Howling Frog Books

This was going to be a book post, but my 'quick update' -- which is probably mostly for posterity anyway -- wound up six paragraphs long, so I guess it gets its own post now.  I'll write the book posts after this... and I'd love to know how everybody else is doing, too! We wandered around here about 10 days ago, lots of space! Like everybody else, we are staying at home a lot.  I work from home now, and I don't like it one bit, but I'm fortunate to be able to earn a paycheck.  Husband is also working from home, and 16yo is doing school here at home.  I think she's starting to rethink her nostalgic yearning for homeschooling -- but then, when we homeschooled, we went a lot of places.  Luckily we each have a computer, so we can work at the same time, but meetings are a little trickier.  This morning we each had a Zoom conference at just about the same time, and my plan to use my tablet in my bedroom didn't work (too far from the wi-fi), so I wound up...

Archer's Goon, by Diana Wynne Jones What with everything going on this month, I've pretty much fallen back on old favorite DWJ titles, of which Archer's Goon is a prominent member.  I love the humor in this book, the family -- this must be one of the very few DWJ titles that features a family that isn't completely, totally dysfunctional, though it is certainly eccentric! -- and the sheer chaos of this really pretty strange story. Howard, age 13, has an ordinary boring life until a Goon shows up in the family kitchen, demanding "two thousand" from Howard's dad Quentin.  Howard finds out about who really runs his town -- seven powerful siblings who have been stuck there for years, and aren't very happy about it.  The siblings figure that Quentin's words must be what's keeping them trapped, and they're determined to force him to write more words for them. This is one of those stories where everything gets turned upside-down, and it...

A Tempest, by Aimé Césaire  Aimé Césaire, born 1913 in Martinique (which is still officially French), became a world-renowned dramatist and poet; he, along with his friend the poet Damas, established the idea of "Negritude," that black people did not need to assimilate into European culture, but had valuable cultures of their own to contribute to the world.  Leopold Senghor was the leader of this movement; I read some of his poetry in 2014 .  This was an anti-colonialism black pride movement, largely in the areas that had been colonized by France, in the 1930s - 1950s.  A Tempest was published in 1969. Césaire's play is an adaptation of Shakespeare's Tempest which casts Ariel as mulatto, and Caliban as black, both enslaved by Prospero, who has arrived on their island and taken illegitimate possession of it.  Ariel works hard for Prospero, always hoping for his long-promised freedom and trying to appeal to Prospero's conscience, while Caliban has given up wa...

Bellman and Black, by Diane Setterfield This novel was recommended to me by a rare-book expert I know; we have some similar tastes and she said this was a favorite of hers.  I actually wouldn't have chosen it, just because there is a Victorian dress on the cover, and I'm a little tired of the kind of books that feature fancy dresses on the covers.  But!  It turned out that the dress was actually meaningful to the plot, and it wasn't at all a 'ballgown' kind of novel.  (I should have realized that just from the person who recommended it!) A village in mid-Victorian England:  four boys are out playing, and William Bellman, in a moment of showing off, aims his slingshot at a young rook and kills it.  And then he forgets -- but the rooks don't forget, not at all. As a young man, William joins his uncle at the wool mill.  He's bright and practical-minded, and soon he's risen to manager.  The entire first half of the novel is given to William's lif...

Kirby cover! The Dark Side of the Sun, by Terry Pratchett --I've put a short update at the bottom if you're interested. I've had this book sitting around for a while, but had never read it, so this was a perfect opportunity.  This is Pterry's first 'adult' novel (as opposed to the juvenile fiction he'd written previously), from 1976, and pre-dates the Discworld books.  It's science fiction, very short, plays with some intriguing ideas, and is a lot of fun. In the far future, humanity has spread over several worlds, sometimes in cooperation with others of the 52 known sentient species.  All of them developed within a fairly small section of the galaxy, the rest of which appears to be sterile.  And there are artifacts left from the Jokers -- a super-intelligent, utterly mysterious, vanished race. Dom is the heir to the massive corporation and planet of Widdershins, a world that is nearly all swamp but that produces two incredible materials.  Wi...

Hexwood, by Diana Wynne Jones I love Hexwood so much.  It starts off with two stories: a girl in an English village, who has been ill and is therefore bored stiff, and an administrator of a lowly bureaucratic department of a galactic corporation/empire who is dismayed to receive a report of a problem on a backwater planet.  The two stories of a village girl and a galactic empire turn out to be in fact the same tale, and this tale is being told by the Bannus, an extremely intelligent machine that can run scenarios in order to predict the consequences of decisions.  It has co-opted a whole lot of people into the story it is enacting, and all of it with the goal of bringing down the cruel Reigners who have run the galaxy for a thousand years or more. I'm not very satisfied with that description, actually, because it doesn't give the least hint of the mystery, adventure, puzzle, intrigue, and tragedy (as well as comedy) of Hexwood .  But I wanted to bring out the ...

Before I get to the book part, just a quick note about the thing on everybody's minds.  Like so many folks, we are semi-battened down.  Our county has no confirmed cases yet, but then they have only done a few tests, so the true state of affairs is unknown.  (Couldn't resist a DWJ reference, ha.)  The reaction has been slow here, but school admins have the advantage that this week is spring break.  Things are changing fast, but at the moment K-12 is off for two weeks instead of just one (I think that will change), the university has gone online until the end of April, and the community college I work for is preparing to go online but so far, will still hold classes after a couple of extra days off.  We have some students with no internet access at home, and some instructors who have not chosen to become familiar with online education, so it's a bit tricky and I'm hoping our library and the tutoring center can stay open to serve those who need support. ...

My very old copy, from the UK Castle in the Air, by Diana Wynne Jones Happy Friday the 13th!  Somehow that seems appropriate for a story that features bad luck and black cats pretty largely. I chose to read Castle in the Air partly because it's never been one of my favorites, so it's been a while since I read it, but I still like it enough to revisit it every once in a while.  This is the second book in the moving castle trilogy with Sophie, Howl, and Calcifer, but you can't tell for quite a while. If you're unfamiliar with the story, it starts with the carpet merchant Abdullah, who escapes the nagging of his extended family members by daydreaming, until he purchases a magic carpet that takes him on some unexpected adventures involving a genie in a bottle, a legendary bandit, adorable (and scary) cats, a couple of djinns, and an actual castle in the air.  And of course a princess, who is both lovely and whip-smart.  Actually there are a lot of princesses,...

Jazz and Palm Wine, by Emmanuel Dongala Emmanuel Dongala was born in the Congo (then a French colony) in 1941.  He studied in US universities during the 1960s, returned to an independent Congo as a professor in the 70s, moved back to the US during the time of civil war in the 90s.  He has written novels, poetry, and short stories -- as far as I can tell, in French.  This collection of short stories was first published in 1982, in France, but they had been written at different times before that, not all in the early 80s.  Dongala's life split between Congo and the US has given him a dual lens -- and a great love of jazz music. The short stories all show a piece of ordinary life for ordinary people caught up in the changing world of post-colonial Congo, and the frustrations thereof.  Having shed the French colonial power, they look for a bright future of freedom, and find instead bureaucratic paralysis, Marxist rhetoric that fails to disguise the same old oppr...

A classic Kirby cover! Interesting Times, by Terry Pratchett It has been so long since I read Interesting Times that I only remembered the curse: May you live in interesting times .  Nothing else.  So I thought it might be good to revisit it, and the title seemed quite apropos to our own interesting times, after all!  It turned out to be a Rincewind story, and it's quite a long time since I read any Rincewind story at all. Rincewind has been dodging around the Discworld, running away from various imminent deaths, for quite a long time now.  Somehow he has wound up on a desert island (with, of course, his trusty and terrifying Luggage), but he is unexpectedly transported home to Unseen University by the wizards, who want him to go to the Counterweight Continent on the other side of the Disc.  He's been summoned by...somebody. The Counterweight Continent is an Empire run by five major families, who are constantly at each other's throats in a battle for ...

Red Cavalry, by Isaac Babel First off, I just have to say that visually speaking, this is one of the most awesome book covers in the history of the world and I love it.  Of course, what it actually depicts is terrible; it's a Soviet propaganda poster showing a map of Eastern Europe/Russia, with a giant Red soldier stomping on his neighbors -- specifically Poland -- and the neighbors are mostly depicted as bloated plutocrats and outdated military officers.  So it's not that I like the subject matter; it's just an amazing poster showing the official Soviet message -- an arresting primary source and window into this time. This time is 1919 -1920, when the newly-established Soviet Russia and Ukraine are involved in a war with Poland.  The whole thing is complicated enough that I'm just going to direct you to the Wikipedia page on the conflict , but the very short version is that Poland wanted to extend its territory east, and invaded Ukraine, and the Soviets wanted to...

The Dark Child: The Autobiography of an African Boy, by Camara Laye I'm happy I found this memoir, because it's a really lovely and heartfelt story.  Camara Laye was born in Guinea (at the time French Guinea) in 1928, and wrote this, his first book, in 1953 while he was studying in France.  It won the Prix Charles Veillon.*  He wrote three more novels** during his lifetime.  After his French studies, he went back to Africa, though not immediately to Guinea.  He worked for the new independent government of Guinea, but had to leave in 1965 due to politics, and spent the rest of his life in Senegal, where he died in 1980. The memoir tells of Laye's childhood in the town of Kouroussa in upper Guinea, where his father worked as a black- and goldsmith.  His parents were very respected, and had spiritual powers -- Laye describes these in a very interesting way, because he's a modern educated man who doesn't believe in powers....except that he does, because he ...

So many things going on!  Around here, spring is well under way after a winter that was not nearly cold or wet enough.  Everything is in bloom, and hayfever has hit with a vengeance.  It's beautiful, but also worrying.  We need rain! Almonds in bloom  As for March in a literary sense, there is too much to do.  My favorite event of the year, March Magics, starts today and I am enjoying Interesting Times , which is a Rincewind story -- I don't think I've read a Rincewind story in ages.  I have a nice pile of Pterry and DWJ on my dresser, which makes me happy. It's also Reading Ireland Month at Cathy's 746 Books blog .  She's got a weekly theme, and giveaways!  I have no idea what Irish thing I could read this month.  Oh wait, I'm pretty sure I have a James Stephens story on my TBR shelf.  I'll see what I can do. AND it's Dewithon, the Wales Readathon at Book Jotter .  Since today is St. David's Day, it's of course...