Howling Frog Books

Four Birds of Noah's Ark: A Prayer Book From the Time of Shakespeare, by Thomas Dekker I've never been a big Thomas Dekker fan, because the first thing I read by Dekker was his version of Patient Griselda , which is about as calculated to offend modern sensibilities as it could possibly be, and while I am pretty easygoing about historical perspectives, I would have been just as happy if the Patient Griselda story had never been invented.  Apparently I should really read some of his other, less horrifying plays. By all accounts, Dekker was not a particularly religious man, but he did live and breathe in an atmosphere more saturated with religion than we can easily imagine, and he spoke the language of devotion fluently.  And in 1608, when plague was ravaging London, he wrote a book of prayer-poems for the people of England.  There is something for everyone here. The book is divided into four parts, named after four birds.  First, the Dove presents poems for ordinary peopl

Most embarrassing cover ever Lud-in-the-Mist, by Hope Mirrlees Chris at Calmgrove posted about this very interesting early fantasy book a while back, and I got it on Kindle to read.  Hope Mirrlees wrote just one book, in 1926, and it is excellent and odd.  It's one of those fantasy books written before the genre gelled into particular templates, and so it still reads as original and strange today. The Free State of Dorimare lies on the coast where two rivers meet, and the capital, Lud-in-the-Mist, is a prosperous port town.  Generations ago, the Duke Aubrey was banished from Dorimare into neighboring Fairyland -- just over the Debatable Hills -- and there has never been any commerce with Fairyland since.   Dorimites live right next to the one place they strenuously ignore and cannot completely forget. Nathaniel Chanticleer is like all the sensible men of the city, but his little son Ranulph has been talking a lot about azure cows and other difficult subjects, and now he

Ganga: A Journey Down the Ganges River, by Julian Crandall Hollick This guy Hollick, who has spent much of his career in radio explaining India to the English-speaking world, as far as I can tell, decided to take a trip down the Ganges to look at the river as a whole.  Except you can't actually do that; it's impossible to just start at the top and go all the way to the sea, for several reasons*, so he just did his very best to travel the length of the river in a few stints.  On the way, he describes the cultural and religious importance of Ganga, and studies some of its many difficulties -- environmental, industrial, and biological. There are some problems specific to Ganga that are very difficult to solve.  India's massive appetite for power means that flow is frequently diverted to generate electricity, to the point that the river gets too small in places (happily constantly refreshed by new flow from tributaries).  Irrigation takes even more, and then there's the

Dude, is it Wednesday already?  I nearly forgot, but since I remembered, here it is, the meme hosted by Sam at A World of Words .  Very simple, just answer me these questions three, ere the other side you see: What are you currently reading? What did you recently finish reading? What do you think you’ll read next?   What are you currently reading?   Secondhand Time , by Svetlana Alexievich.  Memories of the 1990s and the end of the USSR, from former Soviets.  Fascinating, very long, often quite nostalgic for the glories of the Revolution, or alternatively for the glories of the days when freedom seemed right around the corner.  Instead they got rampant commercialism, oligarchy, and a new dictator, which is not what democracy or even capitalism is about.  Russians really got the shaft with that 'shock therapy' idea where they just gave away entire industries to various moguls. I started Hartmann von Aue all right, but I haven't gotten far at all.  I ke

Cat's Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut Funny that I should read two books practically at the same time that use the cat's cradle game as a theme.  I wound up getting out this old Dover book I have about 'string games around the world' only I can't find the yarn to try them out.  I'm sure there is yarn around here someplace... Anyway.  Cat's Cradle is a nice read.  The narrator tells his story, starting with his project of writing a book about what was happening in America on the day that the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.   But now he's a Bokonist, and he's had some adventures with his friend Newt, whose father was one of the major physicists working on the bomb.  That father also invented ice-nine , and Newt and his siblings have some. Bokonism is, I think, the famous part of this novel, and it's where the notion of a karass comes from.  The novel I'd read before made me think a karass was just your band of mates, but it's not; it'

Sorrow's Knot, by Erin Bow I have yet to meet an Erin Bow novel that isn't really well done.  This one is set in an imagined fantasy world that is clearly based on the native cultures of Northwest America, in contrast to Bow's first novel with a fantasy Slavic setting. Otter lives in a tiny village at the very end of the human world, where her talent of binding is all-important and keeps everyone safe -- for the dead are always at the edges, trying to get in. Together with her two best friends, Kestrel and Cricket, she works and prepares for adulthood, when she assumes she'll become a binder like her mother, tying special knots to ward off danger.  (It sounds exactly like cat's-cradle.)  But then her mother goes mad and rejects Otter as the next binder, and there is something wrong with the knots.  Otter, Kestrel, and Cricket have to leave the safety of the village to find their own people's history and learn what went wrong. Eh, that's not a very good

Walls of Jericho , by Rudolph Fisher A few years back I really enjoyed The Conjure-Man Dies , a 1932 mystery by Harlem Renaissance writer Rudolph Fisher.  This novel was written a few years earlier; it was published in 1928.  Fisher paints a portrait of a Harlem preoccupied with both race and class. Fisher has a cast of characters that are enormously disparate, but that intertwine in intriguing ways.  We have a team of moving men, led by Shine, an Ajax of a man; Ralph Merritt, a successful lawyer; Linda, an ambitious working girl, and several others. Merritt is buying a home just outside the edge of Harlem in a white neighborhood -- mostly to annoy his neighbors.  At first, the story might seem to be about the 'walls of Jericho' of white society, but there are other walls that turn out to be more central.  Shine (whose actual name is Joshua) comes to realize that in order to have the life he wants, he must tear down his own inner walls, and the same is true of everyone.  An

Winconsin Death Trip, by Michael Lesy I first heard of this book when I started listening to a podcast called Medieval Death Trip, named in homage to this...cult classic?  I'm not sure what to call it.  It started off as a very unusual PhD dissertation in 1973, but it's sort of an experiment in immersive history. Lesy found all these photographic plates taken by a photographer in Black River Falls, Wisconsin, between 1890 and 1910 -- just piles of them.  Many were ruined by time, but he salvaged a whole lot and put the most interesting ones together for this collection.  Quite a few have been slightly altered -- trimmed, mirrored, framed or something.  There are trends: photos of incredibly elderly people in one section, little girls in dance classes in another, buddy photos and sets of girlfriends, families, and one photograph of a fellow without a stitch on showing off his physique -- from the back, thank goodness.  Interspersed with these photos are snippets from t

Erica at The Broken Spine introduced me to a meme I didn't know about: WWW Wednesdays, hosted by Sam at A World of Words.   I can't do this every week, but it would be fun to do it every so often! It couldn't be simpler; you just answer three questions. What are you currently reading? What did you recently finish reading? What do you think you’ll read next? What are you currently reading? I'm working on one of my major Summer Books, The Adventures of Roderick Random by Tobias Smollett.  It is very long and has 69 shortish chapters, so I figured I'd read 3 chapters per day.  Today I will read chapters 52 - 54.  Roderick Random reminds me of nothing so much as a bro slapstick comedy movie written in 18th-century novel format. I'm also reading Ganga , a book about the Ganges river, and will probably finish it today. What did you recently finish reading? Rudolph Fisher's Walls of Jericho , a Harlem Renaissance novel pub

I love this cover Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History, by David Aaronovitch This was such an interesting book!  I'm very glad I picked it up at Moe's last year.  (In fact, there are a couple others I wish I'd gotten too!) Aaronovitch covers the histories of several conspiracy theories, in detail.  It's fascinating, and also important, because they've had such an influence in modern history and we all -- no matter how skeptical or well-informed we are -- have a few stray thoughts that originated with a conspiracy theory. We start off with the grand-daddy of them all: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion .  I was already semi-aware of the history of this anti-Semitic forgery, but Aaronovitch provides a lot of information that I'd never heard.  I knew it had been written by a Russian nobleman, but it turns out that it was discovered as a forgery within a decade or so.  (I forget exactly how long and my kid nicked t

My copy features the movie poster One Night @ the Call Center, by Chetan Bhagat A couple of novels by Chetan Bhagat came across the donation table, and I took them home to see what they were about.  Bhagat is a popular young Indian author who, I gather, writes about the problems of young Indians.  This is only his second novel, written in 2005.  Bhagat writes in English, but a very Indian version of English, which I liked. Shyam, like a zillion other young adults in India, works in a call center.  They do a lot of computer support, but Shayam's department deals with appliances.  All night, he and his five team members take calls from Americans having trouble with their ovens or vacuums, which doesn't give them a wonderful opinion of American intelligence.  Shyam wants desperately to move up in the company; he and his co-worker Vroom built a webpage that deals with a lot of customer problems, but his manager just keeps spouting business cliches and telling him he needs t

The Pendulum: A Granddaughter's Search for Her Family's Forbidden Nazi Past, by Julie Lindahl Not so long ago, I read Belonging by Nora Krug, about a German woman's search for her family's past and her fears about what she might find.  Krug's journey ended in a bit of relief; for the most part, her grandparents hadn't done anything much.  Julie Lindahl, however, found some really terrible things in her family's history, and this is her memoir. Julie Lindahl, who is just a few years older than I am, was born in Brazil to a German family.  That fact in itself contains a lot of information, but Lindahl grew up -- mostly in Europe -- without knowledge of what it might mean.  Her family's silence about the past was complete, even as it warped all their relationships; they thought they should not burden the future.  It didn't work.  Little Julie, even as a tiny child, felt that she herself must be somehow guilty of the worst crimes, though she did n

Elizabeth and her German Garden , by Elizabeth von Arnim Elizabeth von Arnim is most famous as the author of The Enchanted April, a novel I am very fond of.  I think I would like to re-read it now.  This is actually her first book, which reads as a memoir but is really a novel I think.   She published it, anonymously, in 1898 and it turned out a huge best-seller.  From then on, her many books were billed as "by the author of Elizabeth of Her German Garden ," or just "by Elizabeth."  However, debts forced her and her husband to sell the estate memorialized in the novel and move to England, and then the husband died in 1910.  Elizabeth moved to a chateau in Switzerland, had an affair with H. G. Wells, and hung out with clever people.  A disastrous second marriage (to Bertrand Russell's brother Francis) ended in separation, as she fled to America in 1919.  She spent the next two decades in various parts of Europe, until she moved to America and lived there for

Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore, by Robin Sloan Hello summer!  I finished my semester at work about 10 days ago, and I thought I would relax and take it easy for a few days, but the universe had other plans and dumped a bunch of random stuff in my lap.  I can't even remember what, but it sure kept me busy.  Now $20booksofsummer has started, and I have six books waiting to be blogged about, all of which I started before June 1st.  So I'm going to play a bit of catchup here... My neighborhood has a Little Free Library, and I found this novel in there one morning.  I was skeptical that it would be any good -- novels about bookstores abound, after all -- but I didn't quite want to not read it.  The book startled me quite a bit by glowing at me in the dark after I'd gone to bed; all the books on the cover are printed in glow-in-the-dark ink, on the spine and the back and everything.  And once I got into it, I found that I was pleasantly surprised by this very fun

Kappa, by Akutagawa Ryonosuke The poet Akutagawa, who suffered from mental illness or depression for most of his life, wrote this novella in 1927 at top speed, in just a couple of weeks.  He did this right after his sister's husband committed suicide, leaving him to straighten out a terrible financial mess.  The story was written out of his disgust with life, the world, and most of all with himself. This is the narrative of patient #23 in a mental hospital: he met a kappa one day and chased it, falling into Kappaland.  He had to join Kappa society, learn to speak, and make friends.  After a year or so, he became disenchanted with Kappa life and found a way back home, but now he wants only to return, and he describes his friends and Kappa society to anyone who will listen. When a Kappa is about to be born, the father yells in to it and asks if it really wants to be born and exist, warning it to think carefully.  The child in the story answers:  "I do not wish to be born.