Howling Frog Books

Constellation Myths, by Eratosthanes and Hyginus,  with Aratus' Phaenomena When I was a kid, we had a copy of D'Aulaires Greek Myths that I read over and over.  It had beautiful illustrations, and if you've got kids, you need to give them this book.  Of course, I never thought about where the stories came from, or how they had been preserved and passed down.  Some of them come from Homer, Ovid, or Sophocles, but there are quite a few other tales as well -- and now I know where some of thems came from. Eratosthenes is a well-known favorite ancient Greek (at least of mine, and he certainly ought to be of yours); he was the third librarian of Alexandria, and he figured out a way to estimate the circumference of the Earth -- he got it just about right, too.*   He also wrote down the enjoyable little stories people used to tell about the constellations and how they got that way, which are called catasterisms .   They're a little fuzzy; sometimes people...

It's time to dig out all the scary books and join up with RIP, Readers Imbibing Peril, for its 13th year!  Sounds lucky to me, I'd better do it.  Besides, you gotta love that image!  A bit of a departure from years past, and very nice. I went and found some books I haven't read yet, plus of course I've got some fun things on my tablet.  Here's what I'll be choosing from, with no particular plan: White is for Witching, by Helen Oyeyemi : I've been meaning to get to it for months. The Aleph and Other Stories, by Borges : I don't know how creepy these are, but like I said, I want some mysterious labyrinths of stories! The White Devil, by John Webster : I need to read this murderous play, which is on my CC list, for the Back to the Classics Challenge -- so why not now? The Romance of the Forest, by Ann Radcliffe , is one of three popular 18th-century novels in that red book.  Irish Ghost Stories : a collection featuring lots of Le Fanu and some...

A Sister to Scheherazade, by Assia Djebar August is Women in Translation Month, the time of year when Meytal Radzinski at Bibliobio talks about books by women in translation -- mostly, but certainly not entirely, in the Anglosphere.  The fact is that despite plenty of interesting, intelligent literature written by women in every language, the stuff chosen for translation tends to be much more by men -- who, yes, also write interesting and intelligent literature, but the parity could easily be much better.  Radzinski has recommendations, statistics, and plenty of information available at Bibliobio, so go check it out!  I'm always interested to see what she has to say, and her recommendations are very helpful with my Reading All Around the World project (I have not really paid much attention to gender in choosing my books, but since my tastes do run more to women authors than men, I think I might start to some extent.  I'm finding that frequently, if I choose a boo...

The Perilous Gard, by Elizabeth Marie Pope Have you ever read this wonderful 1974 YA novel?  It's just SO good.  And I say this as someone who does not care for historical fiction, which this is...mostly.  It's also a retelling of Tam Lin .  And I'm always up for a good Tam Lin story! Kate (the awkward sister) and Alicia (the pretty, kittenish one) are ladies-in-waiting to the imprisoned Princess Elizabeth, but after Alicia angers Queen Mary, Kate is punished for it and sent to live at Elvenwood, where she must stay -- and although she is surrounded by castle folk and there's a village nearby, she is completely alone.  The villagers fear the castle and talk about the fairy folk who live under the hill, but Kate knows that's only superstition.  Except that here, children actually do disappear.  And Kate saw the Lady in the Green with her own eyes.  Who are the People of the Hill, then? I just got my own copy of this novel recently, when it...

The Letting Go, by Deborah Markus Apparently I'm at the age where all my friends start writing books.  This is the fourth or fifth recent book by somebody I know -- even if I only know this author virtually.  I got to know of Deborah Markus when she was publishing a wonderful magazine, Secular Homeschooling , several years ago, and now we've been Facebook friends for some time.  I saw her research and write and pitch this YA novel, and as soon as it was published I put it on hold at the library and checked it out.  So I did not receive a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review, but I'll give you an honest review anyway. Emily lives at a boarding school, the open-structure kind for kids who want a lot of time and space for working on their own projects.  Despite living with twenty other girls 24/7, she is not friends with any of them.  Emily pushes everyone away and never forms relationships, because she knows that everyone who gets clo...

The Glatstein Chronicles, by Jacob Glatstein This book took me so much of the summer to read!  I enjoyed it a lot, but it's a long and complex read.  Definitely worth it, though! Jacob Glatstein was a Polish Jew who came to the US at twenty and made a career in journalism.  At forty, in 1934, he traveled back to Poland for the first time to see his dying mother.  The trip inspired two autobiographical stories written in Yiddish (he planned a third) and a determination to warn American Jews about the dangers Hitler posed in Europe.  He spent the next several years hammering away at his message in Jewish publications, frustrated by the lack of response.  The Chronicles contains both memoirs. Volume I, "Homeward Bound," is entirely about the trip to Poland.  Glatstein spends much of the trip spotting fellow Jewish people and sounding them out about Hitler, but he has plenty of time to talk about everybody else, too.  Volume II, "Homecoming ...

The Halloween Tree, by Ray Bradbury Yeah, it's not Halloween or even fall.  I put this on hold at the library, and then I suspended the hold, planning to read it in October, but somehow the hold was activated and I got it in July instead.  That's okay, I'm quite ready for fall!  And, I've decided to switch out the last few picks in my 20 Books of Summer; there is no way I'm going to make it through a modernist Russian novel of over 400 pages, and I have some books that have to get read before being returned to the library.  Like this one! On Halloween, the greatest night of the year, eight boys gather, each in their costumes.  But where is the ninth, Joe Pipkin?  He tells them to meet him at a haunted house on the edge of town, and when they do, they meet Mr. Moundshroud and see his Halloween tree -- and they see Pip seized by death.  Mr. Moundshroud leads them on a chase through time, stopping at festivals of the dead where Pipkin is imprisoned....

Smoke Gets In Your Eyes, and Other Lessons from the Crematory , by Caitlin Doughty I have this kid, age 18, who plans on a career in the funereal field, and so we've had this book around the house for a couple of years now.  (A signed copy, even!)   I didn't really know anything about Doughty myself, though, until I got around to reading her book. Smoke Gets In Your Eyes is half memoir, half ponderings on how Americans deal with death (spoiler: by pretending it doesn't exist).  Doughty was a medieval history major, but then got a job at an Oakland crematorium, where she could freely indulge her  fears and thoughts about death. (Please note at this point in the proceedings that the funeral industry is not about Gothic fascination/romanticization of death.  Nope, should you have leanings that way, do not try to become a mortician, or if you do, it will be crushed right out of you right quick.  Nobody wants their funeral director mooning about de...

Adam at Roof Beam Reader brought back an old meme that used to circulate, and it looked fun, so... 4 Things In/On My Desk A measuring tape A goofy photo of me and my brother as toddlers, with humorous caption  A stuffed Discworld Librarian  (ook!) A neat rock from the Chico Formation Bonus: a slightly macabre model of my kid's now-perfect post-braces teeth.  I paid for 'em, I'm going to admire 'em. The Chico Formation! 4 Things I’ve Always Wanted To Do (but haven’t yet) Visit Russia, India, Japan, New Zealand, Ireland..... Be an astronaut Read the Durants' Story of Civilization Make art out of books too decrepit to be usable (I have a collection! I'm ready!) This is how long I've had the Durant books; this baby is now 15. 4 Favorite Things In My Room/Bedroom The color wheel quilt and pillow I made The cedar chest I put together from a kit when I was 16 (contains letters and so on) The broken piece of medieval pottery I got in ...

Child of All Nations, by Pramoedya Ananta Toer Last summer I read the first book in Pramoedya Ananta Toer's Buru quartet, This Earth of Mankind .   I thought it was great, but it still took me a whole year to get to this second volume, which is also great.  I'm definitely planning on reading the next two as well -- do I keep them for summer roadtrips, thus continuing the trend but taking four years to read the quartet, or do I go a little faster than that? At the end of the first book, Minke's wife Annelies is forced to travel to the Netherlands; the Dutch colonial court has ruled that she is the ward of her father's Dutch relatives, and they want control of the extensive properties that Annelies' mother, a Native and a concubine, controls.  Minke and Ma are left to mourn and wait for news from their employee who has secretly followed in order to encourage and watch over the despairing Annelies. Annelies dies, ignored by her 'guardian,' and Minke is s...

Lectures on Russian Literature, by Vladimir Nabokov A few years ago, I read Nabokov's Lectures on Literature , which covers several English and French authors (Dickens, Proust, Austen...) and is a very enjoyable read, though Nabokov is weirdly anti-women authors and really doesn't like Jane Austen at all except for Mansfield Park , which he thinks is wonderful.  I also wanted to read this collection of lectures on Russian literature, but I felt like I ought to know more about Russian literature before I did.  Now that I've read a bit of all the authors he covers (though of course not as much as I would like), I felt like I could tackle this. We start with Gogol, and I got a lot out of that chapter.  I would like to re-read Dead Souls now, armed with some of the insights I got.  The Turgenev chapter is similar and I want to read more Turgenev.  (Odd fact: Turgenev admired Bazarov in Fathers and Sons , and was bewildered by the general reception of his cha...

Tram 83, by Fiston Mwanza Mujila If you're reading around the world, you should probably not expect sweetness and light from your Democratic Republic of the Congo pick, and indeed I did not.  Good thing too, because it was pretty relentlessly grim.  I can't say that I enjoyed it -- I don't think it was supposed to be enjoyed, it's not that kind of novel -- but there were one or two things I liked. Fiston Mwanza Mujila is Congolese but now lives in Austria, teaching African literature.  Tram 83 was his first novel and got lots of attention and acclaim. Tram 83 is not a bus, or a station.  It's a nightclub, the nightclub, in an unnamed African "City-State" where everything has long ago fallen apart, except for the mines and the crime.  Everyone congregates at Tram 83 -- the gangsters and prostitutes and the for-profit tourists.  Requiem is a gang leader, renowned and ambitious; his childhood friend, Lucien, has returned from abroad and is working on ...

Selected Stories of Lu Hsun For quite some time I've been wanting to read Lu Hsun (or Lu Xun, as some of the older books in the library have it).  I know very little of Chinese literature, but I know that Lu Hsun is one of the most influential writers around.  He seems to have written mostly essays, believing that it was his responsibility to influence politics and advance the liberation of his people from feudalist tradition and capitalist oppression (he wasn't exactly a Communist, but he was sympathetic to them).  However, he was also interested in the literatures of oppressed nations and was an admirer of Adam Mickiewicz among others (I recently read Mikiewicz's epic, Pan Tadeusz ).  Lu Hsun also wrote short stories, which are usually lauded as groundbreaking in Chinese literature and perfect specimens of their kind.  So I was pretty excited to read some. These stories are of everyday life, often from the point of view of an impoverished scholar who can...

Lovely new issues! The Demon in the House Growing Up Pomfret Towers, by Angela Thirkell At the beginning of the summer, I read Summer Half and just had so much fun with it; it was ages since I'd read any Thirkell, and lots of bloggers seemed to be reading her, which put me in the mood.  I told a friend about it and lent her Pomfret Towers , and then I checked a couple more out of the library -- two titles I've enjoyed but do not own.  On the trip to Utah, I found out that Thirkell was just right for fitting into the corners of the days, and since my friend (also my Utah hostess) was done with the one I'd lent her, I had two to read.  All of which is to say that I've had kind of a Thirkelly summer and it's been lovely. The Demon in the House is a bit unusual, because it's about Tony Morland, who is a little boy of twelve.  He is the youngest son of Mrs. Morland, a popular recurring Barsetshire character and a novelist who writes spy thrillers set in ...

I feel like I've done almost nothing for the past few weeks but travel, or pack for traveling, or recover from traveling.  I've hardly had time to read, much less to blog, but I've done a bit of reading and I've missed the blogging!  Here's a quick rundown: Early in the summer my kids and I made a sort of bucket list of things we wanted to do.  I promised faithfully that this summer, I really and truly would take them to Six Flags, a realio, trulio amusement park.  My poor children are so deprived that they've never been to anything besides the county fair (and the terrifyingly rickety rides it has).  In mid-July I realized that if I didn't take them within a week, it wouldn't happen at all...so I did it, in a super-human feat of driving endurance (three hours each way; I am a rotten long-distance driver, because I get sleepy).  We had a great time and I rode a roller coaster for the first time in years. My brother got married!  We drove to Portlan...

The Sibyl, by Pär Lagerkvist I actually read this short novel a few weeks ago, on the way to Portland, but life has moved so fast that I haven't gotten around to blogging it yet.  It was easy to forget about, since the book disappeared from our AirBnB house -- perhaps it was a lovely present for the next person to come along?  I didn't mind losing it; it was an ancient paperback that my brother had left behind, and I was going to put it into the Little Free Library anyway. The one I lost.  Not very beautiful; I won't miss it. This was a very strange novel, I thought.  Near the oracle at Delphi, presumably sometime before about 500 AD, an aged sibyl lives up on the mountain with her son.  A man comes to visit her, asking for a prophecy, and tells his story; fearing bad luck, he told a man condemned to crucifixion not to lean on his wall to rest.  The man cursed him with immortality -- we have here the Wandering Jew of legend,* who complains against ...

Oh, it's so lovely to be home!  I had a great trip, saw some friends and some neat things, visited two museums, read hardly a thing, and wished for clear skies (or better yet, rain) the entire time because as far as I can tell the West is just completely smothered in smoke from wildfires.  California: smoke.  Nevada: all smoke.  Utah: more smoke.  Here at home, we aren't supposed to go outside too much because of all the ash and awful air quality.  The terrible Carr fire is about an hour north, and the even worse Mendocino complex fires are to the southwest. So I was gone for the day when the Spin number was revealed, but it was 9! Which is a happy number for me, because it means I will read Constellation Myths , by Eratosthenes and Hyginus, and how fun is that?  Eratosthanes is one of my favorite librarians, after all.  Plus it's not too long, so I can realistically hope to finish it by the end of the month despite my late start and the m...