Howling Frog Books

 Wow, this is taking a long time!  We're almost to the end of summer and I am on track with my reading, which means it's going to take, I think, another three months.  Still, I think this is the best way for me to be reading it; three chapters a reasonably easy weekly assignment to fulfill and I would probably give up in despair if I tried to read it all at once.  Since I fell behind on the notes, I decided to just take two weeks off, and I'm going to start back up now. Boy these sections had a lot of examples.  This is all about popular folk-customs of the harvest (now mostly gone), and obviously those customs varied slightly according to the region.   XLVI.  The Corn-Mother in Many Lands. The Corn-Mother in America:  Native American customs around maize (short). The Rice-Mother in the East Indies: So many examples of customs around rice. The Spirit of the Corn Embodied in Human Beings:  That last ceremonial reaper is often considered to be the corn-spirit at that moment.

 Black Renaissance, by Miklós Szentkuthy  Miklós Szentkuthy, Hungarian and cosmopolitan (that is, he was in favor of pan-Europeanism rather than nationalism), wrote a sort-of-fictional synthesis of European history and culture, seen through his own very strange lens, and narrated by "St. Orpheus."  The ten volumes of St. Orpheus' Breviary span decades of work and centuries of history, and swirl around the 'marriage of Athens and Jerusalem' -- the contradictions, fractures, and cruelties that make up European history -- but nothing about this is straightforward or anything most people would recognize as history, or logic, or even narrative.  Black Renaissance was written in 1939 (but the title doesn't seem to have anything to do with contemporaneous events).  Also, I love the cover so much, I can't even tell you.  This is a fantastic cover. Now, obviously a work like that is going to be way over my head.  I won't claim to have understood this book.  S

  There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby: Scary Fairy Tale s, by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya This is the second collection of Petrushevskaya's stories I have read, and she is a great writer, although her material is mostly raw misery, Russian style.  In the other post, I quoted a review blurb as saying, "nothing about it screams 'political' or 'dissident' or anything else.  It just screams."   That said, the 'fairy tale' genre works well.  It actually took me all summer to read this collection; since I often get tired of too many short stories at once, I eked it out over months.  Even so, I can recall first story in the book -- the one about the woman who tried to kill her neighbor's baby -- as though I read it yesterday.  Another story deals with a plague in the city and the family that tries to survive it.  Or there's a teenage girl who dies, and her father makes a deal to save her. Twin ballerinas run afoul of a

 Well, I guess since the semester starts today, it's not quite summer any more, but it's sure hot!  We are all fine here, but the world has gone even madder than usual; we had a nasty heat wave and lightning storm with very little rain, and the result is that half the state is on fire -- and there's another storm coming in.    There is nothing very near to us, but the smoke is heavy, so we can't go outside much.  As my brother said, inside entertainment is closed and outside entertainment is on fire, so we just sit around.  The lack of exercise is difficult for me, but since we're about as fortunate as it's possible to be during a pandemic/heat wave/state on fire, I can hardly complain. I did pretty much take the week off from any serious reading, though.  I was up-to-date on The Golden Bough until this week (though I have yet to write up the notes post I should have posted a week ago) and was making decent progress on two books of summer.  I'm none too sur

 Seeing Red, by Lina Meruane (Sangre in el ojo) I was quite interested in this Chilean novel, which I saw billed as "one of Chile's most exciting young writers" in her first work translated into English, which was about trauma and its effects.  I didn't quite expect what I got! Lina is a young Chilean grad student living in the US with her boyfriend, Ignacio, but she has to be extremely careful with her eyes, which have a bunch of extra veins growing in them, and they're brittle.  So the first thing that happens is that the veins burst and Lina becomes very nearly blind as one eye fills with blood and the other comes pretty close.* Immediately, her life becomes far more difficult, as she has to take a leave of absence and usually depends on Ignacio to get around.  The doctor wants to wait and see if the blood kind of goes away.  Her family back in Chile want her home immediately and for her to see a proper Chilean doctor; she and Ignacio do travel down, but Lina&#

Beside the Ocean of Time, by George Mackay Brown I like to listen to the Slightly Foxed podcast, which has added quite a few things to my reading wishlist. A while back, they did an episode on George Mackay Brown (pronounced MaKEE), who is mainly considered a poet -- one of the greats of 20th century Scottish literature -- but who wrote stories, essays, and plays as well.  He was from the Orkney islands, and those islands were very important to his writing.  This 1995 novel is Brown's last, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Thorfinn Ragnarsson lives on the tiny island of Norday* -- it's the 1930s, and Thorfinn is known as the laziest, most useless boy on the island, because he prefers to spend his time daydreaming, imagining himself in other times.  In imagination, Thorfinn sails with his Viking ancestors and rides to the Battle of Bannockburn.  Stories of other islanders are interspersed with Thorfinn's voyages, and we even see the island in 'the future,'

Zima: Origins (Z-Tech Chronicles) , by Ryan Southwick  Readers may possibly remember that in 2018 I reviewed a tech thriller, Angels in the Mist, by my old buddy Ryan Southwick.  He also sent me the second volume, Angels Fall , and you'll see that review in October, when it's published, but first -- a prequel! Here is Zima's story between escaping her former life and the start of Angels in the Mist .  Instead of being an AI implanted in a psychopath, she has her own cyborg body.  But that means she has a lot to get used to and to learn, and she figures the best way to do that is to go out and find herself a family.  How better to learn the normal human interactions she knows nothing about? Zima finds siblings Emilio and Rosa, and applies for membership in their family.  Rosa, a bouncy little 8-year-old, loves this idea.  Emilio, 17, thinks it's pretty strange.  But even though he's sure that he's got his life under control, it turns out he could use some Zima-s

Crossings: A Bald Asian-American Latter-day Saint Woman Scholar's Adventures Through Life, Death, Cancer & Motherhood (Not Necessarily in That Order), by Melissa Wei-Tsing Inouye This book is really a project put together for the author's four children, who are/were too young to read it yet.  But she was dealing with cancer, and wasn't sure she'd survive -- so she put together a collection of essays, letters, talks, and meditations for them to have one day.  (And if it was a published book, it couldn't get lost very easily!)  Lucky for us, the rest of us get to read it too.  I enjoyed this collection a lot, and it gave me some good things to think about.   (Note: I assumed the 'bald' part was due to the cancer, but nope; she had already lost her hair to alopecia in her 20s.) For one thing, she is just very fun to read, and has had an exciting life.  She and her husband/family have lived in Cambridge, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and now Auckland.  She

My copy is ancient; but it's still in print! A Celtic Miscellany, ed. Kenneth Hurlstone Jackson This is one of those TBR books I've had around forever and ever.  I can tell, from the price written on the inside front page, that I got it at our local used bookstore, but it must have been a long time ago! Miscellany is an appropriate description; here we have samples of literature from six Celtic languages, primarily Irish and Welsh, but also Cornish, Scottish-Irish, Breton, and Manx.  The translator, Jackson, wanted to produce a representative collection that wouldn't just include all the things everybody is already familiar with -- but some of the favorites had to go in, or else it wouldn't be representative.     The selections are in themed sections, starting with adventure stories (Cu Chulainn, Fionn, and others), and going on to such topics as love, nature, epigram, satire, elegy, and so on.  They also go somewhat chronologically, with the earliest material first and

  Here we are at the end of Volume III, and things have been quite exciting.  HAS Montoni murdered his own wife?  Who is playing that mystery music?  Will Emily ever escape? One of the guards says he's guarding Madame Montoni and will take Emily to see her, though not until the middle of the night, and all on her own.  After leading her through a lot of deserted and ruined rooms, he points her into a tower, where she finds a torture chair and a body.  She passes out and revives only to realize she's being abducted to who-knows-where!  Luckily, her maid Annette had followed and raised the alarm.  It seems the spurned Morano had a scheme. Emily is now sure that Montoni has murdered her aunt.  (Also, there is a mysterious figure on the ramparts at night!)  But Montoni says she's in the east turret, so Emily goes to check it out, even though she's sure she saw her aunt lying dead.  But!  Madame Montoni is not dead -- yet, anyway.  She's been very ill, and is about to d

 Our number this time is...18! That gives me Tolstoy's novel Resurrection , which I don't even know very much about.  Here's the blurb: Serving on the jury at a murder trial, Prince Dmitri Nekhlyudov is devastated when he sees the prisoner - Katyusha, a young maid he seduced and abandoned years before. As Dmitri faces the consequences of his actions, he decides to give up his life of wealth and luxury to devote himself to rescuing Ka tyusha, even if it means following her into exile in Siberia. But can a man truly find redemption by saving another person? Tolstoy's most controversial novel, Resurrection (1899) is a scathing indictment of injustice, corruption and hypocrisy at all levels of society. Creating a vast panorama of Russian life, from peasants to aristocrats, bureaucrats to convicts, it reveals Tolstoy's magnificent storytelling powers. It's about 560 pages, so not as long as Anna Karenina or War and Peace .   Sounds like a fascinating stor

The Scapegoat, by Sophia Nikolaidou In 1948, an over-eager American journalist reporting on the Greek civil war was pulled out of the bay, murdered.  The American government threatened to withdraw aid unless the killer was found immediately, and so the Greek police decided who did it.  Manolis Gris, a junior reporter, spent 12 years in jail. In 2010, Minas Georgiou is the smartest, and most disaffected, kid at his high school.  Everybody is preparing for the exams, but he doesn't want to go to university or ever take another exam again.  (After all, the Greek economy is in freefall, and there doesn't seem to be much point in anything.)  The maverick teacher at the school gives Minas an assignment: instead of exam prep, investigate the Gris case, and give a presentation on it. The story of the Gris case is presented in a mosaic made of testimonies from the people involved -- almost everyone, except Gris himself.  Blended with the old stories, we see Minas figuring out what he wa

The Forest of Enchantments, by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni I have been looking forward to this book for SO LONG.  And then when I got hold of it, I delayed reading it because I was looking forward to it so much, which is a silly habit of mine.  But I saved it for a summer treat, and wow, it was great. Ten years ago, after Divakaruni wrote The Palace of Illusions , she said that her next project would be the story of Sita from the Ramayana .  Then it was really difficult to get started, because Sita is a hugely important figure, and one that just about all Indian women have to reckon with.  Sita is the embodiment of perfect womanhood and wifehood, and girls are often told "May you be like Sita."  But a lot of times that carries the meaning of 'be meek and mild and put up with everything,' because Sita is often held up as more of a Griselda-like model.  A deep dive into the story of Sita, however, reveals a woman who is brave, strong and determined, and Divakaruni wante

So are you tired of notes on the Golden Bough yet?  I am, a bit.  I'm enjoying the actual book, and these notes are helpful, but the actual job of writing them up is a bit tedious.  Still, I shouldn't complain; this section was a doddle to read!  We're continuing the tour through Middle-Eastern corn deities. XXXVII.  Oriental Religions in the West: Goddess-worship was popular, but foreign and unhealthy for the West.  (See quotations below; they're nearly all from this chapter)  Mithras-worship and Christianity, same thing. XXXVIII.  The Myth of Osiris: Osiris was a corn-god too, but he was so very popular that people piled him with various meanings.  Full story of Osiris is given. XXXIX: The Ritual of Osiris. The Popular Rites: The Nile's rising was the time for the festival of Isis, by which time Osiris was dead.  Farmers' harvest rituals were similar to those of Adonis and Attis.  The Official Rites: Description of priestly rites.  Lots about calendars. XL: T

Yaaaay!  I just love a Spin.   The due date for this challenge will be at the end of September, nearly 8 weeks of time, so it's a good time to put some chunksters on the list.  And since I'm trying to read Russian literature this year, I really loaded up this list with Russians.  (Also, I'm still limited to what I have in the house, and there are a lot of titles I can't get right now.) The Spin number will be announced next Sunday, which is a whole week away.  How will I stand the suspense?? Here's my Spin list: Revelations of Divine Love, by Julian of Norwich (second version) Demons, by Dostoyevsky The Obedience of a Christian Man, by William Tyndale Life and Fate, by Vasily Grossman The Female Quixote, by Charlotte Lennox Oblomov, by Goncharov Lorna Doone, by R. D. Blackmore Thus Were Their Faces, by Silvina Ocampo For Two Thousand Years, by Mihail Sebastian  Our Mutual Friend, by Charles Dickens The Idiot, by Dostoyevsky The Well at the End of the World, by Wil

The White Mountains The City of Gold and Lead The Pool of Fire When the Tripods Came , by John Christopher The original covers!  This is what they look like in my head. I've always really liked John Christopher's novels for -- I guess I'd say ages 10+.  They're fine as YA, and they're not too difficult for most middle-grade readers.  Christopher specialized in apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic stories, which generally feature a very ordinary English boy of 12 - 14 as the protagonist.  The Tripod novels were his breakout stories, and are still the most famous today.  Sometime in the mid-80s, Boys' Life did a graphic serial of the stories, and that's where I first read them, in my brothers' magazine.  ( Boys' Life is the Boy Scout magazine, if you're not familiar with it.) The world has been enslaved to the Tripods for at least a hundred years; nobody knows just how long.  Everyone is Capped at the age of 14, and after that they are docile and obe