Howling Frog Books

Greetings, programs!  Hope you're all doing well in this very hot, boring, yet also scary summer.  We have been watching a lot of Tron, thus the weird salutation.  I'm quite surprised that I managed to make it through my set Golden Bough chapters; I didn't think I would.  So, onward...let's talk about taboos, by which he means pretty much any religious or superstitious practice or belief -- for example the practice of not using a dead person's name anymore.   That is pretty much all I got to read about this time. XIX.  Tabooed Acts: just huge lists of examples of the following: Taboos on Intercourse With Strangers Taboos on Eating and Drinking Taboos on Showing the Face Taboos on Quitting the House Taboos on Leaving Food Over XX.  Tabooed Persons: Chiefs and Kings Tabooed: they're so powerful that using their things would hurt others. Mourners Tabooed Women Tabooed at Menstruation and Childbirth Warriors Tabooed Manslayers Tabooed Hunters and Fishers Tabooed XXI

Oroonoko, or, the Royal Slave, by Aphra Behn Aphra Behn (1640-1689) was...well, an international woman of mystery.  She had several names besides Aphra: Ann Behn,  Agent 160 and Astrea, her pen name.   She deliberately told different stories about her youth, so it's not at all clear where she was from or who her parents were.  She may have been brought up Catholic?  She might have done some time in debtor's prison?  She definitely was hired by Charles II as a spy, and worked in Antwerp -- not that he ever paid her.  She almost certainly didn't spend time in the English colony of Willoughbyland (!) before it was sold to the Dutch (you know it as Suriname, north of Brazil), but she said she did.  She probably married Johan Behn (who may have been Dutch or German), and he maybe died, or they separated...anyway, she took the name Behn.  What her name was before is uncertain; she variously claimed Amis, Cooper, and Johnson.   She was one of the very first professional wo

I wasn't sure how often I would do a Udolpho update, but after Volume I seems like a good time!  This has been a pretty good pace for me; I'm not having any trouble keeping up, but it doesn't feel like a massive burden. The plot so far: Emily St. Aubert and her parents live quietly at their estate, enjoying nature, reading, and music, until the death of Madame St. Aubert.  Emily and her father decide to take a tour of the mountains, and on the way they meet a respectable young man, Valancourt.  They all enjoy the scenery together for a while, and Emily and Valancourt get along wonderfully, but nothing is said for the moment.  Once Emily and her father are on their own again, he gets sick and dies, and Emily is left to manage on her own.  Once at home, Emily carries out the last wishes of her father: that she find some hidden papers and burn them without reading them.  Of course, she inadvertently reads a sentence, and its implication is frightening, but she did promise , s

The Return, by Walter de la Mare This was billed as "one of de la Mare's finest occult stories, this darkly thrilling tale."  It sounded neat, so I took it home. Arthur Lawford, boring suburban husband, complacent, pudgy, and smug, takes a walk in a graveyard near his house and falls asleep (or swoons) on a gravestone.  When he awakes, he has a new face -- the face of Sabarthier, a stranger buried outside consecrated ground.  Sabarthier's spirit seems to be there too.  His wife and friends don't recognize him, and how to convince them that his tale is true?  What is to be done about it?  Lawford makes the acquaintance of Mr. Herbert, who is just full of interesting theories, and his sister, who is sympathetic.  As he tries to fight off this possession, it may come at the cost of his sanity. The story was OK, but it was not darkly thrilling and I couldn't always tell what they were talking about, which is a common problem with me and Walter de la Mare.  I keep

Heidi's Alp: One Family's Search for Storybook Europe, by Christina Hardyment Way back in 1985, this British family borrowed a camper-van, bundled their four daughters in, and took weeks to drive around Europe on a storybook-themed trip.  Hardyment, the mom, wrote up this lovely book to tell the story. Obviously it was a tricky proposition to take that much time off, so what they actually did was start the trip with Mom and four daughters, plus a friend and her year-old baby.  After a few weeks, the friend and baby went home and Dad joined them.  Mom being a writer, she seems to have been able to pull off the long trip. They start in Holland, with Hans Brinker (which I have actually never read, I really should), exploring the cities and dikes of the Netherlands.  Then it's off to Denmark, where Hans Christian Andersen will be a major guide on the trip; they first visit Legoland, Odense, and Kronborg (that's the castle at Helsingør, Hamlet's Elsinore).  This gave me

Time for the third installment of The Golden Bough !  This time, we leave maypoles, sacred marriages, and the world of Robin Hood behind to talk about forms of kingship and taboos.  I must say, doing this outline afterwards is a huge help to me in figuring out the structure and argument of the book, so I hope it's helpful to somebody else too. XIII.  The Kings of Rome and Alba: Numa and Egeria: Let's assume now that "the sacred marriage of the powers both of vegetation and of water" to promote fertility has been a pretty common thing.  Maybe such a thing happened at Nemi between the King of the Wood and Diana.  The water-nymph Egeria was also about fertility and childbirth; maybe she was a form of Diana too.  This would mean that the story of Numa and Egeria is one of the sacred marriage.  We don't know much about the ancient kings of Rome, but maybe they did this. The King as Jupiter:  So if the kings of Rome went through marriage rituals with Diana, they would b

The Seven Citadels tetralogy, by Geraldine Harris Prince of the Godborn Children of the Wind The Dead Kingdom The Seventh Gate I read these books over and over as a kid; the library had all four in first editions (with their awesome freaky cover art, way better than the paperbacks), and I thought they were really good.  They've been out of print for about 30 years now, but I thought of them recently and looked around, and they've been released as e-books on Kindle.  With the Worst Covers Ever , but what are you going to do--e-books.  Still, these are really atrocious.  Don't let that stop you!  The Seven Citadels is great fantasy writing, and I really wish they would come back into print properly.  When I finished the last volume, I finally noticed that there's a highly complimentary blurb from DWJ on the back flap of the book jacket! Kerish-lo-Taan is the youngest and favorite son of the Emperor of Galkis--a kingdom ruled by the Godborn, who claim special dispe

Mudlark: In Search of London's Past Along the River Thames, by Lara Maiklem The minute I saw this book I knew I had to read it.  And so did my co-worker, so we had to have one of those polite exchanges of "you take it first!"  She'll probably be happy I'm done with it.  This book is right up my alley.  If I lived in London I would absolutely go mudlarking.  If I'd had any clue how, I would have done it when we went on our trip (which, unbelievably, was just four years ago).  I can't understand why people who live in London don't spend all their time poking into odd corners of history, but I suppose they have to work in order to afford living in London. I do actually have a piece of medieval pottery taken from the Thames by a mudlark; one of the historical buildings we went into had a basket of them.  Pieces like that are very very common and not worth anything.  For one pound you could choose a piece, and the money went to English Heritage (or maybe th

Virgin Soil, by Ivan Turgenev Turgenev's final novel, published in 1877, was a surprisingly easy and enjoyable read.  Maybe I'm just getting better at understanding Russian literature?  Anyway, it's a sympathetic rendering of young and idealistic reformers (called Populists) in the 1860s/70s -- so, the Russian serfs have been liberated from serfdom, and Tsar Alexander II has instituted some reforms, but he's also become more reactionary after an assassination attempt in 1866.*  The Populists wanted to bridge the massive divide between the wealthier, more educated classes and the people .  (Remember, at this time a lot of wealthier Russians didn't speak Russian; they spoke French.  There were essentially two populations.)  So a lot of them put on folk outfits and went out to the people , trying to educate them and encourage them to become revolutionaries.  It didn't go very well. This novel was a big success internationally, but upper-class Russians didn't li

Robin Hood: Green Lord of the Wildwood, by John Matthews A little while ago, I had to buy a 'history of Robin Hood' book for the college library to replace the one that had been lost.  It's a little tricky to purchase something like that, because you know the majority of what's out there is going to be...kind of woo-ey.  This looked like the best of the bunch.  And then one day I was in the mood to read about Robin Hood, so I brought it home for the quarantine and gave it a try.  I do think it's a little bit woo-ey, but mostly not -- and although he walks right on the border, usually when he crosses over and quotes something really out there, he points out that it's wild speculation and seems unlikely.  I'm not entirely sure how seriously to take it, but it was pretty interesting. I was expecting more of a literary /dramatic history of Robin Hood, and what I actually got bore a startling resemblance to The Golden Bough .  Matthews figures Robin Hood is kind

Here we have chapters VII - XII, which were mainly about trees and vegetation.  This section of reading was pretty easy.  I like this arrangement; as long as I do a section per day, I'm very likely to make decent progress.  That said, the next few chapters are on the hefty side and 2 per week may be the way to go.  I am finding it helpful to have this outline to keep track of Frazer's argument, and it's fine if you don't want to wade through it all. Frazer has described the basic structure of magical beliefs, the development of magic into religion, and the progression of magicians into public figures and kings.  Well, if kings, why not gods?  On with our outline -- and of course, each section comes with many examples: VII.  Incarnate Human Gods:  Magician-kings may very well turn into gods, but the definition of 'god' will most likely not be 'omnipotent being' but more like 'having some supernatural power.'  Ordinary people might well be consider