Howling Frog Books

Short Stories, vol. 1, by Walter de la Mare When will I learn not to read giant collections of short stories all at once?  I regret it every time. Walter de la Mare sure wrote a whole lot of short stories.  They were for an adult audience and published in magazines at the turn of the century, when there was an endless demand for them.  Volume I covers 1895 - 1926, so a good bit more than just the turn of the century.  These stories are mostly somewhat spooky.  They're not outright scary or horror; they're gently unsettling, or creepy, or disturbing, but they're not usually obvious about it.  Some of them are rather thematic.  There were four or five stories in a row featuring characters inspecting gravestones for interesting, amusing, or pathetic epitaphs, which I sincerely hope were real epitaphs de la Mare had collected himself. One story, one of the more obviously spooky ones called "The Riddle," had a detail that I believe may well have...

Baho! by Roland Rugero If you're trying to read around the world, some countries have abundant literature available in English (Nigeria, for example) and others, not so much.  Since I'm late to this project, I'm benefiting from a minor but noticeable trend to make global literature more available in English.  I'm seeing more books published from countries that haven't previously been available -- my TBR pile includes the first novels from Madagascar, Guinea Bissau, and other places.  (I also got to read the first literature to come out of North Korea, but that's more a function of smuggling than of publishers taking notice.)  And this is the first Burundian novel available in English.  It was written in French, but also contains a good deal of Kirundi, which is left in and a translation added. Nyamurgari, a mute teenage boy, is out working and tries to ask a girl where he can go to relieve himself.  Frightened, the girl thinks he is trying to rape he...

A remarkably hideous cover IMO Women Talking, by Miriam Toews Whoof, this is a difficult one, folks, so you have been warned.  First a very short background, then the novel, then some information about the reality. For a few years in the mid-2000s, women in a particular Old Order Mennonite colony in Bolivia suffered from mysterious night-time violence.  In 2009, nine men were arrested and charged with drugging entire households with an anesthetic spray in order to rape girls and women.  They were convicted in a mass trial and are in jail. Miriam Toews, who grew up in a more liberal Mennonite family in Canada, wrote Women Talking as a sort of novelistic response to the events in Bolivia.  I don't know that she's actually trying to portray the people and events; the characters are based on people she knew, and she doesn't seem to have gone to Bolivia.  I really get the feeling that she tidied everything up a lot for her narrative, which may have been n...

Down Among the Sticks and Bones, by Seanan McGuire AND All Systems Red: The Murderbot Diaries, by Martha Wells I read two short, modern SFF novels, so I thought I'd bundle them, though they have little in common otherwise. Down Among the Sticks and Bones :  Twin sisters Jillian and Jacqueline have been forced into certain patterns by their unseeing parents...and then they find a staircase in the closet, that takes them to the Moors.  A different law holds sway there.  They're taken in to the Master's castle, and while Jack chooses to go and live with the local doctor, Jill chooses a princess' life.  Will they be able to save each other when the time comes? This story was fine, but a little too Angela Carter-esque for my taste.  There was a lot to like, and I enjoyed it OK, but the overall impression was not my style.  I also found it hard to believe in the parents. All Systems Red : Far in the future, planetary exploration is sponsored by corp...

Playing Back the 80s: A Decade of Unstoppable Hits, by Jim Beviglia This was just a fun book for me to look through.  Beviglia really just wrote letters to absolutely everybody who had a hit song in the 80s, asking for the story behind the song.  If he got an answer, he did an interview and published the story -- just one song per band.  As a result, the book is a little hit-and-miss; presumably Madonna didn't bother to reply (I don't like Madonna anyhow so that was OK with me), and he says in the foreword that although he's a big fan of 80s rap, nobody responded, so there's no rap and it makes him sad. The selection is stronger on early 80s material than on the later years, and I would say that it's heavy on groups that were not as well-known.  The Police appear, but not U2 or Depeche Mode.  No Cyndi Lauper.  However, many of my own favorites are here, like Men Without Hats, Corey Hart, Bruce Hornsby, Talking Heads, and lots of others.  There were...

Alienated America: Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse, by Timothy P. Carney After the 2016 election, we all saw a lot of people trying to figure out just how and why Trump won.  There's been a lot of blame going around, but I've never really seen an explanation that I thought really hit the nail on the head, until I ran into this book.  Carney focused in on the original, core Trump fan base -- not the people who eventually voted for him because he was the Republican nominee, but the people who really cottoned on to his campaign from the beginning -- and looked for the common denominator. Carney's thesis was that certain segments of the population really resonated with Trump's declaration that the American dream is dead.  A lot of people didn't agree with that at all, but that's because this is all geographically based.  There are plenty of places in the US where the American dream is dead, and those are the places that produced Trump's core. ...

Hooray, it's that time again, when we start planning our summer reading and Cathy posts her #20booksofsummer challenge! Cathy says: Can I keep up my winning streak and complete my 20 Books of Summer challenge this year? From 3 June until 3 September I will be attempting to read my 20 Books of Summer. Why not join in with your own 20 (or 10, or 15!), read along with some of the books or just cheer me on as I try and get that dreaded 746 down by another 20 in just 3 months. So I spent a happy evening checking out my TBR and library shelves, and here is the result.  It was very difficult to pick 20 books and I wound up with 22, telling myself that two are alternates in case I hate some.  I was quite tempted to choose 20 books from different countries for my Reading All Around the World project, but I decided that I wanted a variety.  I wound up with 4 Around the World titles (that is, for countries I haven't hit yet), 12 Classics Club books, 6 from my TBR (3...

Drawn From Memory and Drawn From Life , by E. M. Shepard Last Christmas, I had utterly failed to find a good gift for my mom and had fallen back on nice socks.  We all like socks, but still.  And on December 23, Lory posted about her new book -- a memoir by E. H. Shepard, who illustrated Winnie the Pooh and The Wind in the Willows .  This was clearly the ideal gift!  It didn't arrive for weeks, but eventually my mom got a really good present, and then I borrowed it too.  Naturally! Drawn from Memory is the story of Shepard's early childhood until the age of 8, and it is utterly charming.  He was a the child of a fairly ordinary middle-class Victorian family in London, albeit one with theatrical and artistic connections.  It was 1887, and life was very exciting, what with horses and cabs, ships in the seas, and a Jubilee for the Queen.  Shepard just shares a succession of memories of ordinary Victorian life, from childhood illnesses to...

I feel like it's been a really long time since I wrote any posts, but I guess it hasn't been all that long really.  A lot has happened, is all.  I went on a trip!  I visited one of my best friends, who now lives in Utah, and we went to a women's conference at BYU.  I spent a leisurely hour touring the BYU main library, and now I need to live there.  Otherwise, I've mostly been working a lot -- just a week and a bit left to go! -- hanging out with the family, and trying to get sort of caught up with the house in spare moments (a bootless effort, I fear).  Two very busy weekends in a row have meant no time for Howling Frog and now I have a large pile of books!  One of which is... Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood, by Trevor Noah You've probably seen this book everywhere; I know I have.  I know who Trevor Noah is, but I've seen almost nothing of what he's done, since I hardly watch any TV.  That does not matter, though, ...

  Belonging: A German Reckons With History and Home, by Nora Krug This showed up on the new books cart at work and I couldn't resist.  That happens a lot, and it's becoming a problem, because I can't read as fast as I can take books home...so I'm trying to only take the books that I don't have on a list.   It probably isn't helping much, but maybe I can read a lot over the summer.  (I say that every summer and it never works.)  Anyway, this was a graphic novel of sorts, and therefore wouldn't take long... It's actually more like a scrapbook, collage, and diary.  Nora Krug grew up in Germany, and must be just about exactly my age.  This the record of her struggle with being German in the wake of the 20th century; growing up as a child with this sense of collective shame and guilt, while also not quite understanding what actually happened, and having these blank spaces where family members might have been.  The questions: what did her gra...

The Zelmenyaners, by Moyshe Kulbak A couple of years ago, I read Outwitting History, about saving Yiddish literature from the dumpster of history.  IT was one of my favorite books of the year, and it put some Yiddish titles on my wishlist.  This was one of them, and I finally picked it up! The Zelmenyaners appeared in a serial format in a Yiddish monthly magazine called Shtern (the Star), published in the Soviet Union.  It was actually two series; the first one ran in 1929 - 1930, and the second 1933 - 1935.  It became a comic family saga, about a Jewish family in Minsk. None of the Zelmanyaners are actually named that.  Their father, Reb Zelmele, has been dead for a while now, but it's still his courtyard, with his descendants all living around in a big house, and little houses, and stables.  Bubbe Bashe is their matriarch, and she's so old she's like a little hen.  The four sons now have children and grandchildren, and so there are Zelmenyan...