Howling Frog Books

Sister Emily's Lightship, by Jane Yolen Happy Halloween! I can't exactly call this an RIP read, but it has elements and so I'm going to round off the event by squeaking it in here, and incidentally segue into Witch Week!  Jane Yolen is one of the grand dames of SF/F writing, I think we can all agree (RIGHT?  *ominous glare*), and this collection of short pieces that were published all over the place is well worth tracking down. Many of these stories are twists on classic fairy tales -- "Snow in Summer," for example, is a version of Snow White set in Appalachia, or in a really genius bit, "Granny Rumple" is a realistic tale that could have been the seed for an anti-Semitic Rumplestiltskin .  "Godmother Death" is a wonderful version of a story found across cultures, in which a man outwits Death...but only for so long. There's a nice little series of stories about fey, where the characters are related or appear in various tales.  The y...

The Great God Pan, by Arthur Machen Arthur Machen wrote some early fantasy horror, and I always like to see what Victorians invented back when there were fewer scripts for how a fantasy story should go.  This one is fairly weird, but it isn't a novel; it's a collection of four short stories, though "The Great God Pan" is the longest and almost qualifies as a novella.  I have a paperback Penguin English Library copy, which appears to be unavailable in the US except as an import, but Penguin just published a fancier hardback with more stories in it than I have. In "The Great God Pan," a doctor finds a way to do brain surgery that will allow the patient to see other dimensions; what he calls "seeing the great god Pan."  The victim of this surgery at first appears to have completely lost her reason, but further chapters, set in later years, reveal bits and pieces of a much worse story.  A girl, and then a woman, appears at intervals and befriends...

City of the Shrieking Tomb, by Patrick Rogers Earlier in the year, I reviewed The Green Unknown, a memoir of hiking around the northeastern Indian state of Meghalaya.  Then Patrick Rogers contacted me again about his new book, a novel this time, also set in India and with an irresistible title.  As my friend April used to say, twist my rubber arm -- I had a lot of fun reading this ghostly tale. Rick is a photographer traveling around for a project on old Islamic architecture, and he's trying to get a bus to Bidar without going far out of his way to Hyderabad for it.  A friendly doctor, Awaz, gets him on a bus, which then breaks down at Awaz' hometown of Humayunpur -- but Awaz doesn't want Rick to stay.  Outsiders are not welcome in Humayunpur.  But since there's no alternative, Awaz reluctantly invites Rick to stay overnight, as long as he's leaving first thing in the morning. The bus is still broken in the morning, though, and Awaz softens a bit, invitin...

Every day, I plan to write on my blog, and every day, it gets crowded out!  The pile of books on my desk is not getting smaller, and I miss writing.  So I've got one scheduled for tomorrow, and here's a quick post on some other things. The school year is going nicely, with me at work, one new college student taking anatomy, and a high-school sophomore loving marching band.  Friday night was the local Big Game between the two high schools, and the marching band put on a complicated, ambitious half-time show that they've been working on for weeks.  Afterwards, they get on the field with the other school's band and have a 'battle of the bands,' playing songs for and with each other, that is really fun.  I missed out on the whole thing, sadly, because... Friday night was also the annual Trivia Bee fundraiser for the county Literacy Services.  It went really well and was a lot of fun, and our team won bronze.  If I had remembered calcium carbonate, we w...

The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner's Semester at America's Holiest University, by Kevin Roose I was happy to see this book come across the donation table, because it's been on my wishlist of "books to get around to checking out of the library" for a while.  And it was a really interesting book to read; I liked Roose and his project. Kevin Roose was a perfectly average freshman at Brown University in Rhode Island.  Evidently he also had a job doing assistance to A. J. Jacobs, the guy who makes a living by doing a project for a year and then writing a book about it -- living according to ancient Jewish law, reading the Encyclopedia Britannica, and so on.  When Roose, in the course of his job, visited an evangelical church and met some students from Liberty University, he decided to do his own project.  Lots of his friends did study abroad trips to Europe to learn about other cultures, but here was a much more alien culture right on his own doorstep.  Why not sp...

Confronting the Classics: Traditions, Adventures, and Innovations, by Mary Beard I like books about the classical world (that is to say, ancient Greeks and Romans), especially about reading their books.  I thought this book would be about reading classical literature, but it turned out to be a collection of reviews of books about the classical world, the kind of reviews that are essays several pages in length and that can include many of the reviewer's own thoughts before getting around to the book review part.  So, while it was an OK read, I kind of felt like it was cheating a little bit to collect a bunch of book reviews and not mention that on the back of the book; I was reading about books I've never read and have no wish to read. That said, many of the essays are quite interesting; it's just that they're also pretty random.  Beard imposes a bit of structure on them by categorizing them into sections that then move chronologically through ancient Greece and the ...

Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World -- and Why Things Are Better Than You Think, by Hans Rosling This book has been making something of a splash in non-fiction and especially tech circles.  Bill Gates endorsed it, so that's probably making an impression in a lot of places.  It's the sort of book I really like, but I wasn't in a big hurry, so I put my name on the hold list at the public library and then didn't actually read the book until 4 days before it was due back.  I thought maybe I'd skim and get it later, but instead I was instantly grabbed, and read the whole thing in less than 24 hours.  (Although it's a thickish book, it's quite fast to read.)  Now I'm pushing it to the top of my blogging pile, since I have to return it right away! Hans Rosling was a doctor, expert in international health, speaker, and adviser to WHO and UNICEF.  His TED talks are popular, he helped co-found Doctors Without Borders in his native Sweden...

Franny and Zooey, by J. D. Salinger I put Franny and Zooey on my mental TBR list last year, when somebody assured me that I would like it much better than Catcher in the Rye .  (I have read Catcher three times.  I get that Holden is a mess for particular reasons.  But I'm the wrong person to read it; at this point, I read it with Mom Eyes.  I just want to give him a giant sandwich, a glass of milk, a quart of water, and send him to bed.   After he sleeps for 24 hours, I'll make him shower, feed him some more, and give him a job in construction for a year.  He'll feel much better.) Franny and Zooey turned out to be two short things; the short story Franny, and the novella Zooey.  They're siblings, part of a family Salinger wrote about every so often.  Franny is the youngest, and all six of them are former child prodigies who were featured on the radio all the time.  Franny is at college, and her story shows her visiting her boyfrie...

White is for Witching, by Helen Oyeyemi Now this is what I call an RIP read! This was a weird, fascinating, and entirely spooky novel. Miranda and her twin brother Eliot live in an old house in Dover.  They've been there for several years, since their father converted it to a bed-and-breakfast, but it's belonged to their mother's side of the family for four generations: first Anna Silver, whose husband died in the war; Jennifer, who disappeared, leaving her baby to be brought up by Anna, then Lily, who died while traveling abroad.  After Lily's death, Miranda became strangely ill.  She hates food but will eat plenty of other things.  She hears voices.  Miranda and Eliot are in college now, and they're both intelligent, but Miranda seems to be fastening on to Eliot in a strange way.  When she brings a friend home from Cambridge, the house -- holder of the Silver women -- is not pleased at all. It's a very modern take on a Gothic novel, and just so ...

Well, things have been pretty busy around here, but I've been doing some fun reading and I do plan to tell you about it!  Meanwhile, it's time for the Mount TBR Checkpoint.  Bev says: For those who would like to participate in this checkpoint post, I'd like you to do two things: 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.  I'm pleased to report that I finished up book #27 last night!  I'm now over the top for my original goal of 24.  Good thing too, because the pile just keeps getting larger.  I thought I wasn't getting many books this year, but I was fooling myself, especially after I found out that John Verney and Alan Garner have disappeared from my local public library.  I went on an AbeBooks binge and bought (for super-cheap!) most of ...

Dragon Ascending (Vanir Chronicles) , by Amy Beatty I have this friend, Amy, who I mostly know online through homeschooling, but we've met a couple of times in real life too.  Amy is an amazing person, plus she is eloquent and wise in a way that I will certainly never ever be.  Also I feel like our families would get along well if they happened to live in the same state.  Anyway, Amy had always wanted to be a writer and felt like it was time to do the thing.  She told me that she wasn't sure whether she wanted to write a complicated galactic SF novel, or a fantasy novel about dragons, so she figured she would try both.  She wasn't sure whether she was a meticulous plot-planner or more of a spontaneous writer, so she tried both.  The result is two books, and the dragon novel found a publisher remarkably quickly (I know this because I saw it over Facebook in real time).  First, Edrik is thrown into a dungeon, which wasn't his plan.  His plan was...