Howling Frog Books

 I'm getting on an airplane and going to Germany, so it will be a couple of weeks before I post again.  Happy summer and happy reading! Regensburg!   CC BY-SA 3.0 de , Link

 The Girl With the Glass Bird, by Esme Kerr I used to enjoy the Bookshelves of Doom blog, and now she's over on Substack.  She enjoyed this story, and it was free to me on Kindle, so here we are.  I'd call it age 10+ -- a little older than a middle-grade novel, and good for a YA audience too. Edie has been raised by her grandmother Babka, but Babka has gone blind and is moving to a nursing home.  There's nowhere for Edie to go except to her aunt's house, where her three cousins torment her mercilessly -- so when a distant relative offers her a job of sorts at an old-fashioned girls' boarding school, she jumps at it. Anastasia is a dreamy Anglo-Russian whose wealthy father is worried that she is being bullied at school.  Edie's job is to watch and find out just what is going on.  Anastasia keeps losing things, thinking they're stolen, and then finding them again in odd places.  She's earning a reputation as a drama addict who probably has mental problem...

 Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, by Jack Weatherford   This was actually an assigned title in my kid's world history class this semester, and I decided to read along so we could discuss the book.  (I guess homeschoolers never die!)  It turned out to be a very interesting and exciting book, with plenty to discuss and argue over. The first half of the book is a biography of Temujin (Genghis' original name), who nobody would have picked out as an obvious world-conqueror.  Mongols all lived on the edge, but after the death of Genghis' father, the family nearly starved.  Bullied by his older half-brothers, Genghis learned to assert himself (by killing one of them), put himself under the protection of a powerful lord, and eventually rose to power through a combination of ruthlessness, practicality, and quick wits.  He proceeded to take over all the Mongol tribes and then pushed outward.  By the time of his death, he was the Golden Khan,...

 Being Seen: One Deafblind Woman's Fight to End Ableism, by Elsa Sjunneson A little bit ago I posted that my kid had given me Sitting Pretty , which was on the new bookshelf at my work library, because I'd put it there -- along with Being Seen .  That was actually the one I'd intended to read, so I grabbed it too.  Since eye issues run in my family, and I have my share, I'm always interested in books about low vision and so on. Elsa Sjunneson is a writer and activist; she's done a lot of writing and editing in SF.  This book is a memoir and meditation on how the world sees disability, and disabled people.  She is Deafblind -- that is, partially sighted in only one eye, and uses hearing aids -- because her mother got a mild case of rubella from an unvaccinated person.*   In each chapter, Sjunneson talks about different aspects of disability and navigating a pretty unfriendly world that isn't set up for disabled people.  At first I found Sjunneson's...

 House of Glass, by Pramoedya Ananta Toer It's the last of the Buru quartet!  Toer wrote these novels while he was imprisoned at the Buru Island detention camp.  They were published in the 1980s, but banned in Indonesia until 2000.  Here are the previous three titles: This Earth of Mankind Child of All Nations Footsteps Together, these tell the life story of Minke, who was loosely based on Tirto Adhi Soerjo (1880 - 1918), a native Indonesian journalist who criticized the Dutch colonial government. At the end of Footsteps , Minke is exiled from Indonesia. House of Glass actually moves away from Minke during his exile and is narrated by Jacques Pangemanann, a Native police officer who admires Minke, but also possesses a talent for explaining Native movements to the Dutch government.  Pangemanann has always wanted to be a Good Guy, keeping the law and bringing down the Bad Guys, but his long-awaited promotion dumps him into a much more complex world.  Now he's...

  Schatzkästlein des rheinischen Hausfreundes ( The Treasure Chest), by Johann Peter Hebel I have no idea how I got this book; it's been sitting on my tablet for some time now.  A few weeks ago I started reading it at bedtime, for which it is perfect, because it's a collection of short little stories, vignettes, jokes, and so on, usually with a little moral theme.  Johann Peter Hebel (1760 - 1826) was from Basel in Switzerland and spoke the Allemanische or Alemannic dialect of German, which is/was spoken in much of Switzerland, Bavaria, and Baden.  He lived in a few different places in those areas, and I'm going to count him for Switzerland.  Hebel became a professor, a poet/writer, and a deacon in the Lutheran Church.  Eventually he rose to become a prelate and a member of the Parliament of Baden, though what he really wanted to do was be a parish priest in the Bavarian/Swiss borderland.  Anyway, in the first years of the 19th century, he also edited ...

 The Seventh Bride, by T. Kingfisher I've enjoyed a few of Ursula Vernon/T. Kingfisher's books before, such as Castle Hangnail and A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking .   This one just popped up as a Kindle offer for free, and the description sounded interesting, so here we are. Rhea, age 15, is a very ordinary girl.  Her family runs the local mill, and she spends most of her time helping at the mill, doing chores, and trying to fend off the swan that always steals her lunch.  She's not pretty, or talented, or rich, so why does this Lord Crevan want to marry her?  Maybe it doesn't even matter, because you can't say no to a lord.  Peasants who try to say no to lords generally end up homeless and out of work, at best.  So when Crevan orders Rhea to walk a certain forest path to his house, even though that's completely improper and there shouldn't be a house in the forest at all, she has to do it for her parents' sake. She arrives at a truly horrifyi...

 Model Children: Inside the Republic of Red Scarves, by Paul Thorez This is a reasonably interesting memoir, with the worst cover (from 1990; the original French edition was published in 1982).  This is terrible.  First of all, it really bugs me when people try to use Cyrillic letters to substitute for Latin ones in order to make a title look Russian.  Я is not the same thing as R.   Я says ya .  It's a vowel.  P says R in Cyrillic. But that is not nearly as bad as this cover photo.  This kid is not Paul Thorez as a child, and he's meant to give you a feeling of how desolate and sad Soviet kids must be.  The shaven head is meant to evoke prison life, or a place so lice-ridden that every child must go bald.  Thorez' memoir is, in fact, a description of life at the very posh summer camp of Artek at Yalta, where children spent most of their time swimming, playing sports, and eating a lot of food.  Thorez comments that for years, he tho...

 Yes, it's that time again, when we choose our reading lists for summer and then proceed to ignore them if we want.  Cathy at 746 Books runs this very relaxed reading event, which will go from June 1 to September 1. Between my recent reading slump and the fact that I'm going on a TRIP in June (to Germany!!*), I've made an effort to keep my list light.  Much of it is fiction, and some of it is quite easy fiction, though I've also thrown in a chunkster or two.  There are a few titles from countries I haven't hit yet (Italy, Spain, and Jordan) of which one will also count for WIT August, and everything is from my TBR piles.  The titles: This is How You Lose the Time War, by El-Mohtar and Gladstone The Honjin Murders, by Seishi Yokomizo All the Birds in the Sky, by Charlie Jane Anders The Origin of the Four Branches of the Mabinogi, by Andrew Breeze Word From Wormingford, by Robert Blythe Mink River, by Brian Doyle Lost Island, by Eilis Dillon Mysteries of the Mid...

  Needle and Thread: A Tale of Survival From Bialystok to Paris, by Charles 'Shleimeh' Zabuski as told to June Sutz Brott I nabbed this memoir from the donation table a couple of years ago.  I nearly always grab any Holocaust memoir I come across, but this one was particularly attractive because I like sewing, and because the author is from Bialystok, which I had read very little about, but remembered because Vasily Grossman's mother had lived there. June Brott wrote down this story through many interviews with her cousin Charles, originally Shleimeh.  They didn't really have a language in common, so it was quite difficult and was a process that took some years.  Charles had never spoken about his experiences and did not want to, but because he was the only member of his family to survive, he decided that it was important that their stories be heard. Shleimeh tells his whole life story; the oldest of 4 children, son of a tailor who had planned to emigrate to Argentin...

 Sitting Pretty: The View From My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body, by Rebekah Taussig My younger child read this memoir and told me that I HAD to read it.  And I agree; it's a great book and I could hardly put it down.  Taussig's voice is just so fresh, wry, and candid. Rebekah Taussig, youngest of six children and childhood cancer survivor, became paralyzed from the waist down at age 3, and for years didn't really notice that this rendered her different and pitiful in the eyes of most others.  But of course, the outside world's judgements eventually penetrated her happy childhood bubble, and she learned that according to those judgements, she would be relegated to the role of inspirational friend, never the heroine of the story who has a cool job, meets the guy, and lives happily ever after.    And then, as an adult, she started to question the societal assumptions we have about disabilities.  She got a graduate degree, got a teaching position at a h...

 The Girl and the Ghost, by Hanna Alkaf  This is a lovely (and exciting!) story for, say, middle grades and YA, that not only features a lot of scary ghosts, but also explores the meaning of friendship and love, and the very complicated feelings around them. The ghost is an evil spirit who works for a witch, but the witch is dying.  He can only belong to someone of the same blood, so he searches out the witch's daughter and granddaughter.  The little girl is just five, and welcomes her new friend.  Of course, he needs a name, so she names him...Pink.  Because she's five.  Pink watches over little Suraya, who is a curious and active little girl, and he saves her from myriad dangers. Pink can't save Suraya from other kids, though.  Somehow she just doesn't fit in.  And when she goes to a fancier school in town, it gets much worse.  Pink's dark nature makes him long to exact revenge on the other girls.  Then a new girl, Jing, moves in ...

Momo, by Michael Ende In the US, The Neverending Story is the only work of Ende that is really well-known.  But I'd heard that there was this other story, Momo, and kept my eye out for it.  The first copy I found (on the donation table) turned out to be in Spanish, but eventually I got hold of it... At the edge of town, there is an ancient ruined amphitheater where children go to play.  Momo, a very small person in ragged clothing, arrives and takes up residence in a sort of cubbyhole under the stage.  Adults come and offer to take her in, but she prefers to stay as she is, so they share their food and goods with her.  Momo is an excellent listener -- the kind that seems to spark ideas and solutions for problems just by listening so well -- and she has many friends.  Games are always more fun when Momo is around. But the city is changing.  Unobtrusive grey men, in grey suits, are visiting citizens and convincing them to save time by banking it with the...

 Well, I'm only about a third of the way through my Spin title, but it's very good and I'll report in when I'm done!  That reading slump killed all my goals, but no worries.  And, I also wound up prioritizing a biography of Genghis Khan that my kid is reading for a class so that we can discuss it.  It's very exciting.  The author is surprisingly pro-Genghis, though.