Howling Frog Books

 Resurrection, by Lev Tolstoy Wow, what a novel this is.  It was published in 1899, Tolstoy's last great work, and also his first novel in over 20 years.  He had come to believe that art had to have a purpose and that he should no longer write novels, but when the Dukhobor sect needed money to emigrate to Canada, he wrote this as a fundraiser, and to express the views he had come to hold. Prince Nekhlyudov is your average dissipated rich nobleman; having gone to school and served in the military, and now living in society, he has been well trained in manners, dress, extravagance,  overindulgence in drink, and affairs with women.  He probably ought to settle down and is looking for a society wife.  Called to serve on a jury, he is astounded to recognize one of the defendants in a murder case; it's Katusha, the servant girl he once loved, and then seduced and abandoned.  Realizing that her entire sad life is his fault, he decides that he needs to atone -...

 Ivory Apples, by Lisa Goldstein  I think it was Jenny who loved this book a while back, and I've meant to read it ever since.  RIP finally stirred me to it.  Wow.  It is a great story, and also takes some very unexpected turns. Every couple of months, Ivy's dad, Philip, takes her and her three sisters to go visit their Great-Aunt Maeve, who lives way out in the country.  Philip takes care of her mail and business, and the girls are never supposed to tell anyone that Maeve Reynolds is actually Adela Madden, author of the beloved fantasy novel Ivory Apples .  Maeve can't, and won't, handle the publicity and the fans. At the park, the sisters meet Kate Burden, a remarkably friendly young woman who insinuates herself into the family's life.  She is an obsessive fan of  Ivory Apples , and in fact she wants what Adela Madden had in order to write the story, which is not something easy to come by.  She is willing to destroy the entire family ...

Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism, by Anne Appleb aum I admire Anne Applebaum a lot!  So I actually bought this.  Be impressed.  It's a short, and very personal, book that meditates on recent history and the dangers of authoritarianism.  Why is it attractive to so many?  How long can you hold on to a relationship when the other person espouses beliefs you can't agree with? Applebaum starts with an engaging story -- a New Year's Eve party, 1999, in Poland -- a gathering of writers, thinkers, and dissidents.  Communism is defeated, and surely liberal democracy is the future.  But now, 20 years later, the group of former friends is split.  Many are involved in Poland's new authoritarian government. A large part of the book is dedicated to how Poland got where it is now -- a history that includes conspiracy theory used as a tool by the power-hungry, and which uses the same old familiar weapons of nationalism, violence, fea...

 Heap House (Iremonger Trilogy #1), by Edward Carey  This is one of the strangest, most bizarre middle grade/YA books I have ever read in my entire life.  I picked it up on a whim from the donation table, and it looked like a proper read for RIP, but I was not expecting the complete outlandishness of this story.  I'm not even sure how to describe it. In an alternate Victorian London, the Iremonger family rules the realm of trash.  They're bailiffs (in US terms, repo men) and they also do salvage.  Over the last hundred years or so, they've amassed miles of land near London, all of which is covered by the heaps (of trash).  Their mansion stands in the middle of the heaps, and is a conglomeration of an incredible number of buildings they've repossessed and fastened on.  The people of an entire town work in the heaps, searching for goods to be salvaged, but the heaps are very dangerous -- they even have their own weather. Young Clod Iremonger is one ...

 OK, so the whole 'readalong' thing is maybe not quite true any more, but no matter.  I'm keeping the post series title anyway.  I did, in fact, take a little extra time off and only got back on the wagon in this last couple of weeks.  It's not easy to keep the momentum going for this long!  But I'm now over 600 pages along; only 200ish more to go.  Stay on target! Some of these were very long chapters filled with accounts of various religious practices.  He got very long-winded and I couldn't always see the point (besides anthropological interest, but he was explaining these in much more detail than usual).  The general theme was practices around animals, and it's a bit of a hodgepodge honestly.  Frazer could get any meaning he wanted out of this stuff. XLIX.  Ancient Deities of Vegetation as Animals. Dionysus, the Goat and the Bull: Certain animals were generally sacred to particular deities, and the corn-spirit is often represented as...

 After London, or, Wild England, by Richard Jefferies I've been reading this forever on my phone.  (Since I hardly ever read on my phone, it took a long time!  But it was nice to have a 'phone book.')  My brother recommended it to me and he was right; it was a very interesting thing to read. Jefferies published his story in 1885.  People would have thought of it as romance at the time, as in an improbable adventure.  We'd call it something like post-eco-apocalypse; the story is set hundreds of years in the future, long after some mysterious disaster has killed most of the population of England and presumably the rest of the world.  Water levels have risen, and the formerly great cities are submerged, exuding unknown poisons into the water.  The Thames Valley is now a gigantic lake, and petty kings exert power over small, feudal populations (the story is pretty much confined to the Thames Valley and maybe a bit north). The first part of the novel ...

 Castle Hangnail, by Ursula Vernon I don't know why it took me so long to get around to this charming and funny story!  People recommended it to me, and even my youngest said it was great (she is picky).  RIP finally got it done. Castle Hangnail has been without a Master for quite some time, and the minions are very worried that the Board of Magic will shut them down and decommission the castle.  Even so, the guardian is skeptical when a 12-year-old girl shows up and announces that she is their new Wicked Witch.  She's awfully short and frizzy, and she doesn't look impressive or demand impossible tasks, as a proper Master should.  But she takes on the proper Tasks to make the castle hers, and the minions start to like Eudamonia, who prefers to go by Molly ...until, that is, her secrets are found out. This was so much fun!  It's got clever plot, lovable characters, and great atmosphere.  Molly makes friends with the bats in the attic, and they send...

Queen of the Sea, by Dylan Meconis My mom handed me this long graphic novel and said I'd like it, and so I did!  I thought this was a really unusual, and lovely, story.  It's kind of if you had the Tudors in an alternate universe. Margaret has always lived on the island with the nuns.  It's a very remote island, and the convent is there to pray for and take care of sailors.  Margaret arrived as an infant and doesn't know who her parents are, and she's the only child on the island, until a lady comes with her son, William.  And then Eleanor arrives -- a deposed queen whose half-sister Catherine has taken over the throne.  Margaret is interested in Eleanor, but Eleanor is angry and suspicious... Pretty much, it's got an alternate version of Henry VIII with just two daughters, and when the younger sister becomes queen, the older one rallies her supporters and attacks.  Everything happens on the island (I think it's a version of St. Kilda), and through Mar...

Women's Work: A Reckoning With Work and Home, by Megan K. Stack I had no idea this book would be so absorbing, but after all, I'm always interested in reading about the issues around family, motherhood, and housekeeping!  This hit a lot of my buttons, and as with the Divakaruni book I wrote about a few weeks ago, I'm only sorry that for the most part, only women will read this and men won't be inclined to pick it up -- because although the title is about women, the actual subject matter is about families, work, and how we structure society.  Stack structures her book as a sort of memoir and sort of meditation on how we patch work and family together with money...or not. Megan Stack used to be a correspondence reporter, traveling the world's more dangerous spots after news stories.  Her husband, Tom, was the same, and eventually they decided to settle down in Beijing, where Stack planned to have a baby and write the novel she's been planning.  Seems easy enough, ...

 I was going to write about books today but it's pretty hard to concentrate, and I'm just going to put up a little update.  Most readers know that California has been on fire for the last few weeks, and it's been awful.  Our little part of the state has been smoky and unpleasant, but now it's much worse; a wildfire near Oroville (about 20 miles away, in the foothills -- where the dam made the news about 3 years ago) exploded overnight into a quarter-million acres.  We woke up to ashy, orange darkness -- again.  It's very much like the day after the Camp Fire up in Paradise, and I'm sure a lot of folks are having a horrible day filled with terrible memories.  Quite a few people who used to live in Paradise live in Oroville now and are evacuated. This is the view near my house this morning, an hour after sunrise.  The first photo faces east, and then goes in a counter-clockwise circle to the north, west, and south, ending in the southeast.  I'm just...

 It's time for Readers Imbibing Peril XV!  As with so much these days, everybody is taking a step back and this is a simplified event for fraught times.  No levels or sign-ups, just join in and read a book or three, and post on your Twitter or Instagram or blog -- for those of us dinosaurs still writing blogs. So I happily went and gathered a pile of books, and here they are.  I don't know which ones I'll read when; this is just a pile to pick from.  Are you going to join up with RIPXV? 

 The Anvil of the World, by Kage Baker   #20booksofsummer note: I guess I'm a day late and a dollar short, but no worries.  I finished this on September 1, and The Golden Bough is book #20, so I'm calling it good! I have really loved Kage Baker's Company series, and this was her first dive into fantasy instead of SF.  (Do you know, she only published for about 13 years before she died too young in 2010?  She produced an incredible number of books in that time!) Smith just wants a quiet life and a steady job that doesn't involve killing people -- which is his major talent.  He takes a job leading a caravan from the breadbasket city of Troon to the sea port Salish, carrying lots of cargo, several odd passengers, and a good crew.  After the caravan is attacked three times, Smith figures something might be up with these passengers... The world has several species: Smith is of the Children of the Sun, a prolific people given to building, blood feuds, and a ...

 White Guard, by Mikhail Bulgakov This is Mikhail Bulgakov's first novel, written in 1921 and published serially -- except that the magazine shut down and the last part of the novel was not published at the time.  Instead, it was turned into a play, The Days of the Turbins, and the play was such a smash hit that the novel was kind of ignored.  Bulgakov didn't finish it for several years. It is 1918, and the Turbins of Kiev are a family of three siblings: Elena, whose husband has been working for the German hetman, Alexei, a doctor with the Russian (White) army, and Nikolka, just 17.  They belong to the Russian-based urban/military class.  Ukraine has been pulled nearly to pieces in the complicated war; at the start of the novel, the Germans had installed a hetman to run the country for them, but now they are pulling out.  Elena's husband heads out with them.  Now there are three sides to the war: the Russian military trying to restore the Empire, Petly...

 Th e Inland Sea, by Donald Richie This account is touted as a classic of travel literature, so I was very excited to read it; I love travel literature!  In this case, I was somewhat disappointed.  The travel parts are wonderful, but Richie talks a lot about himself, and...I don't like him very much.  He also talks a lot about the Japanese character, and it feels strange.  So, while I liked parts of it, on the whole...meh. Richie lived in Japan for all of his adult life, and this book was written in the late 60s from his journals of a trip taken in 1961 -- and somewhat streamlined.  The important thing about it is that he's describing an area of Japan that at the time was still very isolated from urban culture, and many of the people were still living a way of life that modernity had not yet taken over.  It's mostly tiny fishing villages and little puttering boats that go from island to island, and Richie is very aware that most likely, pretty soon it ...

I've done it!  I finished!  That was fun, despite Emily's inability to make it across a room without leaning on every available piece of furniture for support.  That girl needs a stronger spine or something. So, Emily believes Valancourt to have gotten into some very bad habits, including heavy gambling and being a gigolo.  Valancourt admits his lack of worthiness, and they're both very sad.  A lot of this volume involves Emily meeting Valancourt -- by his request or accidentally -- whereupon they both get very upset and leave each other again, and Emily writes melancholy poetry.  Emily is staying with her friend Blanche, and an elderly servantwoman won't stop commenting on how much Emily resembles the late Marchioness, who died tragically young.  Emily, remembering her father's mysterious papers, begs for the story.  (Meanwhile, back at Udolpho, Montoni is captured!) The Marchioness was a lovely and good woman who was badly treated by her husband...