Howling Frog Books

The Golden Thread: How Fabric Changed History, by Kassia St. Clair A while ago, St. Clair's first book, The Secret Lives of Color , was very popular, but I had already read Victoria Finlay's Color: A Natural History of the Palette (which is wonderful, and apparently I read it pre-Howling Frog, which surprises me!) and I -- rather snobbily -- eschewed the newer book, thinking it couldn't be as good.  I will have to rethink that snap judgement.  I can never resist a book about textiles, and though I kind of thought this might be on the light side, I found that I enjoyed it very much and and recommend it to any textile-lover...or for that matter, anybody who has never given a thought to the huge importance of textiles. This book is not a comprehensive history of the development of early textiles, though.  St. Clair hops around a bit in the fields of history and geography.  Each chapter focuses on one sub-topic, and gives several stories about that.  So there ...

What a fun cover!  Mine isn't. Coronation Summer, by Angela Thirkell A couple of people around the bloggy world have been reading Angela Thirkell, which strikes me as a perfect author for reading while hiding out from a global pandemic.  I had this one on my TBR shelf, and indeed it was an ideal read for right now.  I'm going to pass it on to my mom and then to a friend; it was so refreshingly funny! Fanny Harcourt is 17 in the summer of 1838, when the young Victoria is going to be crowned.  She and her best friend Emily Dacre manage to talk Fanny's father into spending the summer in London so they can see all the sights and experience the excitement.  The girls also spend quite a bit of time thinking about the young men they meet; Emily has a crush on Fanny's older brother Ned, and Fanny is much struck by the romantic-looking dandy, Mr. DeLacy Vavasour, who has published several sensational novels.*  Mr. Darnley, on the other hand, is also charming...

Here are two novels that I'm putting into one post, because:  They are both books in which the reader, and the protagonist, have to figure out what the Terrible Thing in the Past is; They're both bestselling first novels, and very recent, and I picked them up from our Little Free Library; and  My friend made me read the first one, and I'm going to make her read the second one. Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine, by Gail Honeyman This novel was all the rage a couple years ago, but I never got to it until now -- one of my closest friends read it recently, and recommended it to me.  Pretty soon I came across a copy in our Little Free Library and took it home, and I thought a quarantine would be a good time to read it.  Also, the April book for that one TBR challenge is supposed to be the newest book on the TBR shelf, and while I'm not 100% sure which book is the newest, this one seemed like a pretty good bet.  So here's the story: Eleanor Oliphant wo...

The Long Walk: A Gamble for Life, by Slavomir Rawicz and Ronald Downing  Well, this was certainly an interesting read, and not for the reasons I thought it would be.  It came across the book donation table, and I thought it looked interesting.  My mom said it was a bestseller in its day -- the memoir of a man who had escaped from a Siberian gulag and walked to India.  Well, I couldn't resist that! But I was a bit startled when I started to read the foreword, by Ronald Downing (a reporter who wrote the story as Rawicz told him), and it starts with My newspaper, the London Daily Mail , was launching an expedition into Nepal to seek the yeti, or Abominable Snowman, of the Himalayas...  Wait, what??  Downing goes on to explain that he met and interviewed Rawicz because he'd seen yetis, and insisted on telling the entire story, since the encounter with the yetis was pretty minor really.  In fact, it takes up maybe a page or two in the whole book. S...

When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry, by Gal Beckerman Well, this title took me a little longer than I expected it to!  Embarrassing to relate, I started it in January and got bogged down a few times, especially when we started the lockdown.  For a while I couldn't concentrate well at all, and while it's a fascinating history, it's also a fairly heavy-duty book. This is the amazing history of the struggles of Soviet Jews, and outside efforts to help them.  The dilemma was that, while the USSR didn't really want Jews around, it wasn't willing to let them leave either.   In theory, the Soviets would band together as one; in practice, Jews were always treated as second-class citizens, which kept them out of jobs they were qualified for and made them feel unwelcome.  But if they applied to leave, they would just about always be denied...and would also lose their jobs and social circles.  This meant that even Jews...

6! Which means I'll be reading The Fortunes of Richard Mahony , by Henry Handel Richardson.   Henry Handel Richardson was actually Ethel Florence Lindesay Richardson (1870 - 1946), and when I put it on the list, I forgot that The Fortunes of Richard Mahony is in fact three novels that got collected into one volume: Australia Felix, The Way Home, and Ultima Thule .  So that adds up to a good 800+ pages, yikes!  It's supposed to be a lot of adventure, but maybe I should have just picked the first volume?  We'll see how it goes.  I only have this book in Kindle, which I always find a little more difficult than reading a book, but after all, we're all home all the time now. So on the whole, I'm pretty excited!  Here we go!

Woohoo, it's Spin time!   I was really hoping one would come along to brighten our quarantine time.   Of course, I'm limited to the titles that I actually have in the house (or on my e-reader), but I need to read those piles down anyway.  I tried to pick some that would work for other challenges, and I've tagged those, but only for a couple of them; they're pretty much all on my TBR pile, and many would work for the Reading Classic Books Challenge, whereas I'm having difficulty finding certain of the Back to the Classics requirements. The Club challenges us to pick some titles we are excited about and others that are scary, which I have done.  I'm nervous about several of these!  But I've learned my lesson about the dreaded #1, so I put something fun in there.  Twelfth Night  (Back to the Classics) The White Guard, by Bulgakov For Two Thousand Years, by Mihail Sebastian   (Read Around the World) Stories by Nick Joaquin (Read Ar...

Selections from Specimens of the Pre-Shakespearean Drama , vol. I, ed. John M. Manly That 2020 TBR challenge that I'm not officially doing said that in March, I could take the TBR book that had been there the longest.  As far as I could figure, this was that book.  I bought it in about 1994 from the UC Berkeley Library, which had discarded it from the Moffitt Undergraduate Library (my least favorite library on campus, which is now a bunch of fancy group study rooms with no books at all).  It is a two-volume set, with a date of 1897 on it, and has a bookplate in it for one George Hubbard Savage, complete with family crest (on right!) and motto ("A te pro te"). This volume contains the fun stuff in the dual set: a whole bunch of medieval mystery plays, in which various guilds would depict a piece of the Bible;  some Robin Hood and St. George plays, and a sword play.  I wanted to read some of those, not the whole thing all in one go. I read the "Norwich Wh...

The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, by John le Carr é This has been on my TBR for a little while; I'd never read John le Carr é, and when this book came across the donation table, other folks said he was pretty good and I should give him a try.  It was, indeed, pretty good, but not at all as I was expecting!  Also, the copy I have turned out to be a sort of commemorative edition to mark the fall of the Berlin Wall -- it has an introduction by le Carr é written just afterwards -- because the novel was inspired by the building of the Wall in the first place. Alec Leamas is a British spy overseeing operations in Berlin, but his contacts have all failed, and the best one is killed just as he's about to cross and escape from East to West.  Leamas goes home, a failure expecting to be shoved into a corner, but his boss offers him one last job.  In order to do it, Leamas must enact the part of an embittered loser going down the drain, and get recruited for the other side...

By far the best cover ever done The Homeward Bounders, by Diana Wynne Jones Kind of funny to have a wrapup two weeks after the event ends, but such is life.  I spend too much time at my desk for work, and then fail to fit the blogging in.  I actually have several books to share, but getting to it is a different thing! My final read for March Magics was The Homeward Bounders , a long-time favorite.  I love how DWJ took the idea of role-playing games, mixed it up with a multi-verse and threw in Prometheus, and bam: amazing story.  Jamie, Helen, and Joris are all wonderful characters, and Jamie is so understatedly tragic.* I don't have a lot new to say about this story this time, but I wanted to give it its due, and thank Kristen for hosting March Magics even though this is a difficult time.  The choice of DIY turned out to be far more appropriate than anyone imagined!  I was grateful to have some DWJ to read in the middle of all this muddle. ...

The Spellcoats, and The Crown of Dalemark, by Diana Wynne Jones Last Witch Week, I read Drowned Ammet and Cart and Cwidder ( which I then did not post about, since I went on a hiatus instead), so it seemed only fair to read these two for March Magics.  And of course, they were lovely.  Although I think that DWJ's refusal to spend a tremendous amount of time in any one world was a strength and a good thing, I sure would love a couple more Dalemark stories.  Maybe the story of Manaliabrid, or where Ammet and Libby Beer fit in with the others.  I would very much like to have about 300% more information about Dalemark history, especially about my favorite character, Tanaqui. Spellcoats is such a fascinating novel, to my mind.  It's a 'found documents' story, in which the novel is translated from artifacts found in an archaeological dig -- but the artifacts are "rugcoats," woven robes in which the weaving actually forms words fo...

Irish Fairy Tales, by James Stephens I wanted to read something for Cathy's Reading Ireland 2020 event, but my TBR pile did not hold any modern Irish literature.  It did hold this volume of Irish tales, retold by James Stephens, and as a bonus, it turned out to be illustrated by Arthur Rackham.  In fact it's a lovely volume all 'round, though sadly missing its dust jacket.  My copy is a modern reprint of the 1920 original. Most of the stories are about Fionn mac Uail (in this version; I've seen it spelled other ways and in English it's Finn MacCool), the heroic leader of the Fianna Finn.  There are some other tales as well, such as the story of the man who hated dogs, the 'carl with the drab coat' who ran a race over Ireland with a foreign king, and the Hag of the Mill. One of the great joys of this collection of stories is Stephens' language, which is lovely and descriptive, and often very very funny.  I could not resist sharing some of the bits...