Howling Frog Books

  The Problem With Everything: My Journey Through the New Culture Wars, by Meghan Daum I enjoyed this book, which is pretty much exactly what it says: Daum's thoughts on #MeToo, the 2016 election, and everything that's been going on for the last few years.   She spends a good deal of time meditating upon the differences between people her age -- GenX, like me -- and the other generations, and her conclusion is pretty much that we've always been irrelevant and will never not be irrelevant (well, fooey). For example.  #MeToo.  When we were young, GenXers valued toughness; we desperately wanted to be tough.  Harassment was inevitable, and ideally we'd come up with some cool, dismissive response that would get us out of the situation and also make us feel like we were too tough to be bothered.  Millennials, logically enough, asked why they should have to be tough in the first place -- why do we have to put up with this?  While I do feel that a certain amount of toughness is

  The Drowned World, by J. G. Ballard  In 2145, decades of solar flares have melted all the ice on earth, drowning cities and leaving most of the world uninhabitably hot for humans.  Dr. Robert Kerans grew up in the 85-degree Arctic circle among what's left of the world's population; now he's a scientist with an expedition to explore an old, flooded city to see if it can be rendered usable again. The drowned city now has only some tall buildings poking up from the water, and enormous plants grow everywhere.  Solar radiation has changed plant life, rendering it Triassic in character; everywhere, both plants (and reptiles too) are huge and tropical.  The world seems to be regressing into the far-distant past; humans and other mammals are on their way out, and reptiles are taking over. Soon the heat and ancient atmosphere are affecting the crew with dreams and hallucinations.  The psychologist Dr. Bodkin theorizes that everyone is experiencing the surfacing of ancient genetic

 Breaking Bread With the Dead: A Reader's Guide to a More Tranquil Mind, by Alan Jacobs I quite like Alan Jacobs and have been following his blog, Snakes and Ladders .  I only ran into him a couple of years ago when I read his book, How to Think.   Evidently he's doing a sort of series of that, this, and The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction , which I have not read.  Here, Jacobs lays out his reasoning on why old books is a good idea, and important to do.  With me he's pretty much preaching to the choir, as a look at Howling Frog will show, so the question is, was it worth reading as an already convinced old-book-reader? Jacobs starts by acknowledging that reading old books is often painful.  Yes -- old literature is frequently racist, sexist, or just plain alien.  Why should we even subject ourselves to reading difficult or ugly or incomprehensible books when there are plenty of less painful books to read that we can more easily understand and agree with? Well,

 The lucky number for the CC Spin is.... That gives me Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North , which is about newly postcolonial Sudan.  It was originally published in Arabic in 1967, and the English translation in 1969.  In 2001 a panel selected it as the most important Arabic novel of the 20th century. Honestly that sounds on the intimidating side, but also like something I want to read!  So here goes.  I'll report back on May 31st.

 The Defiant Agents and Key Out of Time (Time Traders 3 and 4), by Andre Norton I got so into the Time Traders books I read in January that I went ahead and got the next two, which kept up the excitement.   The Defiant Agents : Travis Fox, Apache rancher and accidental time agent, has gathered a whole team of tribal members for an expedition to explore the planet Topaz.  It was once part of the now-vanished alien empire, but nothing else is known about it, except that they're trying to beat the Russians there.  Everyone in the ship will be put into suspended animation, and the explorers will be given a new treatment that will awaken genetic memories from the past, rendering these scientific experts more skillful in survival and teamwork.  Plus they have enhanced psychic wolf companions! They do not beat the Russians to Topaz, and so the ship is shoved off-course and crash-lands.  Travis Fox and his teammates awaken with little idea of what is going on, but they survive and begin ex

 Midway: The Battle That Doomed Japan, by Mitsuo Fuchida and Masatake Okumiya  After I read Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo , my brother informed me of the existence of this book, so I borrowed it.  While I love reading history, and I'm fascinated by lots of things around war, I'm not much on reading the actual military war part with battles and weapons.  As a result, I'm somewhat ignorant; I've hardly ever heard of famous war books like Thirty Seconds , or this one, and a month ago I could not have told you about the importance of the Battle of Midway.  Which was pivotal! Mitsuo Fuchida, the main author, explains himself as a naval aviator.  After being badly injured at Midway, he went to teach at the Japanese naval academy and was asked to write up an analysis of the battle for his superiors -- the truth of which had been covered up in Japan.  He was given access to secret documents, wrote the analysis, and the copies were sent off.  In the Japanese surrender, all these do

  Tangled Up In Blue: Policing the American City, by Rosa Brooks I heard about this book from a podcast interview with the author; if not for that, I would never have known that this book is what it doesn't look like -- a memoir about a Georgetown law professor in her mid-40s becoming a reserve police officer in Washington DC.  And it so happens that the law professor is the daughter of Barbara Ehrenreich, the well-known writer, activist, and cop-hater. Rosa Brooks has traveled the world, studying law and violence, and as tensions around race issues and policing heated up, she wanted to know what the world looks like from the cop's point of view.  She wanted to try it herself and think about what good policing is and whether we even know what we want from the police.  (Seems like no.)  And in DC, it's possible to become a part-time reserve officer, complete with swearing-in.  So she went to reserve police academy, while her mother had a meltdown. The world of the police and

 The Woman Who Had Two Navels and Tales of the Tropical Gothic, by Nick Joaquin I really like this wonderful cover image, which illustrates one of the stories.... Nick Joaquin (1917 - 2004) is, as far as I can ascertain, a fairly major Filipino writer.  His full name was Nicomedes Joaquín y Márquez, and he also wrote as Quijano de Manila.  Although his first language was Spanish, he wrote his stories in English, and he wrote for 70 years.  These stories were written over time, with the earliest in the 30s and others in the 60s.   Joaquin started off wanting to be a priest, but decided that his calling was to be a writer.  These stories are suffused with Catholicism both cultural and faithful, but not conventional.  In fact none of Joaquin's characters could be described as conventional; they seem to exist in order to upend expectations. The first stories are set in the days of Spanish colonialism, and are indeed Gothic in tone.  A girl meets her own granddaughter and decides that s

  The Man Who Sold a Ghost: Chinese Tales of the 3rd - 6th Centuries, translated by Yang Hsien-Yi and Gladys Yang One of the fun things about working at a college library, even one as small as mine, is the interesting things you run into on the shelf.  I found this in the Chinese literature section, and the book itself is ten years older than the college is, so it must have been donated when the library was started.  It was printed in the PRC and is clearly part of a Chinese classics series meant for export and education.   This book is not rare, however, and you can easily find it used or in ebook format. This is just a small book of tales gathered from several historical sources, so the contents are highly varied.  There are anecdotes of the doings of various emperors and sages, moral folktales about kindness to animals, honesty, and so on, ghost stories and tales of marvels.  A lot of people die and come back to life, and sometimes they tell about the land of the dead.  They are a

 Yippee!  I've been thinking for the last couple of weeks that it's about time for a Spin, so I was overjoyed to see the post about Spin #26 .  You probably know the rules, and if you don't, check out the CC post; it's easy and fun.  I am ludicrously overexcited about these things, but you gotta enjoy them when they come along, right?  Especially now, when we're all sick to death of staying home but are still waiting for things to open more. So here's my 20 titles, all available within my house: Two Years Before the Mast, by Richard Henry Dana The Little Grey Men, by BB Samguk Yusa: Legends and Histry of the Three Kingdoms of Ancient Korea, coll. by Ilyon Mules and Men, by Zora Neale Hurston The Wind in the Willows, by Kenneth Grahame Conjure Tales and Stories of the Color Line, by Charles W. Chesnutt  The Gray Earth, by Galsan Tschinag It Is Acceptable (Det Gaar An), by C. J. L. Almqvist The Female Quixote, by Charlotte Lennox The Obedience of a Christian Man,

 The Glass Hotel, by Emily St. John Mandel I read Mandel's earlier novel, Station Eleven , a few years ago and enjoyed it quite a bit.  I wasn't really planning on reading this, though, until I heard an interview with her and got intrigued.  So here we are.  And it's a really good novel! At the north end of Vancouver Island, far away from anywhere, there stands a luxurious hotel facing out to sea.   2005: graffiti scrawled on the window: " Why don't you swallow broken glass? "  It's quickly covered with a large plant, and Vincent, the bartender, doesn't know what it means.  She flirts with the wealthy hotel owner, and within a few months they are living together, telling the world they're married.  2008: Jonathan Alkatis is arrested for running a huge international Ponzi scheme.  His investors' retirement funds are gone, among them a retired painter, a shipping executive, a Mafia gangster.  Vincent walks away and melts into the crowd. 2018: Vin

 Frauen: German Women Recall the Third Reich, by Alison Owings We all owe Alison Owings a debt of gratitude for the work she did.  In the mid-80s, she realized that there were all these elderly German ladies, and nobody had ever really asked them about their experiences in World War II.  People interviewed German men, and survivors, but what about the women who had lived through the war, who had experienced life under the Third Reich?  What had they thought, done, believed?  Owings spent several years finding and interviewing an enormous variety of women, and put 27 of those interviews together into this book.  That generation is gone now, and I hope other people thought of asking them about their experiences too. Each lady gets a chapter, and tells her story, partly in her own words and partly through Owings' eyes, as she observes tone, body language, and so on.  Sometimes there is a sister or daughter to supplement, sometimes even a gathering of women with differing opinions.  Ow