Howling Frog Books

When I found out that a few people (including Cleo ) were planning a summer read-along of The Mysteries of Udolpho, I begged to be allowed into the club.  So here we are!  I even made a badge in GIMP -- this was my first one, and it's pretty dang amateur but I had fun and learned skills.  Cleo made one at the same time and it's a good deal prettier.  So I'll alternate! This is the most casual of read-alongs.  Check out Cleo's post for details, but here's the schedule: June 1 – 7                Chapters I – IV (Volume I) June 8 – 14               Chapters V – XIII June 15 – 21             Chapters IX – XIII June 22 – 28             Chapters I – III (Volume II) June 29 – July 5        Chapters IV – VI July 6 – 12                 Chapters VII – IX July 13 – 19   ...

The Bards of Bone Plain, by Patricia McKillip I do think this is an awfully good title.  It just begs to be picked up and read!  This is only the second Patricia McKillip book I've read in my life (the other one was The Bell at Sealey Head), and I've liked both pretty well.  I do find the cover a bit amusing; a lot of McKillip books have this kind of cover and it's very pretty.  It's also a little much, though, and a bit ironic for this book given that the heroine spends all her time in working clothes.  It's sure pretty though! Belden is a modernizing kingdom -- I imagine it rather Edwardian -- and the capital contains the ancient and prestigious bardic college.  It's also got an active archaeology program!  Phelan, a talented but unenthusiastic student, is about to graduate, but he has to write a final paper.  Beatrice, the youngest daughter of the king, is a very enthusiastic archaeology student under Phelan's talented but very eccentric father...

The Castle on the Hill, by Elizabeth Goudge I acquired this book sometime last year and saved it for a special treat.  Or for Elizabeth Goudge Day, but I wasn't very good at that event, and the publisher moved its interest to Instagram, and I wound up skipping it.  (Am still up for next year, maybe?)  Anyway, a global pandemic seemed like a good time to enjoy a new-to-me Goudge title.  This one was published in 1942, in the middle of the war, and probably everybody needed a nice uplifting read right then. It's 1940, and Miss Brown is homeless and jobless, at her wits' end to find a solution.  She's not wanted for war work, and all she's ever done is run a boarding house -- and there are a lot of people looking for jobs as housekeepers.  A train journey gone wrong brings her to Torhaven, in the West Country, where several mismatched people have been washed up by the war: a destitute Jewish refugee; a daring pilot and his brother, a dedicated pacifist; and tw...

A S trange Sti rring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at t he D a w n of the 1960s, b y St ephanie Coontz I've meant to read The Feminine Mystique for years, since it was so influential back in the day, but it's huge and I figured it would be boring.  When I spotted this analysis of the book, it took me a while to decide to read it without reading Feminine Mystique first.  But I'm pretty happy that I did, because Coontz is interesting and also not 800 pages long. Coontz offers up a capsule description of the book itself, the context it was written in, the impact it made, and the book's strong and weak points -- as well as some things Friedan wasn't necessarily entirely truthful about.  It makes for pretty good reading! She also tries to blow up some myths about Feminine Mystique .  People have often described it as a book that encouraged women to ignore husband, children, and home in favor of focusing on a full-time career, which apparently is not real...

This is something my mom and I have been working on during this lockdown.  I've probably mentioned before that my mom is enthusiastic about local history, and some years ago she wrote a much-needed book about the founder of our town, John Bidwell.  All the local schools study the Bidwells, but there were no kid-level books about them.  That was a 10-chapter biography aimed at 4th grade and up.  Then the 3rd-grade teachers, who also teach local history, asked for a picture book that 8-year-olds would enjoy, and so she wrote that, and then two other picture books.  You can see all of them at her website/blog, Goldfields Books, where she writes regular posts about California history . Well, now that school is done from home, the teachers can't read the picture book to their students.  My neighbor down the street mentioned to me that teachers would be thrilled if we made a video of the book, so they could have their students watch it.  This was obviously a...

I'm going to try out doing Golden Bough posts every couple of weeks, and I think I'm going to do a quick outline format just to keep track.  I'm finding that Frazer likes to pile on the evidence "evidence." Frazer's goal is to investigate the origins of religion and magic.  He figures there was a sort of Ur-practice back in ancient days, and that world religions (at least, I think he's implying this) developed from this pre-historic practice, which involved -- so far -- a king who was killed and then symbolically reborn as a kind of fertility rite.  But, since he doesn't really lay his argument out in the way we would expect from a modern author, it's hard to follow.  Instead, he meanders around, poking into this or that aspect of magic or religion.  Any folk-magic practice or religious belief that he likes, he'll throw in as a piece of evidence for his theory -- which seems like obvious cherry-picking of data -- and apparently he wasn...

Despite the fact that time has slowed to a crawl under lockdown, I'm still capable of being surprised that June is in a couple of weeks and it's time for Cathy's 20 Books of Summer event.    As usual, it runs from the first of June through the first of September, and the hashtag this year (which I will forget to use) is #20booksofsummer20 .  My preference is to pick 20 books and put them in a pile -- Cathy has no serious rules.  This year, I have two summer readalongs of giant tomes, so those count in the list.  And I gave myself a couple of alternates, in case.  So here are my titles -- some fun, some classics, some challenge titles, all from my two TBR piles since new books aren't really a thing right now: The Golden Bough, by Sir James Frazer The Mysteries of Udolpho, by Mrs. Radcliffe (readalong #2) The View From the Cheap Seats, by Neil Gaiman The Spy and the Traitor, by Ben McIntyre Edward Lear biography, by Vivien Noakes Age of Ange...

I haven't done the Classics Club's monthly memes in a long time; usually I can't think of much to say that wouldn't sound utterly trite and vapid, so I leave it to people like Lory and Cleo, who can think of insightful things to say.  This one, though, I can get behind!  The question is: What Kinds of Classic Books Do You Prefer? Last month’s discussion about what a classic book was very interesting and provoked a lot of response, I thought, so I figured I would suggest another topic, this one much more subjective. When you read classic literature, what’s your preference, or will you read anything? Do you prefer the “literary” authors, like Dickens, Hugo, Austen, Eliot, or Thackeray, or do you like swashbuckling adventures, historical fiction , science fiction, mysteries, children’s literature? Or do you prefer nonfiction? Are you interested in reading books from many different parts of the world, or are you more interested in books from...

The Unwomanly Face of War: An Oral History of Women in World War II, by Svetlana Alexievich This book was originally published in 1985, and was first translated into English a few years later, but I don't think it became very well-known at the time.  This is a new translation on the heels of Alexievich's winning the Nobel Prize and becoming well-known for her collections of oral histories.  Alexievich spent, as far as I can figure, at least a couple of years collection the material for this project.  She visited places all over the USSR, and interviewed thousands of women who had served in the war, but who had never been asked about their experiences or set down their memories.  After the war, the USSR preferred to focus on the great victory rather than the incredible hardships it took to get there, and people tended to assume that it was exclusively a men's victory.  So I am very grateful that Alexievich worked so hard to get all these women's stories!...

Death of the Snakecatcher, by Ak Welsapar I'm always tempted by Glagoslav titles, but the trouble is they're mostly in Europe, and not that much in the US.  Anyway, I wanted to read something by Ak Welsapar, and this title is pretty tempting, don't you agree?  It's a collection of short stories, written over the decades of Welsapar's career. That career has been a long and difficult one, because Welsapar's homeland of Turkmenistan is one of the most repressive governments in the world.  (Currently, for example, they're one of two countries claiming not to have any Covid cases.)  In the early 90s, the government -- which was newly independent from the old USSR -- objected to a novel that criticized communism.  Suddenly Welsapar's books were no longer for sale, his wife lost her job, and they had to leave for Sweden.  Given that Welsapar writes in Turkmen, it was a worrying thing to do, but instead of losing his audience, he gained a wider one.  Th...

Alberic the Wise and Other Journeys , by Norton Juster Norton Juster is most famous for The Phantom Tollbooth , which I read a lot as a kid, but I don't think I ever read anything else by him, so when I saw this little volume of three fairy tales, I put it on my TBR shelf.  They're for a middle-grade audience, but anybody else could enjoy them too.  I did.  "Alberic the Wise" is about a young farmer who hears of the wide world and goes to learn about it.  He learns many trades, but never quite becomes a master, and, now an old man, arrives in a town and starts telling stories about his journeyings.  He is acclaimed as a wise man, but soon realizes that he isn't wise at all, so what to do now? "She Cries No More" is a fascinating little story about Claude, who (like Pierre) doesn't care.  But he becomes fascinated with a little painting in the museum, and then he actually enters it and meets the sad young lady in the picture... And, "Two...

Some time ago, Ruth at A Great Book Study posted this Dilemmas of a Book Nerd "Tag."  It turned out to be something that started in the book vlogging world, of which I know nothing, but here you go: the video! by Lindsey's Little Library. I wrote most of this post back then, and then I forgot about it for a while.  Here it is, updated for Covid-19....why not write your own version and let me know?    Storage: How do you store and organize your books? I have a lot of bookcases. In the office/Room 4 as we sometimes call it, I have the largest set of bookcases, which hold literature, history, science, and various smaller categories like medieval lit, mythology, chess, housekeeping, classical ed, and so on.  Fancy sets live here too, like my Yale Shakespeare and Durants' Story of Civilization (which I am totally going to read someday, for reals). The living room has only one large bookshelf, which holds religion, older children's literature, and a whole ...

Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, by Capt. Ted W. Lawson A while back, a very elderly copy of this famous book came across the donation table, and my mom mentioned that the author, Ted Lawson, lived here in our town in his later years, and is buried here.  So I figured I'd better read it!  I honestly did not know anything about this book or the events he describes -- meanwhile, my husband said "Oh yeah, that's about the Doolittle raid, right?"  Maybe!  Let's find out!  (What's the Doolittle raid?) Lawson wanted to go into aeronautical research, and in 1940 he figured one step would be to join the Air Force to gain more hands-on experience.  So he became a pilot and flew a B-25 bomber.  He and the rest of his class volunteered for a "dangerous, important, and interesting" mission that they weren't allowed to know anything about until they were already underway.  After strenuous training, they got on to the aircraft carrier USS Hornet and were told th...

The other day when I posted about The Golden Thread , Cleo ( who blogs over at Classical Carousel ) said she had at first thought it was The Golden Bough and gotten all excited.  It turns out that both of us have wanted to read it for a long time, so we decided to have a readalong, and why not start right away?  So here it is, the Spontaneous Golden Bough Readalong, and anybody is welcome to join us, should they wish to read 800+ pages of  highly dodgy but entertaining anthropology. We've decided on a schedule of 2-3 chapters a week; a chapter per day is too much, because some of them are very long.  So we've got some elasticity in case we run into some heavy-duty sections.  My copy has 69 chapters, which makes for some months of reading.  This is a pretty relaxed deal, and we aren't sure yet how often either of us will post.  I might go for every two weeks, if I have enough to say about it.  And my husband made an image for me, because I li...

Russian Tattoo: A Memoir, by Elena Gorokhova In 1980, Elena Gorokova, a scholar of the English language, married an American academic and moved from Leningrad (now back to being St. Petersburg) to the United States, first Texas and then New Jersey.  When her daughter was born, her mother arrived and never left -- and much of this is the story of three intertwined lives. Gorokhova is an expressive writer, and her story is gripping.  Having escaped the crumbling Soviet Union, she doesn't know how to acclimate to the US, and feels that she has little help.  The marriage falls apart, but Elena finds new understanding and happiness in New Jersey, and slowly adapts to American life, while always missing the Russian life that formed her.  When she has a baby daughter, her mother moves in (in fact, she has old friends all over the place, and her sister comes too).  Elena's reaction to her mother -- one of the main strands of the memoir -- is one of mingled exasper...