Howling Frog Books

 Hooray, Kristen at We Be Reading is back for her 11th hosting of March Magics, the event in which we read and remember Diana Wynne Jones and Terry Pratchett.  I think we can all use a little magic this March, so this is a very welcome event, and the theme this year is "Friends Old and New." For DWJ, my old pick will be the first book I ever read, which is Witch's Business (aka Wilkins' Tooth).  It's also her first published story, not counting the early Changeover.  For new, I went with a couple of later titles that I haven't read as often as some, so they are new-ish: A Sudden Wild Magic , and the short stories in Unexpected Magic .  I feel like reading "The Master" again. For Terry Pratchett, I chose Pyramids , which I haven't read since college in the 90s, and The Last Continent -- I can't remember when I read that one at all, though I know I have. This will certainly make my March much more magic!  Are you going to join in?  I hope you...

I don't know why the image comes out with red.  It's bright Penguin orange.  The Third Reich at War, by Richard J. Evans It took me a good six weeks, but I did it!  I finished the Evans trilogy.  This is a huge book, 760 pages without all the notes and such, and I tried to read one sub-section per day.  I actually finished it a couple of weeks ago, but have had trouble getting around to writing it up, and now we're seeing Putin try to pull some of the same moves that are chronicled at the start of this book.  So I guess it's appropriate. Evans offers a solid analysis of everything Germany did, with (I think) something of an emphasis on atrocities and the Eastern front.  There is not quite as much about the Western side of the war, possibly because most people already know more about that, while the eastern side has been less known until pretty recently.  We don't see much of the US part of the war, and there's nothing about the Pacific arena since...

 The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, by C. S. Lewis Here we are on volume 3 of the Narniathon readalong.  I think this is often a favorite with readers; I know it is with me.  It's got so many adventures! Edmund and Lucy are to spend the summer with their detestable cousin Eustace, who plans to sneer at them the whole time.  But they are immediately pulled into Narnia instead; they land in the ocean, right near a beautiful little sailing ship.  It's King Caspian X's ship; it's been three years and his reign is going well, so they're mounting an expedition to visit Narnia's island possessions, which no Telmarines have visited in generations.  After that, they plan to sail as far east as they can, to see if they can find the edge of the world.  (Edmund and Lucy are quite surprised to find out that this world is, in fact, flat, and Caspian thinks it's amazing that they're from a round world.) It's a perfect setup for a series of adventures.  I don't kn...

Difficult to think of anything to say but this seems appropriate.    

 How to Fight Anti-Semitism, by Bari Weiss  This wound up being kind of timely; I'd just started reading it when the news about the Tennessee school board pulling Maus from the curriculum broke*, and then the whole Whoopi Goldberg/View/Holocaust thing happened, and so I wound up watching interviews with David Baddiel and reading think-pieces about it.** The final part of this book is, indeed, about fighting anti-Semitism, but a good 60% of it comes first, and it's about explaining anti-Semitism for the twisty, sneaky, ever-morphing thing that it is.   There's the Nazi version, which we can still see today in diatribes about Jews "replacing" people and attacks on synagogues.  Weiss actually opens the book with the story of the Tree of Life synagogue attack in October  2018, because that was her parents' own place of worship and community. Then there's a quieter version, in which anti-Semitism is bad, sure, but not as bad as real racism, and very understan...

It's not a boat.  She Would Be King, by Wayétu Moore This was such an intriguing novel!  It takes a little while to figure out the overall structure, but since each individual story is also compelling, that is not a drawback at all.  Taken together, the various pieces form a mosaic imagining the establishment of Liberia in the first half of the 19th century -- and how it could have gone better. There are three protagonists: Gbessa (pronounced Bessa), a native African woman whose village pronounced her cursed at birth; June Dey, who escaped slavery and ended up on a ship to Liberia by accident; and Norman Aragon, a Maroon of Jamaica whose enslaved mother had just one dream -- to get to Freetown in Africa.  Their stories are narrated by a ghost.  Each of the three has a special gift, and each of them eventually uses the gift to help the helpless, communicate between the native Africans and the African-American settlers, and help to make Liberia a place where all ...

 The Arsenal Out of Time, by David McDaniel   One final vintage SF novel to round things out!  This story was almost exactly like a very long Stargate episode. Lawrence Alexander is a scholar, an expert in the long-vanished XXX civilization that once spread through the galaxy, but disappeared before humans even got started.  Every so often someone finds a lost ship or something, and Lawrence studies any documents that are found -- usually business-related.  It's very boring, really, until the day he realizes that a bill of lading contains a reference to a preserved cache of weapons, hidden deep in a planet that may, or may not, exist any longer. This is important, because Earth is very worried about aggression from the Old Colonies.  Centuries ago, Earth sent out colonizing spaceships, and then a sudden and massive plague wiped out nearly the whole Earth population.  From the colonies' point of view, they were simply abandoned to die, and those t...

 The Blythes are Quoted, by L. M. Montgomery The day before her (sadly, almost certainly self-inflicted) death in 1942, L. M. Montgomery turned in one final manuscript.  The editors don't seem to have known quite what to do with it, and while versions were published a couple of times, the whole thing was never published in the form LMM wanted it until 2009. It's a bit of a strange book, because even though Anne, Gilbert, and the Blythe children are the organizing principle of the text, they feel mostly absent.  It's divided into two halves of stories and poems set before, and then after, WWI.  One story goes all the way up to 1939 and the start of WWII.  The idea is that we move between stories, which are about other people in the area, with references to the Blythes here and there, and occasional Blythe family evenings with Anne reading out her own, or later on Walter's, poetry.  After a poem or two there will be a short family dialogue. The stories are m...

 Three Apples Fell From the Sky, by Narine Abgaryan This novel is advertised as a Russian best-seller, but that seems to mean that it was a big hit in Russia, not that it is a Russian novel, because it isn't.  Narine Abgaryan is Armenian, and her story is set in Armenia, completely suffused with an Armenian atmosphere (I conclude, never having been there myself).   Anatolia has spent her life in Maran, a tiny village clinging to the side of a great mountain.  These days, Maran is inhabited only by the old; after the disasters of past decades (an earthquake that swallowed part of the village, the war, the famine that killed so many), what few young people who were left had to go.  Anatolia and her neighbors live as they have always done, but they are the last, and now Anatolia is dying. At least, she believes herself to be dying, and gets everything ready so that her best friend will find her properly.  As she lays down and prepares for death, something...

  The Imitation of Christ, by Thomas à Kempis This book has been on my Spin list so many times, but it never gets picked!  However, one of my classics challenges said to pick the title that has been on your TBR pile the longest, and I think this one is it. Thomas Hämerken (Haemmerlien), of Kempen, Germany, was born in 1380 and died in 1471 -- that's a pretty long run!  His devotional book was written in Latin and appeared in 1470.  It was translated into English just about 30 years later.  The translation I read in an old Oxford classics edition dates from 1613 -- at first I assumed it was written in KJV-style English as an affectation to sound Biblical, but no, it's actually written in the English of King James.  And as a fun aside, my copy contains an inscription from 1943 from the president of Trinity College in Texas.  It was given to a lady named Grace, and since she dated her highlights and notes, I know that she must have read it several times...

 The Secret of Zi, by Kenneth Bulmer I saw the UK cover of this SF paperback and immediately decided that I NEEDED to read it.  I mean, look at that fabulous image.  I eventually got hold of an e-copy.  It was probably impossible for a book to live up to that cover, but the story was decent, and I wish there was a sequel. In the year 2025, Earth was taken over by the Alishang.  The aliens are far stronger than humans, and they had no trouble turning Earth into a client planet after a massively destructive attack.  Now, a few generations later, there are enough humans willing to work for the Alishang that there is little chance for rebellion.  But there is a secret underground, and its symbol is ZI.  Only four people in the whole world know ZI's plan or when it will trigger, but the ZI symbol is widely known. Rupert is a ZI sleeper agent, newly activated.  Everything goes wrong and he ends up on the run with Liz, a psychiatrist.  Their a...

 Suns of Independence, by Ahmadou Kourouma  Ahmadou Kourouma was an Ivorian novelist who wrote in French, so this first novel was published in 1968 but not translated into English until 1981.  Kourouma has gotten lots of awards -- this novel won the Grand prix littéraire d'Afrique noire -- but hasn't attracted much attention in English.  He was the son of a highly-regarded Malinke family, and that Malinke heritage (descendants of the Mali Empire, also known as Mandinka) forms a large element of his writing.  Kourouma's main focus, however, was disappointment in the newly independent West African governments, which he saw betraying African ideals and descending into corruption.  He was therefore imprisoned a time or two, but consistently stood against nationalism, wars, and corruption. 'Suns of Independence' is a literal translation of the Malinke phrase that we would say as 'days of independence.'  Fama, the last descendant of the princely Dumbuya fami...

Prince Caspian, by C. S. Lewis The second installment of the Narnia chronicles was published in 1951, just a year after LWW.  I heard after last month's post that Lewis had all seven stories finished by the time LWW was published, and now I'm not sure on that point.  Anyone? It is a year after the Pevensie children's Narnia adventure, and they are in a depressing state: they're waiting at a train station to go back to their boarding schools (Lucy for the first time).  I'm guessing that this makes Lucy about ten and Peter about sixteen, maybe a year younger.  They're magically dragged into a different world, and it takes them a while to realize that this is Narnia -- but Narnia changed by many centuries of time.  You undoubtedly know the story, so I don't need to rehearse it, but I'll just throw in a few observations. As before, Lucy is the innocent one with the most faith.  (Her name means light , after all.)  Lucy has to learn courage, and to do what ...