Howling Frog Books

Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, by Patrick Radden Keefe It was complete coincidence that my co-worker lent me this book in March and I felt like I ought to read it right away instead of putting it on the TBR pile where it would sit for a year.  But I did read it, and it was pretty gripping, as well as very depressing and now I have a lot of Feelings.  I should note that except for this book, my knowledge of Northern Irish politics is gained mainly from osmosis and not any systematic study.  Say Nothing is ostensibly about the disappearance and murder of Jean McConville, a Belfast widow and mother of ten, in 1972, at the height of the Troubles.  It's really more about everything the IRA was doing, but the story of Mrs. McConville serves as a focusing lens. Northern Ireland, in the 1960s, was a fairly poor area, with about 2/3 Protestants and 1/3 Catholics.  The Catholics were very definitely an oppressed minority, dis...

Brona did a fun TBR meme the other day, and then Fanda followed suit, and I thought it would be fun to join in.  I'd love to see yours too! Twenty-Four Things from my TBR: 4 Books On My Desk Not sure how to make this one a TBR list.  Books on my desk are ones waiting to be blogged about.  On the coffee table , I'm in the middle of reading them.  And the nightstand books are ones waiting to be re-read.  I guess I pick nightstand! Dancing Goddesses: Folklore, Archaeology, and the Origins of European Dance, by Elizabeth Wayland Barber: I just loved this book but it's hard to describe, so here's the official synopsis: A fascinating exploration of an ancient system of beliefs and its links to the evolution of dance.  From southern Greece to northern Russia, people have long believed in female spirits, bringers of fertility, who spend their nights and days dancing in the fields and forests. So appealing were these spirit-maidens that they also took...

1986 edition It's Diana Wynne Jones Day!  Kristen at We Be Reading, our host, decreed that today we would discuss Howl's Moving Castle.   And she has a great think-out on the different kinds of magic found in the story.  Throwing several different kinds of magic into a world or a story seems to have been a bit of a DWJ trademark. I can remember quite well where Howl's Moving Castle lived on the shelf in the library where I grew up.  It was not the first DWJ book I read (that was Witch's Business ) but it was one of the early ones.  I must have found it right after it was published in 1986.  As a result, I practically have it memorized -- I could not tell you how many times I've read it.   Even so, I enjoy it anew every time, and I still have new realizations about what's going on.  (Though possibly I have the same ones over and over, and just forget!  My kids tell me so sometimes.) When I first met my husband, he had kind of forgotte...

The Grey King , by Susan Cooper Somebody read Susan Cooper's Grey King for the Welsh reading event, and I realized I hadn't read it The Dark is Rising for years.  I re-read it nearly every Christmas, but the others tend to get much less attention lately.  The Grey King did, after all, win the Newbery Award, so I figured this would be a good time to re-read it.  It's the fourth book in the Dark is Rising sequence -- and as I recall, the last one is really quite strange. Will has been very ill indeed, and has actually forgotten his special knowledge, but he's sent to a family friend's farm in Wales to recuperate.  This places him exactly where he needs to be in order to fulfill the next step in his quest, which is to find a golden harp and awake the Six Sleepers.  He meets Bran, an unusual boy who could be an ally or an enemy, and Caradog Pritchard, a neighboring farmer and definitely an enemy.  Dogs are also everywhere in this story!  Will and Bra...

It may not seem like I've done much March Magics reading, but I have in fact -- in the spirit of reading the favorites -- read two and a bit DWJ novels. I needed to read Homeward Bounders all of a sudden because one of the kids had a phone catastrophe and my husband pretty much said "As to that..." and produced a replacement phone out of thin air.  It was a pretty impressive trenchcoat effect moment.  I adore Homeward Bounders , it's such a strange story and so compelling and tragic, yet of course has DWJ's humor and tendency to drop deep thought grenades on the reader (as in, you don't see them for a while and then *boom* -- in fact, I hereby declare that to be a new technical term.  Deep Thought Grenades.).  Homeward Bounders is what you get when you put multiverse theory, Greek mythology, and Dungeons & Dragons together in a blender, and add a street-smart Victorian urchin to the mix. I also picked Hexwood from my DWJ shelf.  I love Hexwood ...

I've been meaning to read Lord Dunsany's Book of Wonder for some time.  Well, I read it once long long ago, and don't remember anything about it except that I didn't get it, so I wanted to try again.  It was on my TBR shelf, and I figured I'd read it for the Ireland event.  It turns out I just don't like Lord Dunsany.  I read several stories, and the idea of reading a whole lot more of them is not a happy thought, so I'm quitting.  The stories are all very short, and consciously strange, with lots of names: King he was of Afarmah, Lool and Haf, over-lord of Zeroora and hilly Chang, and duke of the dukedoms of Molong and Mlash, none of them unfamiliar with romance or unknown or overlooked in the making of myth. He pondered as he went in his thin disguise. So, I guess I still don't get it.  But I don't think I'll bother with Lord Dunsany again, be he never so important a pillar of early fantasy literature (something I usually try hard to read)....

Stories of Red Hanrahan The Secret Rose Rosa Alchemica, by W. B. Yeats This book has been sitting around forever and I don't know where it came from.  It's a very elderly book, and the spine label is nearly illegible.   I had a vague idea that it contained Irish folktales, but when I actually opened it up and inspected it, it revealed itself to be short stories by W. B. Yeats.  There are two different collections and then one longish story that is still too short to be a novella.  My copy was published in 1914, but this fancier version in the image is from 1927. Stories of Red Hanrahan -- these seem to have been written at different times, all about Owen "Red" Hanrahan, who starts off a young schoolteacher.  He gets a message from his sweetheart, summoning him to help her, but first a strange man insists that he play cards for a little while.  After playing for hours, Hanrahan wanders out into the mountains and finds a sleeping queen, with four cr...

The Light and the Dark, by Mikhail Shishkin A few years ago I read a modernist novel by Shishkin, Maidenhair , which was strange and intriguing.  I've been meaning to read his next book for quite some time and I finally did it.  By now he's probably published three more, oh dear. This is a love story, maybe.  Alexandra (Sasha) and Vladimir (Vovka) are separated lovers who write to each other.  In long alternating letters, they reminisce about their time together, talk about their memories, and share what's happening in their lives.  Except...after a while, the reader starts to notice strange things.  Volodya is a soldier, and eventually we realize he's in China, helping to put down the Boxer Rebellion.  If you look for indications of Sasha's environment, there are few clues, but she is more modern and seems to live at the end of the century. And both of them seem to be writing into a void; they never reference each other's letters.  Vladim...

I just read it for free on Kindle The Riddle of the Sands, by Erskine Childers  This is another title I picked up from the Slightly Foxed podcast, which lauded it as a gripping boys' adventure and minor classic.  It was indeed pretty exciting, but it's waaaay longer than I anticipated!  I thought it would be a quick little read on my phone's Kindle app for odd moments, but it took me weeks. Carruthers, young man about town, is invited on a yachting cruise by an old school friend, Davies, and he packs up his nattiest yachting outfit and heads for the north coast of Germany to meet Davies and relax for some duck shooting.  Except, the 'yacht' turns out to be a tiny (but tough!) little souped-up boat, and what Davies really wants is to explore the north-west coast of Germany in excruciating detail, because he's become convinced that something nefarious is going on.  Something worth killing for, that involves the German navy and concerns England.  It's...

Parnassus on Wheels and The Haunted Bookshop, by Christopher Morley These fun books came across the donation table and I just read them in spare moments.  Several years ago, I downloaded The Haunted Bookshop , but I couldn't understand the first chapter at all, so I quit.  I had no idea that it was a sequel to Parnassus on Wheels !  Now it all makes sense.... Parnassus on Wheels is the narrative of Helen McGill, spinster, who lives with her brother on a farm.  Until a few years ago, they farmed happily together, but then Andrew wrote a book and became a successful writer about the joys of country life, and things have never been the same since.  Helen is pretty fed up and the last straw arrives on a wagon in the form of a mobile bookstore, Parnassus on Wheels; the owner wants to sell the outfit to Andrew so he can retire and write his book, about the joys of bookselling.  Helen decides that it's high time she got to go out galliv...

The Last Dragonslayer and The Song of the Quarkbeast, by Jasper Fforde I do love Jasper Fforde!  For Dewithon, I read the first two books in the Chronicles of Kazam trilogy.  The third is no longer at my library, and I put an ILL request in for it.  These middle-grade fantasy stories are so fun, everybody! OK, I haven't gotten that third one yet, but I like this image Jennifer Strange, age 16, is a foundling -- there are lots in the Kingdom of Hereford, ruled by the illustrious King Snodd IV.  She works as a manager at a company of wizards; it's her job to do the practical work of booking jobs, scheduling, and feeding the very unruly jobbing wizards, and since the worrying disappearance of the owner 8 months ago, she's been running it all on her own.  But!  The level of magic available in the world is going down.  It's getting harder and harder to do big workings, and pretty soon the wizards of Kazam might be out of work altogether.  Me...

The Wee Free Men, by Terry Pratchett -- audiobook read by Stephen Briggs It's #MarchMagics Pterry Day!  The readalong was Wee Free Men , and I thought I'd try listening to the audiobook, as my mom said it was fantastic.  I don't usually like audiobooks, so this is a departure for me.  (Usually, I lack the patience to listen to a book I know I could be reading about five times faster.  Also I tend to let my mind wander and then I get lost.) And indeed, the audio version of this book IS fantastic!  It's beautifully read, and Briggs gives everybody a wonderful variety of accents.  I recommend! Now, in my opinion, the Tiffany Aching series is just about Pterry's apex of writing.  It would probably be hard to get any better.  The way he managed to blend humor, myth, and Big Important Stuff is simply amazing to me.  Tiffany is a fantastic character, and the Nac Mac Feegles are sheer genius. As a result, it's hard to find much to say about T...

This isn't about books at all; it's about what I did Wednesday and how happy I am about it, and so I thought I'd write it down. One of my very favorite all-time bands is a New Zealand group called the Chills.  It's fronted by Martin Phillipps, whose lifelong project it is; the other members have changed quite a bit though the current lineup has been around for a while.  I first got into them with their 1990 album Submarine Bells , which was their first international release.  In 1992, they did a US tour, and I saw that they were playing in San Francisco -- at a venue I couldn't get to.  I didn't have a car or any friends with cars who wanted to go see a band they'd never heard of (cars were very rare in my world); it was too far from any BART stations and in a really sketchy area.  I sadly concluded I'd have to wait till the next time, but I never heard of another one.  Until now!  And now I have a car! So my husband and I hopped into the car on ...

Stet: a Memoir, by Diana Athill I've been listening to the Slightly Foxed podcast, which is a bit of a problem when it comes to my TBR pile and its daunting rate of growth.  One episode mentioned this memoir by Diana Athill, who was an editor in London for decades, and it sounded so fun that I had to have it.  InterLibrary Loan was my friend, and I enjoyed it very much.  It also put three more books on the TBR list, which I hope doesn't happen every time; the podcast gave me two or three titles, and if each one gives me two or three titles more, pretty soon we'll have a 'going to St. Ives' problem. Athill starts out with her youth as one of those county families with no actual money but some land and a taste for the leisured life.  She lived with horses and dogs outside, and books inside, and then went off to London to earn her living, which coincided with the war, and eventually turned into editing.  She ended up at Andre Deutsch, and edited books for a go...

Elidor, by Alan Garner I chose this book for Dewithon, because I was under the impression that it had something to do with Wales...and it's set in Manchester.  So I was only a couple pages in and thought I was wrong, but Chris at Calmgrove pointed out some details, and the story features threads of both Irish and Welsh legend. The four Watson siblings, bored and wandering around, go exploring and are suddenly shoved into a different world.  Elidor is not a lovely adventure world at all; it's a barren, post-apocalyptic wasteland, and Roland, the youngest, meets Malebron -- who promptly shoves him into a terrifying barrow to find some treasures and save his trapped siblings.  Malebron then tells them to take the treasures and hide them in their own world, and for over a year, nothing happens.  Until all of a sudden it does and the children are being hunted by men who mean to kill them to get those treasures. Like most of Garner's work, Elidor is an unusual kin...