Howling Frog Books

Lurid cartoons on every panel! Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, trans. by Oliver Ready My chunkster Spin title was Crime and Punishment, and despite the completely un-cozy nature of the novel, I really was pretty excited to read this new translation by Oliver Ready.  I read Crime and Punishment once before, years ago (maybe 15?  after I moved to this house but before I started the blog), and I don't know what translation that was, other than an older one -- given that I was reading a very elderly pocket paperback, it was probably Constance Gannett.  I remember almost nothing, but I did find it something of a slog.  Well, this translation is not a slog! The story is well known: Raskolnikov, a student in St. Petersburg, has no money and no energy either.  Everything makes him angry, and he lies in his filthy little room and feverishly stews over his terrible, tempting plan -- there's this awful pawnbroker woman, and if he killed her, he could...

First, a little update:  I started back to work last week.  It's a new semester, filled with hope and possibility!  It's nice to be back, and I am also working a lot more hours now, as a co-worker is on maternity leave.  It's a good chance for me to do more (and earn more!), but the transition is proving a little rough.  Suddenly I seem to have almost no time at home, so keeping the household running takes up the hours I'm not at work.  Don't worry, I'm making the kids step up; everybody is willing enough, but we're working on that elusive skill of noticing that things need to happen without Mom pointing it out.  Reading time is only somewhat curtailed (since a lot of my reading time happens while doing other things anyway) but wow, I'm going to have to be very intentional about scheduling blogging time or it will never happen. Meanwhile, everybody else did a weekly Top Ten post about the books they wished they'd read in 2018, but didn't.  I d...

A Fall of Moondust, by Arthur C. Clarke I got a bit bogged down in my Vintage Sci-Fi reading when I picked up an Alfred Bester novel and didn't love it.  I will still finish it, but I wanted to do one more fun read before the month was over, so I picked this 1961 Clarke novel that looked interesting. In the not-too-distant future (from us; I think this is set around 2020 or so), the Moon has a few cities and a small tourist trade.  Pat Harris and Sue Wilkins run a Moon bus-ship, the Selene , for trips across the Sea of Thirst.  This large crater is filled with moondust, which acts almost like a liquid -- though it doesn't ripple.  A moonquake pulls the Selene down under the dust, trapping 22 people alive. This is a technical problem novel which made me think of a cross between The Poseidon Adventure and The Martian .  Can the Selene be found?  If it's found at all, how to bring it up from under unknown fathoms of dust?  Inside, how to keep 20 ...

I adore old paperback cover art, and I especially love old SF cover art!  In honor of Vintage Sci-Fi Month, Little Red has asked about our favorite covers.  Here are some of mine.  I love anything with a spaceman in a silly outfit...  I read these all the time when I was a kid, and to me they are perfect examples of SF cover art. You can't go wrong with an axe and lots of red hair, right? This one is just so goofy.  I love weirdo covers like these. I love these because they're so perfectly typical of the period's style, so surreal and supposed to be all symbolic. Ahahaha perfecto. My husband also likes SF art, and his tastes run to John Berkey, Vincent di Fate, and Chris Foss -- spacescapes with huge ships or structures hanging in front of planets.  Whenever I read Archer's Goon, Howard and his spaceships reminds me of him.  Here's one for the husband, "a really complicated spaceship, full of unnecessary but soothing twidd...

Born to Be Posthumous: the Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey, by Mark Dery My librarian co-worker and I have both been looking forward to this, and we had to have a polite argument about who got to take this book home first and keep it over winter break.  "You should take it first; I have so many books at home."  "No, you should have it -- I might not be able to finish it in time!"  I wound up with it and am due to take it back on the first day of the semester, which is tomorrow -- today by the time this is published.  So I'd better hurry up and get this post done. Can you believe nobody has done a Gorey biography before this?  Me neither.  On the whole, it's an interesting read and delves into Gorey's childhood, Army service during the war*, and all other events through his whole life. There is a happy amount of discussion of Gorey's particular aesthetic, and the implications thereof. Of course, all writing and artistic purs...

Three Weeks, by Elinor Glyn Reading Rambo is a genius at coming up with insane readalongs, and as she said... I never thought you could actually read Elinor Glyn's books; she seemed like some distant untouchable literary figure, referenced in The Music Man , but whose works were not to be seen by contemporary eyes. Well that is nonsense. They're right there on the internet for free. This was a revelation to me.  I could read Elinor Glyn!  So I joined in the Glynalong and here I am, having finished one of Glyn's more scandalous novels, Three Weeks .  It's a romance novel of 1907 and it's no wonder it caused a fuss; this story straight-up involves an older married lady seducing a young man and having an affair with him for, you guessed it, three weeks. Paul is a 23-year-old young man who has fallen in love with the Wrong Girl -- that is, one who is of a slightly lower class and isn't very pretty.  Isabella is a tall, strapping young woman with "large...

Cover to Cover: Creative Techniques for Making Beautiful Books, Journals & Albums, by Shereen LaPlantz Innovative Bookbinding: Secret Compartments and Hidden Messages, by Shereen LaPlantz Bound: Over 20 Artful Handmade Books, by Erica Ekrem I've been getting a little bit into bookmaking, which has been so much fun.   I've tried out several books on the subject, and here are three I looked at recently. Cover to Cover is full of great ideas.  It's a very good general book about making books, and covers a lot of the basics.  Shereen LaPlantz seems to have specialized in taking simple ideas and coming up with a zillion ways to implement them in cool ways.  This would be an excellent purchase for somebody like me who wants to try out different things and is not yet very knowledgeable.  (Several of the books I've looked at in the past have turned out not to be very good, so this is a serious recommendation.)  There is also a lot of variety here...

The Secret of Sinharat, by Leigh Brackett Yep, I found another Stark novel!  This short novel takes place on Mars, before the story I first read in Black Amazon of Mars.   (In fact, that novel is also included in this volume, but under a different title, so I read a page or so before figuring it out.)  It's just as adventurous and dramatic as the others.  Stark has been hired to go to Mars and fight as a mercenary, but his mentor finds him and explains that there's a lot more to the story than his employer has revealed.  He agrees to try to stop the imminent war instead, to spare the many tribes of innocents who will be slaughtered if the plan goes forth.  So Stark joins Delgaun and Kynon, who plan to unite the Drylander tribes of Mars, plunder the richer cities, and then take over the world.  It all seems straightforward enough, but it sure isn't!  This is all part of a deep plot by an ancient and hidden evil. This was a fun one.  I en...

Kar Kaballa, by George Henry Smith / Tower of the Medusa, by Lin Carter So fun to have an Ace Double title to read for Vintage Sci-Fi January!  It was hard to choose which to read first, but I went with Kar Kaballa, which was pretty great.  I would happily read the other three books set in this world, but sadly they seem almost impossible to come by.  On Earth's twin world (in another dimension, not on the other side of the Sun), much is the same, yet different.  Our myths are their reality and vice versa; the Annwn Empire, with its capital of Avallon, is not the British Empire, but it was founded by Arthur when he was brought there by Morgan le Fay.  Shakespeare is a folk-figure who is popularly credited with great plays that are actually folktales sprung from the people.  Annwn is complacent and has paid no attention to the Gogs across the sea, but Dylan MacBride, a Highlander soldier, knows that the Gogs (think Mongolian hordes) are about to in...

Individualism and Economic Order, by F. A. Hayek This is the one book from my TBR Challenge last year that I didn't manage to read, because it is so very daunting.  So I decided it should be my first pick this year!  That way the scariest thing would be over with.  Imagine my dismay and consternation when I actually opened the book and read the words: ...I should in fairness warn the reader that the present volume is not intended for popular consumption.  Only a few of the essays collected here (chaps. i and vi, and possibly iv and v) may in a sense be regarded as supplementary...the rest are definitely addressed to fellow-students and are fairly technical in character.  Now, I found Hayek's works for laypeople quite difficult enough.  I knew I couldn't wrap my brain around technical essays for fellow economists!   So I decided that I would read the four essays he thought regular people could handle, and call it good.  And indeed I bash...

The Happiness Curve: Why Life Gets Better After 50, by Jonathan Rauch All through his forties, Jonathan Rauch* was fairly miserable, and he didn't really have a good reason to be.  His career was doing well, he'd accomplished more than he'd dreamed of, his personal life was happy, he was healthy and strong -- and yet he couldn't stop telling himself that he should be doing far better.  He often felt like bolting from his perfectly good career.  Was this a midlife crisis?  Was he just a really ungrateful, terrible person who didn't appreciate his blessings?  The more he scolded himself, the worse he felt. As a journalist, though, he could find out some things, and in fact he found out quite a bit.  It's quite stunning to me, but it turns out that it is normal to be kind of miserable in your 40s, approximately.  It happens across cultures, in every country.   In fact, it's hard-wired into us and other great apes do it, too.  Of course, ou...

1973 Annual World's Best SF, ed. by Donald Wollheim I think this series has been going forever!  I found the 1973 edition, with ten short stories, and about half were by people I'd heard of.  I really picked it up because it had a story by James Tiptree, Jr., and I've been hoping to read her (without any effort on my part, ideally -- no nearby libraries have any of her works and I've pretty much been relying on the donation table for vintage SF anyway, so I just sort books and hope something shows up).  On the whole, the stories were indeed pretty good!  Here are a few I liked: "Goat Song," by Poul Anderson: long in the future, the world is governed by a god-computer, SUM, whose living representative is a woman rendered immortal.  Once a year people can petition her.  This guy is so sad that his girlfriend is dead, he petitions for her to be resurrected, and it's granted...but he has to walk all the way out without looking back.  Hello, Orpheus! ...

Educated: a Memoir, by Tara Westover I've been hearing about this memoir, but I wasn't going to seek it out.  A friend of mine is visiting and said I should read it, so she lent me her copy...and I was hooked.  I read it in three hours! Tara Westover was raised in very rural Idaho as part of a survivalist-minded family.  Their dad was convinced that the government, doctors -- well, anything establishment -- was out to get them.  The Ruby Ridge incident convinced him a good deal further.  As is often the case, they got more extreme over time, so that the oldest kids went to public school for a while, but the younger kids did not have birth certificates and never went to school at all.  The mom, who started off a home herbalist, was encouraged (well, pushed) to become a not- quite -illegal midwife and full-time healer.  In theory, the family homeschooled, but the necessity for work overrode most educational pursuits, and after a while they figured ...

Agricola and Germania, by Tacitus I've been meaning to read Tacitus (well, the easy bits) for some time, but what kicked me into gear was the book on my shelf all about the influence of Germania on European culture and history.  I am allowed to start reading it after I write this post! Tacitus is considered the best Roman historian -- at least, he's the best we've got!  We certainly don't have everything he wrote.  Large chunks are missing from one of his longer works.  I read two really short things; a life of Agricola, Tacitus' father-in-law, and this sort of tour of the territory of Germania, which was most of Northern Europe. The largest part of Agricola's biography covers his time as governor of Roman Britain.  It has a short description of Britannia, and of how Agricola extended Roman rule right up to the Pictish territory; I think this is as far as it ever got, up to the Firth of Forth.  There are famous stories in here.  This is how we...

Looks beige, is in fact a bit sparkly What If This Were Enough? by Heather Havrilesky Heather Havrilesky writes this kind of oddball advice column, Ask Polly , for the Cut.  At least, I've never read any advice columnist like that before!  I like it a lot, so when she put out a book of essays recently, I picked it up. I'm kind of mixed on the essays.  Several of them are critiques of pop-culture things -- TV shows and such -- that I have never seen, so it's kind of hard to care about them.  On the other hand, never having seen The Sopranos was not a big barrier to understanding the critique, which was excellent.  And she's usually drawing pointers about the larger American culture, which I do live in, so it's not like they're totally irrelevant...but still, I don't know anything about most current TV shows (by which I mean virtually any TV of the last 15+ years) and I don't feel like I need to.* When Havrilesky is not writing about TV, whic...

Anachronistic 1962 cover! Beyond the Sound of Guns , by Emilie Loring My brother got me this great little paperback romance novel for Christmas (off his work book-trade table; we don't really buy gifts for adult siblings, just for the kids).  It was published in 1945, but as you see, my copy is from 1962.  The blurb on the back is irresistible: As the Second World War raged across the world, lovely, raven-haired Kit Marlowe and her brother sought peace and quiet at her brother's Double-H Ranch.  Then war came to this remote cattle country. Enemy agents were stealing the Double-H beeves needed to feed our fighting men. And Kit knew her luck was bad when she stumbled on the identity of the head of the saboteurs, for this fanatical enemy would use any means to silence her forever. Irrevocably trapped, only one man could help her - bold and charming Colonel Rex Danton, the man who had stolen her brother's fiancée - the man she had sworn to hate!  Cattle-...

The Teacher of Cheops, by Albert Salvadó Literary works by Andorran writers that are translated into English are not thick on the ground, since the principality of Andorra only has about 77,000 people (according to a quick check on Wikipedia).  My town has more people than that, and it has several authors -- but I bet none of them are translated into another language.  So I lifted a page from Ann Morgan's "Year of Reading the World" list , and read Albert Salvadó, who has one novel translated into English from the original Catalan.  And it's a historical novel about ancient Egypt! This is the life story of Sedum, born into slavery, whose single goal in life is to become free and bequeath that freedom to his children.  He becomes a junior accountant for the Pharaoh Huni and becomes free while still a young man.  Surviving the intricacies of Pharaoh's court is tricky even for a junior accountant, but Sedum rises during Snefru's reign, even becoming a tuto...

Earthworks, by Brian Aldiss Here's my first Vintage Sci-Fi book for January!  Brian Aldiss started writing in the mid-50s, so this isn't quite an early novel, but it is fairly early on in his decades-long career.  It was published in 1965. A couple hundred years in the future, Earth is living a Malthusian nightmare.  The population is 24 billion, nearly everyone is desperately poor and malnourished, and practically all the land is turned over to farming in the poisoned and depleted soil, so everything is massively toxic.  Synthetic, poisonous food is routine, and the whole world is a police state.  Robots are more valuable than people and do most of the work.  African nations now lead the globe, and their unifying president is the only person who can hold the whole thing together. Against this background, Knowle Noland chronicles his life.  He is one of the few literate people in the world, and he used to be the captain of the Trieste Star , ...

Jim at the Corner, by Eleanor Farjeon Just a little post to tell you about the lovely storybook I got for Christmas.  I've always been a dedicated Eleanor Farjeon fan, and wore out the copy of The Little Bookroom I had when I was a kid.  I only got to read her other works after I was grown up and could use the power of the internet to buy used books!  Happily for me and for many children, the New York Review re-published The Little Bookroom and another Farjeon title I'd never seen before -- Jim at the Corner .  It's not a long book at all. On the corner of Derry's street, a retired sailor spends his days sitting on an old orange box.  The people on the street take care of Jim, and the children crowd around him to hear his stories of when he was a youngster sailing as mate on the good ship Rocking-horse .  Each chapter has a tale taller than the last -- the time Jim's ship was stuck fast in the ice in Antarctica for three months, and made friends with ...

Time for the final wrap-up post with Bev of My Reader's Block's Mount TBR Challenge !  There are rules here.  Bev says: For those who would like to participate in this checkpoint post, I'd like you to at least complete the first of these two things.  And if you feel particularly inspired, then please do both. 1. Tell us how many miles you made it up your mountain (# of books read). If you've planted your flag on the peak, then tell us, take a selfie, and celebrate (and wave!).    I signed up for 24 titles, and hit a record number of 34!  Now, two of these I have not yet blogged about, but I DID finish them before year's end.   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  Pa...