Howling Frog Books

A Golden Age, by Tahmima Anam (Just a note -- I've been traveling a lot.  I went to Portland for four days, took a day trip to Sacramento, and am about to head out for the wilds of Utah for eight days.  So while I'm reading, I'm certainly having a hard time finding time for blogging.  I'll be back, with plenty to talk about, fairly soon.  And I will have pictures to share too!) Meanwhile, Rehana is preparing for a party and remembering her past.  Widowed all too young, she had no means to support her two children, and her husband's relatives took them away.  The lengths Rehana went to in order to get her children back have always been her most closely-held secret, and now the kids are grown and attending university.  The party is for the anniversary of their return, but it's 1971 in East Pakistan and the kids are really more interested in politics and the movement to break away from West Pakistan.  The Pakistani rulers are not about to let ...

Bev has posted the second checkpoint for the Mount TBR Challenge .  She always gives some jobs, so here goes:  1. Tell us how many miles you've made it up your mountain (# of books read). I'm quite proud to say that I have read 21.5 titles out of a goal of 24.  This is much better than I usually do!   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 guru!) Rasselas, by Samuel Johnson  Pan Tadeusz, by Adam Mickiewicz Fire in the Bones, by S. Michael Wilcox  Towers in the Mist, by Elizabeth Goudge Libraries in the Ancient World, by Lionel Casson Home and Exile, by Chinua Achebe Over the Gate, by Miss Read The Market Square, by Miss Read The Sea and Poison, by Shusaku Endo The Pocket Enquire Within Justinian's Flea, by Wil...

The newly revised Classics Club is kicking off with a Spin!  Habitual readers know the drill, and new ones can join in by reading the CC Spin rules .  The winning number will be announced on the 1st of August. The catch is that I will be out of town on the 1st. I just got back from a trip, but I can't stay off the road and I'm leaving for 8 days or so, which means I'll probably miss out on several days' worth of Spin reading time.  The time frame is a little shorter this time around and I'll only have until the 31st of August -- which time is meant to be spent on the 20 Books of Summer project.  So there's a fairly good chance that I'll end up with quite a reading job! Here's my list -- which I have not made any easier than usual, I must say I find Roderick Random pretty terrifying:  Walls of Jericho, by Rudolph Fisher The Palm-Wine Drinkard, by Tutuola  The Elder Edda  (Poetic Edda)  The Zelmenyaners, by Moyshe Kulbak The Bride of ...

UK edition, which is what I've got The Year of Reading Dangerously, by Andy Miller Andy Miller, writer and editor, cog in the machinery of British society, had stopped reading books.  In something like five (ten?) years, he had read magazines and Internet articles and only one book, and that one was The Da Vinci Code .  Books had fallen out of his life, replaced by his phone and Sudoku puzzles.  (Seriously, the man spends hours every week commuting on a train, and was doing Sudoku instead of reading.)  So he started thinking maybe he should read a book sometime.  He came up with a whole imaginary program, but it still took a couple of years before he actually picked up a book and read it.  After that, he finally embarked on a project of reading books -- the list being mostly books he had always meant to read, had in fact lied about reading, but had never actually read. Miller starts off with The Master and Margarita , which won him my instant app...

800 Years of Women's Letters, ed. by Olga Kenyon Way back in the 1990s I bought this book, and then never got more than about 50 pages into it.  I used to think I liked historical collections of letters, but in fact I do not.  Still, I've always meant to read this, and now I have.  Kenyon collected letters from lots of women, from a few lands and many times. The letters are arranged by topic, which I did not love.  Sections address things like domestic labor, romance, travel, illness, and so on.  Each section has a little introduction, which is usually unnecessary and frequently embarrassingly laden with trite filler like "Women have travelled for multifarious reasons."   Well, yes. Hildegard of Bingen I think is the oldest writer, but not the only medieval woman.  Other names include Elizabeth I, Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Madame de Sevigne, a prolific correspondent.  Many of the writers are not famo...

Angels in the Mist (Z-Tech Chronicles) , by Ryan Southwick Once upon a time in high school, I had a buddy named Ryan.  He's a fun guy and helped me get a good job driving pizza at Arnoldi's (though in hindsight I'm surprised that my parents let me drive pizza!).  We lost touch for a while, like you do, but with the magic of Facebook, we can  keep up again.  Ryan has always had ambitions to write, and now he's finished his first novel, which is going to be a trilogy, so obviously I wanted to read it! It's true that this is not my usual kind of story -- you will not find a lot of tech/fantasy thrillers reviewed on this blog -- but I had a lot of fun with it.  It's a real page-turner with lots of action and suspense.  I was, at times, a little frustrated because I wanted ANSWERS to my QUESTIONS, and I wasn't at all sure that I would get them before the next volume (or, horrors, the third!).  Happily, the satisfaction/suspense ratio is nicely balanced ...

Summer Half, by Angela Thirkell It's been several years since I picked up any Thirkell novels, but I do love them.  Just the other day Brona read Northbridge Rectory , and somebody else mentioned Thirkell books too, and Sunday was far too sleepy and warm a day to try to read Nabokovian lectures or Chinese literary short stories!  So I picked up Summer Half and had a truly delightful afternoon. If you're unfamiliar with the Thirkell novels -- she picked up Trollope's fictional county of Barsetshire and wrote contemporary domestic comedies in it.  Really, they are much like updated Trollope novels, with a wide cast of characters going through realistic but essentially happy lives, all given with a large dose of humor.  They are just such fun. In Summer Half , young Colin Keith is reading law, but decides that a young man ought to be supporting himself, so he gets a job as a junior Classics Master at a prep school.  Nobody notices how noble and self-sacrif...

Dark Emu: Black Seeds: Agriculture or Accident?  by Bruce Pascoe Some time back I read this amazing Australian book, The Biggest Estate On Earth , by Bill Gammage, which was a large, detailed explanation of Aboriginal land management techniques.  My mind was blown, and so then I needed this book by Bruce Pascoe to learn more. Dark Emu is more of a short overview of several aspects of Aboriginal life; it is not as exhaustive on one topic as the Gammage book.  Pascoe uses old diaries and descriptions of what early white settlers found to show what he means.  He points out that Aboriginal people were engaging in sedentary farming; they were not 'only' hunter-gatherers.  They had villages, and large stores of food.  They had complex engineered aquaculture sites on rivers that allowed fish to flourish and be easily caught.  White settlers did not always recognize what was going on right in front of them, either because Aboriginal technologies looke...

There are no good covers of this book. Miss Mackenzie, by Anthony Trollope It's been quite a while since I made time for a Trollope novel, and I've missed them!  I love Trollope's writing.  Miss Mackenzie has been sitting on my TBR shelf for a little while now; I found this nice old Oxford Classics edition from the 1920s that's in really good shape still, and a pretty olive green with art deco gold designs on the spine.  On the back flyleaf, somebody parked a needle many years ago, and now it's rusty. Miss Mackenzie is not your average novelistic heroine.  She is thirty-five, not particularly beautiful or educated, and she's spent nearly the last 20 years nursing her father and then her brother.  Now she has a small fortune to live on, and no knowledge whatsoever of the world she so desperately wants to see more of.  So she moves to "Littlebath," a small city, and hopes to find congenial society. What she mostly finds is that Littlebath is ...