Howling Frog Books

 The Popol Vuh (Definitive Edition of the Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life and the Glories of Gods and Kings), translated by Dennis Tedlock I am so happy with my Spin title!   The Popol Vuh is amazing stuff, and Tedlock puts in plenty of explanatory material to help with comprehension.  I loved it.  Mythology/religion readers, put this on your list! The Popol Vuh is the holy book of the Quiché people in Guatamala -- the Mayans.  The book tells of the creation of the earth, the start of the Quiché, and goes right down to the writers' own day, which was the 1550s.  The men who wrote it down kept themselves anonymous for fear of punishment.   (Tedlock is of the opinion that they were the three Masters of Ceremonies mentioned near the end.) Of course I can't go through the whole thing, but...at first there is nothing but a quiet sky and sea.  The gods arrive and decide to create an earth and people for it; they want the people to be able to na...

 I want to blog, I really do.  Everything has just been getting away from me so fast!  I'm gearing up to go back to work, which means lots of fun meetings beforehand.   I've officially changed some of my 20 Books of Summer list!  I just can't read it all, but that's OK.  And so, here is my second riffle of reviews... Summerbook #14: Millions Like Us: Women's Lives During the Second World War, by Virginia Nicholson.    The UK seems to have an even more endless and voracious appetite for books about WWII than we do here in the US, which is no surprise.  This book collects the stories of many different women; Nicholson is trying to give us a portrait of the incredible number of ways women lived and worked during the war.  So we have Wrens, WAAFs, land girls, decoders, housewives...Vera Lynn and Vera Brittain.  Nicholson also covers how women managed under wartime conditions -- not just drawing lines up the backs of their legs, bu...

 Well, I got busy with...stuff...and didn't write any posts for a couple of weeks, and now I have a pile of books, but no more energy than I started with.  So let's just catch up with a riffle of reviews, yes? I'm doing well with the Popol Vuh (which is FASCINATING) and only OK with my 20 Books of Summer.  I mean, I'm currently reading books 14, 15, and 16 -- and one is a WIT title, with another upcoming -- but I have serious doubts that I can read the entire Ring of Bright Water trilogy by the end of the month, especially since I have three or four library books that are crying out for attention...so I'll probably change my list a bit.  And now: Summerbook #11: Harlequin's Millions, by Bohumil Hrabal.   Hrabal's later novel is all about growing old.  In a town "where time stands still," the local castle has been converted into an old folks' home.  Our narrator, a woman who remains unnamed, wanders around the grounds and, in her mind, throug...