Howling Frog Books

 The Silver Chair, by C. S. Lewis I've always thought of this as a slightly oddball Narnia story, but that doesn't mean I don't like it.  I like this one quite a bit.  I just feel like it doesn't quite fit the mold. OK, so Eustace is back in school, and his school sounds like a dystopian Summerhill gone wrong, which is funny to me.  Lewis hated his own schooling, but he still seems to have stuck to that model as being the proper kind of education.  This school is co-educational and works on democratic lines, and so it's run by vicious bullies.  (Because boys' public schools didn't have much bullying??)  Eustace runs into Jane Pole and tells her about Narnia, and whoosh, into Narnia they go!  Well, actually, they start off at the top of the mountains that were visible across the edge of the world in Voyage of the Dawn Treader, and Aslan sends them over the sea.  I like Jill very much.  She's a sensible, tough kid.  But she and Eusta...

 Unexpected Magic, by Diana Wynne Jones I chose this volume for March because I wanted to revisit that weird and nightmarish short story, "The Master."  I did that first, and ....it's really weird and nightmarish.  I'm not sure what else to say about it.   Some of the other stories in this volume are for younger readers: "Plague of Peacocks, Fluffy Pink Toadstools, Auntie Bea's Day Out."  They each feature an upsetting, irritating older person who must be got rid of in various ingenious ways.  "Enna Hittims" is a twist on this, and must have been inspired by the final pun of Magic Markers really being magic, and bringing Anne's story people to life.  I really like that one.  (Funny how both DWJ stories featuring girls recovering from long illnesses have them named Ann/e!) I have to say, I'm not a fan of "Nad and Dan adn Quaffy."  Maybe because I don't like coffee?  That story just really doesn't speak to me, though it...

 This Is How Your Marriage Ends: A Hopeful Approach to Saving Relationships, by Matthew Fray This book comes out tomorrow, and I was given a free copy in exchange for an honest review.  Matthew Fray went viral a few years ago with a blog post about how little things had -- um -- frayed his marriage until it broke.  There were some big things too, but what it had come down to, he finally figured out, was that he had consistently not respected his wife's feelings.  He had, without ever really meaning to, thoughtlessly ignored what she tried to communicate. So this is a relationship book that is very definitely written to men.  Fray writes with kind of a dude-bro voice, a very 'I'm just like you' attitude.  This is not to say that there's nothing here for women to benefit from (I think I did), but really this is a guy writing to other guys, trying to give a different perspective.   Fray feels that most 'ordinary' breakups (sans abuse, etc.) come from...

 ...11! That means I'll be reading House of Glass , the fourth and concluding volume in the Buru Quartet by Indonesian author Pramoedya Ananta Toer.  This is great; I'll finally finish the set!  I was figuring on reading it this summer. What's your Spin title?  

  Conrad's Fate, by Diana Wynne Jones I was just in the mood to read about a couple of kids getting into massive trouble!  I think I'll count this as a 'new' friend; it was published in 2005 so I've only read it maybe 5 times. Conrad is only about 12, and his manipulative uncle sends him off to Stallery castle to get a job as a servant, telling him that the awful Fate hanging over him will kill him soon unless he does the task he's meant to do -- which is to kill an unknown villain that he failed to kill in his last life.  On his way to be hired, Christopher joins the group and both boys are hired as apprentice valets.  In between the hours they spend learning to be perfect servants, Christopher searches for his missing friend, Millie, and Conrad tries to understand what's going on.  They team up to find out who is pulling the possibilities -- changing reality for profit. This is such a fun story, with lots of running around and comedy.  DWJ shows us her ow...

Oh, I do love the Spin.  This is the 29th Spin, and Brona and I have done them all.  You probably know the drill: make a list of 20 books from the CC list, the random number will be dropped on Sunday, and you read the book before the deadline on April 30th. So here's my list! Conjure Tales, by Charles Chesnutt The Box of Delights, by John Masefield  Amerika, by Kafka  First Love and Other Stories, by Turgenev Our Mutual Friend, by Charles Dickens The Gray Earth, by Galsan Tshinag It is Acceptable (Det Gaar An), C. J. L. Almqvist  Revelations of Divine Love, by Julian of Norwich Motl, the Cantor's Son, by Sholem Aleichem The Female Quixote, by Charlotte Lennox House of Glass, by Pramoedya Ananta Toer Second-Class Citizen, by Buchi Emecheta The Leopard, by di Lampedusa  The Black Arrow, by R. L. Stevenson    I Served the King of England, by Bohumil Hrabal It Can't Happen Here, by Sinclair Lewis Hunger, by Knut Hamsun Madwoman on the Bridge, by Su ...

My favorite color scheme!  False Value, by Ben Aaronovitch I've had this, the 8th Rivers of London novel, for over a year.  But I have this tendency to put off the latest book in a series because then there won't be any left.  Well, the 9th book will be published next month, so now I can read this one... Peter applies for a security position at the super high-tech company Serious Cybernetic Corporation.  (Everything is named after Hitchhiker's Guide things, which is fun.)  He tells them that he was pushed out of the Met, but in fact he's undercover, looking for answers to some questions.  Something weird is going on, involving Babbage's Difference Engine, another mysterious thing called a Mary Engine, and what appears to be a real, true, artificial intelligence.   At the same time, though, people are being hypnotized into attacking the CEO, and a fleet of terrifying magical killer spider drones flying around town. Aaronovitch brings in the America...

 Witch's Business (Wilkins' Tooth), by Diana Wynne Jones Our theme being "Old Friends and New," I started March with the first DWJ book I ever read (in 6th grade, about 1983).  DWJ commented that when she started trying to get published in children's books in the early 1970s, fantasy was unfashionable.  Publishers were only interested in what we used to call 'problem novels' -- realistic stories in which kids dealt with problems like child abuse, alcoholism, divorce, racism, and so on.  So she wrote a story that started off as a problem novel featuring poverty and bullying, but turned out to be a fantasy.  It was published in 1973. Jess and Frank have had their pocket money stopped, and in desperation they start a business: Own Back, Ltd., will undertake revenge jobs and treasure hunting.  They hope to be able to think up ways of tormenting the local bully, Buster Knell.  Instead Buster hires them; he wants a tooth from Vernon Wilkins.  And then t...

 The Leaky Establishment, by David Langford This is such a great comedic novel, and it is (as far as I know) undeservedly little-known.  It's a quintessential British workplace comedy; probably 'The Office' got a lot of tips from it, though I have never seen either of the Office shows so I wouldn't know.  Anyway, it was published in 1984 and reissued in 2003, with an introduction by Terry Pratchett in which he starts:  I hate Dave Langford for writing this book.  This was the book I meant to write.  God wanted me to write this book. And indeed in a parallel universe maybe he did, but here, David Langford did it, and a bang-up job he did too. Roy Tappen, nuclear physicist, works at NUTC, a high-level nuclear research facility -- the UK's equivalent of Los Alamos, where he is supposed to work on fascinating scientific problems and help to preserve the free peoples of the earth from the clutches of evil.  In reality, he mostly fights a losing battle with ...

 Like everyone else, I'm following the news from Ukraine closely and hoping that sanity will prevail in the Kremlin (talk about forlorn hopes...). I have a stamp collection that I'm very fond of, though I don't do much with it these days.  Anybody familiar with the Howling Frog blog will know that I'm always interested in Eastern Europe/Russia/other bits, and that extends to stamps too.  Stamps from the USSR are quite easy to come by; Communist bloc countries produced a lot of pretty stamps for collectors as a revenue stream and as a kid I particularly liked the Polish stamps with lavish illustrations of horses, for example.  So I have lots of USSR stamps.  I also have quite a few German stamps from Weimar and WWII.  They're fascinating because they're often overprinted with astronomical numbers to deal with inflation, or with the names of occupied nations.  I have a couple of 1941 Hitler portrait stamps with "Ukraine" printed on them.  Old postag...

  Our Malady: Lessons in Liberty From a Hospital Diary, by Timothy Snyder This isn't the sort of title I would usually pick up, but I love Timothy Snyder's work, so I was interested in giving this one a go as well.  Previously, I have read Bloodlands , Black Earth , and On Tyranny .  I had better put The Road to Unfreedom on my list!  Obviously from the titles, he has mostly written about history and totalitarianism, specifically as applied in Eastern Europe. Our Malady is different.  Like On Tyranny , it's very short; the two seem to go together, sort of.  But this was written in 2020, after a health crisis, and it focuses on the American health care system. At the end of 2019, Snyder suffered a burst appendix that led to a liver infection, and came very close to death -- largely due to doctors' neglect that was encouraged by Snyder's own unwillingness to admit to pain, but which was mostly due to lack of time.  During his very long recovery, the Co...

  The Eternal Husband and Other Stories , by Fyodor Dostoevsky I picked this one from my TBR pile for February because the Classics Club's dare for the month was to read something that had to do with romance/love.  I looked at my pile, and, well, an eternal husband sounds like it has something to do with love!  Or at least marriage, which isn't at all the same thing in a Dostoevsky novel.  In fact these stories were utterly without romance, even the ones that had marriage in them.   In fact, the first story, "A Nasty Anecdote," is all about a wedding!  Ivan Ilyich Pralinsky is a general, and has spent the evening with two friends, boasting about his liberal credentials.  On the way home, he comes upon the wedding celebration for a very lowly clerk in his office, and decides to prove his boasts by entering the event and being generously kind to his employee.  It goes horribly, horribly wrong.  Everyone is embarrassed, Ivan Ilyich, a non-d...

 Lost Solace and Chasing Solace , by Karl Drinkwater Super low-effort covers, but very pretty  Opal has stolen a spaceship, hacked it into a personality she calls Clarissa, and is on a quest to find...something.  She and Clarissa end up exploring an accretion disk around a neutron star, which hides a drifting Lost Ship (every so often ships disappear, and legend has it that they sometimes reappear years later).  Opal needs to find this something on the deserted liner, but it's not so deserted, and it isn't much like it once was, and the military has tracked her here. It's not a spoiler to reveal that Opal is looking for her little sister.  They were forcibly separated years ago, and Opal has been preparing to find Clarissa -- who she promised to protect -- ever since.  This stolen ship is her chance, and she's determined to either get her sister back or die trying.  That second one is a much more probable outcome. This is a very exciting set of storie...

  Cathy at 746 Books hosts Reading Ireland Month every year, and I'm not very good at it.  But my TBR shelf features a huge and kind of old book titled The Story of the Irish Race , and this seems like a good time to tackle it.  It dates from 1921 and I don't think it will quite count as 'dodgy anthropology,' since it seems more like a mix of legendary and actual history, but it does look like a lot of fun. Can you resist that over-the-top cover?  Not me. The Goodreads description says:   The whole saga of the Irish from earliest times to the present -- the various races from the time of Firbolg and the quest and occupation by the Milesians Spain through the various invasions; history, culture, religion, laws, arts, ties, folklore, trade, literature, heroes Fein, Easter Uprising, etc. Sketches a rough and ready picture of the more prominent peaks that rise out of Ireland's past-the high spots in the story of the Irish race. Written especially for the Ame...