Howling Frog Books

 Season of Migration to the North, by Tayeb Salih Here's my Spin title!  This novel was chosen as "the most important Arab novel of the 20th century."  I....am not entirely sure why, as it didn't blow me away, but it did have a lot of subtle things to say about colonialism. Our narrator, who is nameless, is a Sudanese man who has spent years studying in Europe.  Now he is back in a newly-independent Sudan, ready to work hard in Khartoum for the advancement of his people.  He visits his home village on the Nile,* where he meets all the people he has known all his life -- an a newcomer, Mustafa Sa'eed, who lives as an ordinary resident of the village with a wife and two sons. Sa'eed, however, is not an ordinary villager at all, and tells our narrator (who has heard of him) his story.  He lived in London for many years, and was a prominent economist.  He was semi-adopted by an English couple, married an Englishwoman, and had endless clandestine affairs wi...

 The Phantom Tollbooth, by Norton Juster    I read this story so many times when I was a kid!  It came up in conversation/life a few times a couple of weeks ago, so I pulled it off the shelf and read it again.  If you're not familiar with it, put it on your summer reading list! Milo is always in a hurry, and usually bored.  He's not a kid who pays attention to his surroundings, but he does notice when a large mystery package appears in his room.  It turns out to be a miniature (purple!) tollbooth, and to his surprise, when he drives through, he arrives in another world -- one where language and numbers are a little more real than they are here. Milo travels through the Doldrums (where he gets lost) on his way to Dictionopolis, the great city of words, where he finds that King Azaz and his brother, the Mathematician king of Digitopolis, have hated each other for years and have banished their sisters, Rhyme and Reason.  Until the sisters return, con...

 Fugitive Telemetry, by Martha Wells Another Murderbot novella, yay!   Murderbot is back on Preservation with Dr. Mensah, and finds a dead body in an empty hall.  Its immediate concern is to solve the murder in order to find out whether Mensah and the rest of the family are under any threat from GrayCris or another corporation, but Preservation's security teams are less than thrilled at the prospect of working with Murderbot in any way.  Mensah, knowing that it will be good for both parties to get to know each other, pretty much forces them to work as a team. So: who is this dead human?  Who killed him, how, and why?  Indah, leader of Preservation security, is not all that experienced with murder and possible corporate nefariousness.  (Nefarity?  I don't think either of those are words.)  Murderbot is sure that Indah will only get in the way, but has to work with her because it promised not to hack all the computer systems on the station...

I love this cover, I do  For Two Thousand Years, by Mihail Sebastian  I only heard of this novel/writer in the last couple of years, and it should be better known!  This is an amazing book, and also sort of semi-biographical.  Sebastian had this charismatic professor who is portrayed in the novel, and he asked him to write the foreword, which he did; but the foreword was a vicious polemic.  Sebastian published it anyway.  And it's not included here, presumably because of the 'vicious polemic' part. This is a diary that covers about ten years (1923 - 33), and the narrator remains unnamed.  He starts as a Jewish university student in Bucharest, and the university houses other students who make it a point to bar Jewish students from classes and beat them up.  Getting to class is an impossible daily ordeal.  Some Jewish students enjoy the street battles and fistfights, and in their dingy dormitory, they discuss Zionism and Communism and so on....

 The Wind in the Willows, by Kenneth Grahame  I've been wanting to re-read this classic for quite a while; I just wanted to find the right time.  It's so long since I read it (I'm sure I was reading it aloud to small children last time, and they are grown now) that I only remembered some of the major points -- and of course, the perfect illustrations by E. H. Shepard. It's spring, and Mole has been doing so much spring-cleaning that he needs a break; he goes out to enjoy the day.  He's so delighted with everything that he goes farther than he's been before, finds the River, and meets the Water-Rat.*  Mole is so enchanted with this new world that he stays with Ratty for months, and together they have many adventures. We also meet Badger, a solid, dependable, but solitary fellow, and Toad.  Toad is faddish, vain, and flighty, and his adventures form a comedic alternating counterpoint to the pastoral joys of picnics and boating.  At first he just wants t...

 Mules and Men, by Zora Neale Hurston I particularly wanted to read Mules and Men this month as part of Erica's Zora Neale Hurston reading project.   That was the title that I most wanted to read; published in 1935, it represents her anthropological work, in which she collected African-American folktales, legends, and practices. There are ten chapters of folktales, in which Hurston narrates her trip and experiences as well as the stories she collected.  She starts in her hometown of Eatonville, where she is known, and has to convince people to tell her "lies" -- which, while entertaining, are not considered worthwhile.  Once the local fellows are in on the project, they take her to parties and dances, and she moves ever further out, visiting a logging camp and a gambling club, among other places.  Hurston collects songs, most especially "John Henry," which must have become a staple folksong in schools somewhat later; it was the sort of song we were all taught wh...

  The Diary of a Bookseller, by Shaun Bythell This was fun.  Shaun Bythell runs the Book Shop, a large used bookstore in Wigtown, in Galloway, Scotland.  Wigtown is the Scottish equivalent of Hay-on-Wye, and hosts an annual book festival.  Since a used bookstore needs as many revenue streams as possible, Bythell has also written a few books about bookselling, of which this is the first.  I get the impression that this book really made the Book Shop famous. It's just a daily diary of bookshop doings in 2014, with anecdotes about strange or irritating customers, lamentations about Amazon, accounts of trips to pick up book collections, and endless stories about the batty clerk, Nicky.  Each entry also has the number of customers and takings for the day. Bythell also talks about store programs like the Random Book Club , in which subscribers receive a monthly book, guaranteed in good condition.  It sounds like a lot of fun, and I suspect that this diary ma...

 The Luck of the Vails , by E. F. Benson I appear to be on an accidental Benson kick.  A couple of months ago, I read a volume of his horror/ghost stories , which was very good.  It was completely unrelated that I also listened to a podcast about E. Nesbit's story The Enchanted Castle , which put me in the mood to read it again.  In it, Mabel mentions that:  "There's a yew-hedge with a passage along its inside like the box-hedge in 'The Luck of the Vails.'" "In what? " "'The Luck of the Vails.' It's a ripping book. It was that book first set me on to hunt for hidden doors in panels and things."  And, owing to the magic of the internet, I realized that I could find out if a book called that really exists (Nesbit's book mentions generally do exist), and if it's any good.  And it does, and it is.  In fact, it's a very entertaining novel!  And an odd one. It is just about 1900, and Harry Vail is getting started runni...

 It's time to prepare for what has become an essential summer event: the 20 Books of Summer, hosted by Cathy at 741 Books !  As a summer event, the rules are practically non-existent, and I've tried to pick out a nice mix of TBRs, international reads, and books about WWII.  And of course it's important to include a title or two for WIT Month in August! So here are my picks -- 20 titles, plus two alternates: The White Witch, by Elizabeth Goudge I'm Not Leaving, by Williams The Heart of the Hunter, by van der Post Travelling In, Travelling Out, by Namita Gokhale The Summer Tree, by Guy Gavriel Kay The Lady of Godey's: Sarah Josepha Hale, by Ruth E. Finley The Midnight Folk, by John Masefield The Little Grey Men, by BB A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, by Mark Twain On Foot to the Golden Horn, by James Goodwin A Place to Belong, by Fluhman and Olson The Inscrutable Americans, by Anurag Mathur Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, by Olga Tokarczuk ...

 Last Witnesses: An Oral History of the Children of World War II, by Svetlana Alexievich You know, having WWII as a historical focus this year is informative and fascinating, but not necessarily very much fun.  I have read quite a few grim but important books about the war in Europe, and this one is definitely in the top five; and wow -- this really brings home how utterly devastating the war was to the USSR, which is something that Westerners have historically known little about.  Until the fall of the Iron Curtain, much of this was just not available to us, and naturally we focused on Western Europe and the Pacific.  I remember years ago, my Russian sister-in-law expressing frustration with Western ignorance about how much the USSR had done and sacrificed in WWII, and I had no idea what she was talking about.  She was completely right; but also we just didn't have much of the necessary information. I've now read quite a bit of Svetlana Alexievich's work: Voice...

  Weird Al: Seriously  While I cannot say that I am a serious Weird Al fan the way that some people are, I am quite fond of him, have some favorite songs, and have seen him in concert more than once.  And of course we like to watch (and quote) UHF around here.  So when this book was published, I put it on my mental list of books to read. This isn't really a biography or anything; it's much more an analysis of Weird Al's music.  Hirsch interviewed Al (who seems to have a well-developed sense of privacy, go Al), but also does a lot of solo pondering.  She dives into the playful -- but sharp -- nature of the songs, Al's frequent inversion of tropes according to what kind of song it is, and his ability to be critical without anybody noticing.   If you're not too familiar with Weird Al, he does a bunch of different things; most famously, direct parodies of particular songs, but he will also do parodies of song genres .  So there's a truck driving...

 Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things, by Randy Frost and Gail Steketee As a somewhat messy person who collects books and fabric, I've often worried about becoming somebody with too much stuff.  This was especially true when the kids were younger and we also had tons of homeschooling paraphernalia, and I had a really hard time with keeping things clean and organized (I found that we could have only two of three at any one time: good homeschooling, a reasonably clean house, or reasonable meals.  All of them at once were not humanly possible.)  I would sometimes watch shows like "How Clean is Your House?" or "Hoarders" in order to motivate myself to clean, despite the twinge of conscience I experience from exploitative shows like that. The kids are older now and I've much improved my housekeeping/decluttering skills, so that I'm fairly happy with my stuff level.  (I recommend Dana White's blog/podcast/books ; they have helped me tremend...