Howling Frog Books

My Sister, the Serial Killer, by Oyinkan Braithwaite Ayoola summons me with these words -- Korede, I killed him. I had hoped I would never hear those words again. Korede is the older, plain sister who works hard at her job as a nurse.  Ayoola is the younger and stunningly beautiful younger sister who always gets what she wants and has men falling at her feet.  Ayoola also has a worrying habit; every so often she needs Korede to help her clean up and hide the body of a boyfriend.  The first couple of times, it was easy to believe it was self-defense, but it's getting harder for Korede to believe in Ayoola's innocence.  And now Tade, the kind doctor Korede daydreams about, is interested in Ayoola. This is a gripping story!  It's a pretty fast read, but it's not a simple story at all.  In the end, it's pretty disturbing.  A good, suspenseful novel.

Spy Runner, by Eugene Yelchin I like Eugene Yelchin, writer of middle-grade fiction.  Some years ago I read the Newbery Honor book, Breaking Stalin's Nose , which is great.  And I have a nice new copy of The Assassination of Brangwain Spurge on my TBR shelf; it's co-authored and illustrated by Yelchin.  So when my mom handed me his new novel, I was happy. Jake is 12, and living right next to an Air Force base, he knows that being a good American is important.  His dad has been missing for 12 years, since the end of World War II, and Jake is pretty sure the Russians have him imprisoned.  He knows all about Communists from his favorite spy comics, so when his mom welcomes a Russian boarder into their home, Jake goes on high alert.  He just knows that Mr. Shubin is a spy.  But pretty soon his classmates are calling him a Communist, and there's this car following him around, and his best friend's dad is acting really weird.  Jake just has to fig...

The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, by Elif Batuman This was such a fun book -- at least, if you like Russian literature, or wry stories about oddball academics, or information about Uzbekistan.  I like all of those things. Elif Batuman writes a sort of memoirish thing about her time in grad school -- some chapters were originally articles, so it's not always a smooth narrative, but it sure is fun.  Instead of writing a novel, she ends up at Stanford studying Russian literature. And then she goes to a conference on Tolstoy, right at Tolstoy's estate!  Eccentric academics abound, Batuman formulates a theory that Tolstoy was murdered, and fun is had by all.  It's finished off by a group dinner so strange and uncomfortable that a faculty member despairingly groans  "It was a dinner from Dostoevsky, that's all." There is some quite fascinating stuff about Isaac Babel, a library display, King Kong , and Soviet propaganda...

19! That's a number I don't think we've had before. When I first looked at my list to see what 19 was, I read Banana Yoshimoto's Amrita .  So I checked it out of the library and read some pages.  So far so good. This morning I looked again at my list, and behold, Amrita was #18!  I'm actually supposed to read Walter de la Mare's short stories -- the first volume, anyway.  It's huge.  We'll see how far I get -- it's over 500 pages long!  Amrita looked a lot more doable.

Black Earth: the Holocaust as History and Warning, by Timothy Snyder This is a truly great work of history, one I would highly recommend.  It's also quite a dense and difficult read, which is why it took me something like 3 months to get through.  It took some concentration to read -- something I don't always have in large supply! -- and it was one of those books where it's very easy to read two pages and then realize you have no idea what those pages said.  It was very worth it, though; this is an important work. An interesting thing about this book is that it barely touches on the usual focus of the Holocaust: Auschwitz and other famous concentration camps.  Most of this book is about the political background and development of the Holocaust, the beginnings, who cooperated and how.  There is much more about death squads in Eastern Europe. Snyder gives the most lucid and practical explication of Hitler's philosophy -- if such it can be called -- that I ...

Essential Encounters, by Therese Kuoh-Moukoury I have read hardly anything for my Around the World project lately, even though I have something like 15 books sitting here waiting to be read.  (I am thinking of making my 20 Books of Summer list completely out of African novels, doesn't that sound good?  I absolutely could, but in that case I'd have to put that one I just chose back on the pile, which doesn't seem like that great a plan....hm.)  So I picked this one up to get me back in the groove.  This is a Cameroonian novel, written in 1959 but not published until 10 years later, and it is "the first novel by a woman of sub-Saharan francophone Africa."  In fact it was pretty influential so I thought it would make a good selection. Flo tells her life story entirely in the present tense, so that everything is happening right now.  As a young woman, she enters a cosmopolitan social circle that includes both black and white, and becomes best friends with D...

Well, this is just what I need to get back in the groove!  Life kind of took over there for a couple of weeks, and I just haven't seemed to find time for blogging.  Even reading hasn't been doing so hot, though I did finish a very dense history book.  On the other hand, we're having a spectacular (and long!) spring and work has been hopping, so things are fine.  And I love me a Spin! This is the 20th CC Spin, and I have done every single one, which I believe is something only Brona and I can say.  She can even list all her links, which I have never found the time to collect.  Anyway, the rules are simple: list 20 books from your CC list, and commit to reading the one that comes up on the CC's roulette wheel.  The prize is the reading experience -- admittedly, once in a while you get the booby prize!   Guess I'd better put something good into that 7 slot 1 has been my unlucky number a few times, so I'm going to put something really easy i...