Howling Frog Books

 Understanding the Book of Mormon: A Reader's Guide, by Grant Hardy I've read this book very slowly this year; it's fascinating, but it's also fairly heavy-duty.  Grant Hardy's complaint is that, in academia/the world outside the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, everybody spends so much time arguing about the origins of the Book of Mormon that they never examine the contents.  He proposes a different approach that doesn't need everybody to agree about whether the book is fiction or history: why not examine the narrative as we would a literary work?  The Book of Mormon has several different narrators, and we can examine their methods and motivations in the same way whether they were real or not. . ..if the Book of Mormon does not qualify as a literary masterpiece, it is nevertheless a complex and coherent work of literature, and its narratological strategies are of more than passing interest.  Professors in English departments are probably not used...

 Network Effect, by Martha Wells OK, I love the Murderbot Diaries series.  It's fantastic.  This novel didn't disappoint and was so good -- and also set up for a good long run of Murderbot stories in the future, so yay! Murderbot, known in public as SecUnit, now works for Dr. Mensah on the independent planet of Preservation.  On the way home from a research mission with some of Mensah's family members, the ship is attacked and Murderbot, plus the teenage Amena, are kidnapped by some strange grey aliens.  It turns out that an old friend is in trouble, and so Murderbot is pulled into a very complicated hostage situation... It's a lot of action, thrills, angst, and weird alien remnants, plus Murderbot's difficult feelings.  It's nice to be with people who treat it like a person, but also that means they want to talk about feelings and....hug.  Ack. I love how Murderbot isn't a human, and really, really doesn't want to be one.  It's always kind of bug...

 14! Which gives me Lorna Doone by R. D. Blackmore, an intimidating brick of a mid-Victorian novel set in Scotland.  I hadn't realized that it's historical fiction, being set nearly 200 years earlier, in the late 1600s.   Doubtless there will be a whole lot of very Scots dialogue! Of course, when I googled the title to get a nice book cover image, the first thing that came up was cookies.  I don't think I've ever had a Lorna Doone cookie, but it is pretty funny to me.  When the cookies were first made and named by Nabisco, they would have been meant to evoke the romance of the Highlands.  Today, if you told almost any American that you were reading Lorna Doone , they'd think "...you're reading a cookie?"  The name would be meaningless otherwise. Scots wha hae!

 Hooray, it's that time again, and we're going to have a Spin!  This is the 25th Spin, which must be some kind of anniversary, right? We all know the rules (and if you don't, just click on that link up there), so let's get right to the list.  The Spin Number will be announced on Sunday, and the deadline won't be until January 30, 2021, so this is a good time to load up the list with terrifying doorstops of books!  Diary of London, by Boswell   The Gray Earth, by Galsan Tshinag  The Eustace Diamonds, by Anthony Trollope  Thus Were Their Faces, by Silvina Ocampo The Female Quixote, by Charlotte Lennox  The Hunchback of Notre Dame, by Victor Hugo  The Well at the End of the World, by William Morris  The Black Arrow, by R. L. Stevenson   For Two Thousand Years, by Mihail Sebastian   Our Mutual Friend, by Charles Dickens  Oblomov, by Goncharov Marriage, by (somebody...)  Stories by Nick Joaquin Lorna Doone, ...

  A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking , by T. Kingfisher (Ursula Vernon) I only recently discovered Ursula Vernon at all, when I read Castle Hangnail in September.  After that, I kept seeing this book pop up on Amazon, but I didn't connect any dots until Redhead explained it all in her review and convinced me that this was a must-read.   So: T. Kingfisher is Vernon's pen name that she uses when she writes for adults.  I'd call this a YA book, but apparently publishers didn't quite know how to deal with it, so she just published it herself. Mona is 14, and a baker.  It's her job to get things started at 4am every morning at her aunt and uncle's bakery, and she is good at what she does.  Like quite a few people in her town, Mona has a minor magical talent -- hers is bread.  She can persuade muffins not to burn and make gingerbread men dance, that sort of thing.  And one morning, she goes into the bakery, and there's a dead body on the floor....

 Solutions and Other Problems, by Allie Brosh Like the entire rest of the internet, I love Allie Brosh's cartoons and was more than a little worried that she had essentially disappeared for several years.  And indeed, it turns out that she was having a rotten time, what with the medical issues and the divorce and the tragedy of losing her sister.  Brosh also decided that cartoon-blogging just isn't a good format for her, so she put everything into a book, which is just as good as the first one.   Solutions and Other Problems is over 500 pages of text and illustrations, so there's plenty.  25 short essays talk about everything from childhood experiences to dogs Brosh has known, the odd neighbor kid, and her sister.  As always, half of the pieces had me laughing too hard to breathe, and several of the others brought on the tears. The first couple of chapters are available in their entirety if you preview the book, so I recommend that if you want to give...

The Moomintroll books, by Tove Jansson:  Comet in Moominland, Finn Family Moomintroll, Moominpappa's Memoirs, Tales from Moominvalley, Moominvalley Midwinter, Moominpappa at Sea ( I don't own the last , Moominvalley in November) We've all been feeling the strain lately, I know, what with the election and the Covid and the state of things generally.  I've reacted to it by reading nothing but the most comfortable of comfort reads.  The Russian history, the horizon-broadening literature, anything the least bit demanding, has fallen by the wayside.  I decided to take November off as far as events go, so no Australians (sorry, Brona) or non-fiction parties.  Instead, I have read at least six Moomintroll books in the last couple of weeks. I've long been a fan of the Moomins -- I discovered them in my mid-teens with a battered paperback of Finn Family Moomintroll.  That was about 1988 and they were at a low ebb of fame in the United States (and they've never been...

 I hope you've been following Lizzie and Chris' Witch Week events over on Lizzie Ross Writer !  There have been some wonderful posts and today is the last day of Witch Week (which, as we know, ends on Guy Fawkes' Day). I participated in two of the posts; we had a really nice readalong discussion of Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book .  I hadn't read it in a long time, and this time I got the graphic novels too.  I also contributed a post about the works of M. R. James, which was a nice experience for me.  I'm grateful that Lizzie and Chris were willing to have me as a guest blogger! I do so enjoy so many aspects of Gothic literature, and have loved reading all of the posts.  Go visit for yourself.    

 The Life of Glückel of Hameln: A Memoir, by Glückel I am so glad I ran into this book!  It's truly one of a kind, I think.  I'm surprised I didn't run into it earlier.  It should be more widely known, outside of the world of Jewish history where it's long been a classic. Glückel (1646–1724) was a Jewish-German woman from a Hamburg family.  At fourteen, she was married to her husband and together they ran a successful business and had twelve children.  Her husband died when they were only in their early forties, and she worked hard to keep up the business and marry off her children well.  She was persuaded to marry again, to a wealthy banker, but he lost all their money before dying and she ended her life in poverty.  Glückel wrote her memoirs -- in an early form of Yiddish -- for her children, on nights when she couldn't sleep because she was so sad about losing her beloved first husband.  She wanted them to know where they came from, and wh...

 The Five Jars , by M. R. James I read a bunch of M. R. James short stories for Witch Week -- watch out for my article later this week -- and watched some BBC adaptations too.  I also discovered a book I hadn't run into before -- The Five Jars , a short novel for children that nevertheless has many of James' favorite elements.  It's written as a letter to "Jane." James tells the story of how he went on a forest ramble and found a magic spring.  He's given directions and digs up an ancient box with five tiny jars in it, and dreams of how they are to be used.  Each day, he can gain a new skill with the contents of one jar.  He becomes able to understand the language of animals, see the unseen, and so on, but there are evil forces after the box and it must be carefully guarded.  At last he is even able to visit the homes of some of the people he has got to know. This novella was charming -- so much fun, unusual for a children's fantasy story, and a little...

 Inside Job and I Met A Traveller From an Antique Land I do love Connie Willis!  And so I'm willing to drop a few bucks on Kindle versions of novellas I haven't read.  I Met A Traveller From an Antique Land features Jim, a blogger who has made a splash with his insistence that when things disappear, it's a good thing.  His blog, Gone For Good, argues that things disappear from disuse and a lack of need, and nostalgia is pointless.  Now he's walking the streets of New York on a rainy day after a radio interview, and he ducks into Ozymandias Books for shelter.  When he wanders into the basement, he discovers endless shelves of books, but the shelving system is odd and there are no prices.  Only after Jim leaves does he realize what Ozymandias Books really is... Inside Job is hysterical.  Rob and Kildy run a skeptic newsletter in which they debunk psychics and quack cures.  Ariaura is the latest hot spirit channeler, but while they're sitting...