Howling Frog Books

THEM: Adventures With Extremists, by Jon Ronson I've been on a bit of a Ronson spree, I guess, even though I didn't know anything about him until I'd already started.  I knew Ronson as the author of So You've Been Publicly Shamed , a book I liked.  I got this one off the donation table, and then another, and only when I was almost done with them did I find out that he also wrote The Men Who Stare at Goats and is apparently quite well known -- just not to me.  Wikipedia calls him a gonzo journalist who assumes a " faux-naif" persona in his writing. This is Ronson's second book, written over some time and published in 2001, "a snapshot of life in the Western world on September 10, 2001," when he thought all these people he was interviewing were getting very dramatic over nothing much and nothing would really happen.  By the time he wrote the foreword of my 2002 edition, things looked different.  And now, in 2018, they look different again. ...

The Spin number was given out this morning , and it's.... This number has the appropriate feel, I think Oh, waily waily! as the Nac Mac Feegle would say.  My title -- for a very jolly Christmas read -- is Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment , the newish Oliver Ready translation, which I've actually been quite excited about, but I'm not too sure about reading it over Christmas.  It's not exactly cozy . I feel like the bosun in Tim's Last Voyage .  I don't know if you're familiar with the Little Tim books by Ardizzone (if you're not, you should be!), but in this one, a terrible storm engulfs the ship where Tim is signed on as a cabin boy.  The bosun takes to his room in a cowardly manner and unhelpfully howls "Doom" at everybody. The funny thing is that I'm always putting a book I'm scared of into the #1 spot, on the obviously untenable and mathematically illiterate grounds that it's somehow less likely than the ot...

I now have seven books sitting in front of me to review, and some of them were read well before the fire.  Now I can barely remember them.  So, I'm going to do quickie reviews of all of them, and consider that a fresh start to the winter season. The Infernal Library: On Dictators, the Books They Wrote, and Other Catastrophes of Literacy, by Daniel Kalder:     Oh boy, this was not to be missed!  How do you pass up that title?  Kalder gives us a tour of the terrible, awful literary productions of 20th century dictators, from Lenin on down.  The material is no fun, but he helps the reader survive with a large dose of wit.  The big names go first, with Mao taking up quite a lot of space, but there's room for a whole lot of less-famous dictators, such as Salazar of Portugal and Hoxha of Armenia.  Everybody felt the need to write books that would dictate how the world should work: Gaddafi wrote the Green Book , Saddam Hussein wrote allegorical...

Oh, how I love a Spin, and boy I could sure use one right now.  So let's do it!  The newly-renovated Classics Club is hosting a special chunkster edition of its Spin : On Tuesday 27th November, we’ll post a number from 1 through 20. The challenge is to read whatever book falls under that number on your Spin List, by 31st January, 2019 .  Yes, you read that date correctly: the 31st January 2019 ! This is an extra special, super-dooper CHUNKSTER edition of the Classics Club Spin. We challenge you to fill this spin list with 20 of those HUGE books you’ve been putting off reading because you didn’t have enough time. With this spin we are giving you the time  – nearly 10 weeks in fact – to tackle one of those imposing tomes on your classics shelf. This is an excellent plan.  I usually put very few chunksters on my Spin lists because the time is short (but I always put a few, because Danger is my middle name!).  So here is my Terrifying Chunkster...

Hi folks, I guess I ought to start getting back to books, but before that I want to talk a little bit more about the news around here.  The fire is still not fully contained, but they've been gaining about 5% a day, which is amazing to me.  As far as I can tell, tremendous efforts by both firefighters and townsfolk have saved Stirling City (though I don't think the danger is entirely over there).  We're supposed to get heavy rain starting tomorrow, which is both a blessing and a problem; it will help tremendously and lessen further fire danger, but it will also produce a lot of toxic sludge, which will enter streams, and without healthy plants to hold the soil down, there may be mudslides.  There doesn't seem to be any way to stop those things from happening. They're starting to let people in a little teeny bit, but mostly they're still looking for the dead and surveying the damage.  There are still lots of people who don't know whether their homes are the...

Hey folks, I thought I'd post a little update in case you're interested.  The fire is still spreading, and it's jumped the river at a spot I think everybody was hoping would stay contained, so that's not good.  It's also heading towards more small communities.  But it has, at least, slowed for the moment. Regular citizens are not yet allowed up to Paradise -- there are downed trees and power lines all over the place -- but we are getting some news about what has and has not been preserved.  We were happy to hear today that the public library up there is still intact, which is good news as it can serve people in many ways during whatever rebuilding will happen.  Otherwise, the news is mostly bad -- you can see videos all over Facebook, and they're devastating.  I know a lot of people who have confirmed that their houses have gone, and one who knows it's still there.  Others just don't know yet.  And we have over 40 confirmed dead; that number w...

I was all ready to post about some great books I've been reading, especially this one non-fiction title, but right now blogging about books is the last thing on my mind, so I thought I'd post something to let you all know what's going on.  We are just fine, but nobody else around here is... Thursday morning a small wildfire sparked up on the ridge -- I live in a valley, but tucked up near the start of the mountains -- and it spread so fast.  This fire just exploded, and it turned out to be the Big One we all worried would come some day.  The winter rains haven't started yet, and everything is extremely dry.  Our lovely little neighbor town of Paradise was pretty well destroyed, while people escaped as fast as they could.  By evening, the fire was reaching the edges of our town too, but it's much easier to fight a fire on the valley floor, so although many people were evacuated, nearly all of them were able to go home the next day.  Thursday morning ...

This is the week where we pair up books!  The theme is fiction/non-fiction book pairings, and it's hosted at Sarah's Book Shelves: It can be a “If you loved this book, read this!” or just two titles that you think would go well together. Maybe it’s a historical novel and you’d like to get the real history by reading a nonfiction version of the story. Lots of people love this question, but I have a really hard time with it.  It may be that I'm not very imaginative.  I was looking at my shelves, and it seems to me that a lot of the time, my tastes in fiction vs. non-fiction really don't overlap very much.  I don't really care for historical fiction, though I love to read history.   But Brona saved me, by pairing up books from her TBR shelf, and so I went and looked at my shelf and came up with a couple of things... When the World Spoke French, by Marc Fumaroli, and Les Miserables, by Victor Hugo .  I'm scared of French literature, but I do wa...

Guess what, it's Nonfiction November!  This one snuck up on me.  Nonfiction November is a month-long event that talks about everything non-fiction.  There's a different prompt and host every week.  This week's host is Kim at Sophisticated Dorkiness , and she asks: Week 1: (Oct. 29 to Nov. 2) – Your Year in Nonfiction (Kim @ Sophisticated Dorkiness ): Take a look back at your year of nonfiction and reflect on the following questions – What was your favorite nonfiction read of the year? Do you have a particular topic you’ve been attracted to more this year? What nonfiction book have you recommended the most? What are you hoping to get out of participating in Nonfiction November? Favorite non-fiction read of the year: Boy, that's a tough one.  Looking back on what I've read, I see that I have read more non-fiction than I thought I did, and a lot of it was great.  I can't pick just one, so here is a top five: 5.  The Coddling of the American...

The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation for Failure, by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt First off, don't think this is a "kids today, get off my lawn" kind of book.  It's not.  Plus, they hated the title and wanted it to be called Disempowered .  Check out the video below (which was a bit of tongue-in-cheek Halloween fun) for some explanation! I've been a Lukianoff fan for some years now -- as the president of FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, he's been working on First Amendment rights at colleges for years, and that's how I got to hear of him.  (Back in 2014, I took a kid to see him speak on a panel at the 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley.  The event was extremely Berkeley;  I laughed all the way up Bancroft Ave. afterwards, but I'm pretty sure poor Lukianoff wanted to scream.  On the strength of that, I cadged a Facebook acquaintance.) I ...