people tell us to avoid stress in such a way that just makes most people laugh hopelessly.  We're convinced that stress makes us sick and unhappy, and yet most of us cannot avoid difficult workplaces, illness in the family, financial worries, and lots of other stressful things.  BUT!  It turns out that stress is far more complex than we thought, and humans are in fact great at dealing with it.  This makes intuitive...

Walpurgisnacht, by Gustav Meyrink I saved this book to read over actual Walpurgisnacht, which is April 30.  The novel starts at that point and then continues for a couple of months, except that time is also stalled; the characters can't get past it.  Meyrink wrote Walpurgisnacht in 1917, and it continues the train of thought he was following in his prior novel, The Green Face , which I haven't read yet.  I guess I got it a little bit out of order. The story is set in Prague, during World War I.  German officials and aristocrats live in a sort of palace/office complex and virtually never leave; certainly they never, ever cross the river to the ordinary people of Prague.  The river (Moldau then, now Vltava) is a nearly uncrossable barrier.  These aristocrats are few, elderly, decrepit, and senile, with the exception of the young and voracious Polyxena.  She is carrying on an affair with Ottokar, a poor violinist. The actor Zrcadlo (Mirror) appear...

Fire in the Bones: William Tyndale -- Martyr, Father of the English Bible , by S. Michael Wilcox It's a biography of William Tyndale, the great translator of the Bible into English!  I had this recommended to me a few years ago and it's been on my TBR shelf ever since.  It's written from an LDS perspective, and would not really be of interest to others.  Plus, Wilcox's tone is frankly kind of adulatory, which feels a little odd if you're more used to biographies that aim for a semblance of objectivity. Wilcox puts a lot of historical background into the book, assuming that the average reader won't necessarily be all that familiar with late medieval and Reformation-era figures.  So Wycliffe and the Lollards get an introduction before Tyndale does, and Wilcox makes sure to explain who the various players are, especially Cromwell and More.  And boy is he partisan; he shows a grudging respect for Sir Thomas More as a famous humanist, martyred for his faith, bu...