Howling Frog Books

  Wyllard's Weird , by Mary Elizabeth Braddon Mary Elizabeth Braddon was the Victorian sensationalist author of Lady Audley's Secret .  She was hugely prolific, and lived a rather sensational life herself -- she lived with the publisher John Maxwell as his wife and had six children with him, but Maxwell was already married and had five children with his actual wife, who was still alive.  No wonder her most famous novels were about bigamy!  I've always wanted to read Wyllard's Weird for no other reason than its title, and it became my book to read on my phone for a couple of weeks. We start in a train going to Cornwall -- as the train is on a bridge over a deep gully, a young woman falls to her death.  Mr. Wyllard, a wealthy man, is the first to reach her, but she is dead, and there is no identification at all.  She has no luggage, nothing but a basket containing a little food for the journey.  She seems French in her dress, but that's the only clue.  Did she jump,

 Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging, by Sebastian Junger I heard about this book and it turned out to be pretty fascinating.  Also short!  It's about two things: PTSD and belonging in society.  Those two things have a lot to do with each other. Why is it that colonial Americans so often ran off to join Native American people?  They actually made laws disallowing it!  Why do so many people who have lived through war -- both soldiers and civilians -- miss the war when it's over?   Junger talks about the Blitz, Sarajevo, and other locations. Junger's theme is summarized in his introduction: ...why -- for many people -- war feels better than peace and hardship can turn out to be a great blessing and disasters are sometimes remembered more fondly than weddings or tropical vacations.  Humans don't mind hardship, in fact they thrive on it; what they mind is not feeling necessary.  Modern society has perfected the art of making people not feel necessary. He talks about a whol

 THREE!   This means I'll be reading Ring of Bright Water , by Gavin Maxwell , a classic of nature writing.  The copy I have is actually the trilogy, so we'll see how far I get.   See you on December 18th!     

 Hey it's that time again, my favorite time -- it's Spin time!   You know the rules, so here we go: No Name, by Wilkie Collins Second-Class Citizen, by Buchi Emecheta Ring of Bright Water, by Gavin Maxwell The Tale of Sinhue (ancient Egyptian poetry)   Eichmann in Jerusalem, by Hannah Arendt   Hunger, by Knut Hamsun Sybil, by Disraeli The Leopard, by di Lampedusa  Phineas Finn, by Anthony Trollope   The Obedience of a Christian Man, by William Tyndale   Sagas of Icelanders (aiming for 50% by the due date) The Well at the End of the World, by William Morris It is Acceptable (Det Gaar An), C. J. L. Almqvist  Two Years Before the Mast, by Richard Henry Dana  Amerika, by Kafka Peter the Great's African, by Pushkin  The Beggar's Opera, by John Gay The Nature of Things, by Lucretius Polyhistor Solinus Lives, by Plutarch (again, aiming for part, not the whole) I'm still in a mood for ancient British literature, or at least something saga-ish or British, but there's n

 Storyland: A New Mythology of Britain, by Amy Jeffs This caught my eye when my mom and I spent a couple of hours in Foyles; I was kind of intrigued.  What do you mean, a new mythology?  So I got hold of a copy and found out.  It's a couple of years old now so this will all be old news to any British readers; Chris at Calmgrove probably beat me to this ages ago. Jeffs has taken all those old stories about the founding of Britain and British history -- from Geoffrey of Monmouth, and Wace, and Layamon, and such -- and told them as short stories or episodes.  She's had a wonderful time carving lino prints to illustrate the stories, too.   So we start with giants installing Stonehenge on an Irish mountain, and Brutus bringing his Trojans, and the Scotti, and so on.  Then there's Weland the Smith, King Leir and Cordelia, the origin of the Stone of Scone, Deirdre in Ireland, and the two dragons.  We move into the Arthurian cycle, especially stories about Merlin, and early Saxon s

 Tress of the Emerald Sea, by Brandon Sanderson A friend of mine recently started a book club, and for our second book we decided to read something fun -- this one.  It's a long time since I read any Brandon Sanderson, and he's developed this whole Cosmere thing that I don't really understand (I'm planning to learn), but this book is a sort of one-off for fun set on an obscure planet of the Cosmere.  It's narrated by a visitor, whose real name is not mentioned and who is apparently not a character from another book.  And as this was something of a personal project and more of a YA story, Sanderson lets quite a bit of his native silliness out in this novel. Tress lives on a bitty little island in the Emerald Sea -- a salt-mining outpost that people aren't allowed to leave, that's how unpleasant it is.  She's a nice girl with tangly hair (thus the nickname) who works hard and is good friends with the gardener up at the castle, though she knows he's rea

 The Loneliest Place, by Lora Senf It's the new conclusion to the Blight Harbor trilogy, and the Clackity is BACK!  I enjoyed this just as much  the other two, and they're perfect spooky fall reading.  Go get your copy from the library today! Evie has been back from the Nighthouse for a few weeks now, and summer is almost over, but she still has one more thing to do.  Now that Evie knows that her parents are a) alive and b) trapped on the Dark Sun Side, she can't think about anything but rescuing them.  In true protagonist fashion, she doesn't want to endanger anyone else, so she leaves a note.  Evie thinks she's prepared, but the Clackity is a lot angrier this time around. In order to find her parents, Evie must run the gauntlet of the storybook her mother wrote for her, in which a little girl who loves herself some alone time looks for the loneliest place in the world.  The Clackity has set up a challenge for each page, and its goal is to first kill Evie and then

 D is for Death, by Harriet F. Townson I heard an interview with this author and her new novel sounded like something I would enjoy.  A murder mystery set in the London Library?  In the 1930s?  Yes please!  I got it on Kindle. Dora is leaving home for London in hopes of escaping an impending marriage to a man she dislikes -- she plans to stay with her godmother, find a job, and build a life for herself.  But her fiance, Charles, gives chase and Dora finds refuge in the London Library, only to discover a dead body in the stacks.  It's the bad-tempered and shouty head of the Library, although how he got the post is a mystery since he knows nothing of books.  Also involved: Dora's favorite mystery writer, her catty former assistant, half the staff of the library, Charles the ex-fiance, Dora's best friend from school (in serious trouble), class-conscious Detective Inspector Fox and his sister....so many people!  And what Dora really wants is to figure out how her mother died fo

 The Black Arrow: A Tale of the Two Roses, by Robert Louis Stevenson  It's Spin Day!  Did you read your book? The Black Arrow was fun.  It's set -- as the subtitle says -- during the Wars of the Roses, a chaotic and confusing time when two branches of the English nobility fought over which would control the throne.  Everybody else fought on one side or the other, and quite a few switched sides on the regular, according to who looked like winning.  This lasted decades, in patches, and was essentially a series of civil wars that took up much of the 1400s.  It ended with the death of Richard III in 1485 and the accession of Henry Tudor, a Lancastrian who married Elizabeth of York to unite the two branches.  But in this story, Richard III is a young man.  Strictly speaking he isn't even the Duke of Gloucester yet, but RLS makes him duke a little prematurely to avoid confusion. Richard Shelton, called Dick, is a teenage orphan in the care of Sir Daniel Bracknell, who administe

 How the Girl Guides Won the War, by Janie Hampton This was one of the titles that intrigued me on our last book-binge day in London.  As a former Girl Scout myself, I had to be interested in this!  How could that possibly be? Hampton confesses in her introduction that she meant to write about how awful the Girl Guides were, so hearty and colonial and tragically unhip, but was then surprised to discover that they were in fact amazing .  She doesn't cover just British Guides, but girls in many countries, and though she ranges throughout Guide history since its inception, she mostly focuses on World War II.  This makes it kind of all over the place, but it's always fascinating to read about what these girls and women accomplished! One thing to remember is that for a long time, Guiding reached up well into early adulthood and often functioned as further education back when many girls left school at 14 or 16.  You could be a Guide into your twenties, and lead a troop.  So Hampton

 Joyful Recollections of Trauma, by Paul Scheer I like Paul Scheer; he's very funny, and I keep meaning to listen to his podcast "How Did This Get Made?" but I've seen him in other things.  Like the hilarious NTSF:DS:SUV::.  Anyway, a little bit ago I listened to one of my favorite comedy podcasts and he was a guest, talking about his new book.  I ordered it for my work library, and read it once it came in.   Scheer had a pretty rough childhood, with a stepfather who enjoyed thinking up creative ways to terrorize little Paul.  Finally he and his mom escaped, and he embarked on his quest to become...an actor!  Lessons in improv led to one thing and another, and finally to the Upright Citizens Brigade, a long-form improv comedy troupe that launched Amy Poehler and others.   He also realized that he was not okay, and spent a good long time straightening himself out in therapy, which was really interesting to read about.  He'd tried rage and passivity and it took a lo

 The Clackity, by Lora Senf The Nighthouse Keeper I was recommended this title by Leila at Bookshelves of Doom , who is on Substack now.  I'm so glad I read it, and I can't wait to get my hands on The Loneliest Place , the final book in the Blight Harbor trilogy, which comes out soon. Blight Harbor is the seventh-most-haunted town in America, so Evie has become familiar with the supernatural since she moved to town a few years ago to live with her Aunt Des.  But she's never been allowed to explore the old abattoir on the other side of town; that place is haunted in a very bad way.  Des, however, has a job to do there, and Evie witnesses her disappearance.  To get Des back, Evie has to make a deal with the Clackity, the monster that inhabits the place, and go through to the other side of reality on a quest. Under a dark sun, Evie has just hours to find her way through seven houses and rescue her aunt from the even worse monster pursuing her.  She has a few tools to use, and

 The Strange Library, by Haruki Murakami This is a funky little story -- at just 72 pages long, with a lot of artwork, it's a short story, not a novel.  It's a bit like somebody let Tim Holz illustrate it, but in fact the marbled papers and illustrations come from books found in the London Library (which I am still bitter about not being allowed to visit). Our narrator, an unnamed boy, just wants to return his library books and ask for a new one.  He's directed to room 107, in the cellar, and soon he is imprisoned and on a strange adventure.  Assisted by a mysterious girl and a sheep man, he meets all sorts of dangers; will he ever get home to his mother? An intriguing read, sometimes hard on the eyes (pale grey ink on magenta, whose idea was that?), and worth the time, which isn't much. 

  The Witch Family, by Eleanor Estes, ill. by Edward Ardizzon e I picked up this titles from the discard table, largely because of the Ardizzone illustrations.  I like to collect Ardizzone and will grab whatever I can (same for Trina Schart Hyman).  And soon I happily grabbed a matching book, The Alley , so I'll read that soon too!  I like Estes just fine, but usually you only see The Hundred Dresses.  I'd never heard of The Witch Family. This is an utterly charming story!  If you have a witch-loving little girl in your vicinity, get this story for her right away.  Amy and her best friend Clarissa love to sit together and draw pictures, and Amy has decreed that Old Witch must be banished.  She has been too wicked, and she must be banished to the Glass Hill, there to live all alone.  If she behaves herself, Amy will let her out for Halloween.  But Amy doesn't wish to be too tough on Old Witch, so she lets Little Witch Girl and Weeny Witch go to live with Old Witch...and Litt

  Selling the Dream: The Billion-Dollar Industry Bankrupting Americans, by Jane Marie This is an expose of MLMs -- multi-level marketing schemes -- which are pyramid schemes that keep just within the letter of the law.   You know them: Amway, Avon, Mary Kay, Arbonne, Doterra, Lularoe, and many many others.  Some are more respectable than others, but they all promise you the ability to run your own business from home, be independent, and make money at your own pace.  The trouble is that the product they're selling, whatever it is, is not where the profit lies; that's in your downline.  The more people you recruit to be sellers, the more money you'll make, but as the layers add up, the money runs out.  The people at the top make plenty, but you won't; in fact, you'll probably lose money and end up with a basement full of product you can't move. Marie dissects the biggest MLM companies, analyzing how they attract people (predominantly moms looking for flexible ways

Glow-in-the-dark ink!!  Moonbound, by Robin Sloane  Two hundred or so years from now, human civilization -- called the Anth -- will be at an apex, with incredible technologies and problem-solving.  And they've discovered how to time-travel; at least, how to send information through time, and they build constructs called dragons to send through time.  When the dragons return, they have gone mad, and they envelop the Earth in dust.  The ensuing war destroys nearly everything. 11,000 years later, a boy lives in a village owned by the wizard Malory.  Ariel was born to live a story, but he goes off-script...and now anything can happen. I loved Moonbound, and read it in two long sessions.  This is amazing storytelling, and fantastic SF too.  I liked Sloane's first novel, Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore , but this is a whole new level for Sloane.  (Plus I got a limited, hand-printed zine, which made me happy.)  This is an excellent novel, highly recommended, and you should read

 Unruly: A History of England's Kings and Queens, by David Mitchell You may be familiar with the UK comedy duo Mitchell and Webb?  They're probably best known in the US by this sketch .  The one who asks, "Are we the baddies?"  is David Mitchell, and besides being a very funny comedian, he is also a history nerd, and he wrote this comedic take on the kings and queens of England, at least up to the end of the Tudors.  It's quite long enough as it is, without bringing in modernity. Mitchell is interested in the questions that humans have been working out in real time for the past several thousand years -- how do we decide who's going to be in charge, and how do we transfer power?  What is a king anyway?  So while he's narrating, amusingly, the list of kings, he's bringing out how people thought of their kings and what they did about it.   For example.  Pre-Norman Conquest, the king's sons were all eligible for the crown, and the barons would try to

 While I was walking, I kept finding connections to Diana Wynne Jones books.  I was not expecting this, and I didn't get it into my daily journal posts.  But right from the first day, as we hiked up from Avebury along the herepath, I kept thinking of various DWJ stories.  That herepath looked just like the Shield of Oreth, except it wasn't hot -- but the rain was just the same, sweeping up the hillside in curtains.  Not that I managed to take a photo of what it really looked like! Of course, Dalemark's green roads are the same idea as old paths like the Ridgeway -- and they're often called green roads too.  At some point in the Dalemark books, someone explains that the green roads are out of the way because they are so old, and tend to go places that people don't live any more, which again is very close to the actual case. (As an aside, I felt a lot of sympathy for Moril too on that trip.  I very frequently felt much too hot indoors!  It was warm, sunny weather, and

 The Hard Way: Discovering the Women Who Walked Before Us, by Susannah Walker This book arrived for me while I was gone on the Ridgeway, and that's what it's about!  Sort of.  I was kind of confused about the title at first but eventually Walker moves from the Ridgeway to focus on the much less known Hard Way or Harrow Way, and it is not easy to trace.  Anyway, I helped to back the publishing of this book, pretty much on a whim, so I got a copy and my name in the back.  You can look me up. Walker seems to be about my age, and spent much of her 20s walking and even living on the Ridgeway, before settling down into marriage and a child and suddenly no more walking.  Or at least, it became far more difficult to get out to anyplace as inaccessible as the Ridgeway, which is not stroller-friendly and has hardly anyplace to park and leave the car, and she spent a lot of time thinking about how women get pulled into domesticity once they have kids, in a way that doesn't need to be

We saw Kim off at the Tube station after a breakfast at Pret a Manger.  We'd decided to have a booky kind of day.  First, though, we decided to explore the Waitrose shopping complex we'd discovered the day before (because it houses Skoob Books, so we'd scoped it out on the way home).  Waitrose is awesome and we bought a lot of chocolate to take home, and a couple of croissants to make breakfast more exciting.  We went back to the hotel room to dump the chocolate and set out again, off to the British Library, which we thought opened at ten.  It's not far at all and we had a nice walk up to St Pancras station and the Library.  The doors were already open and we went in, but it turned out that the exhibits of library treasures didn't open until after lunch.  So we said hello to the King's Library, and went into the shop and bought more books than we intended to.  This turned out to be a theme of the day.... Will look familiar to Blake fans The heart of the British

It was Sunday, and we thought we'd like to go to a church service.  It wasn't easy to choose a place, but eventually we settled on the 10am service at Westminster Abbey, which was a Matins service -- not a full one with Communion and a sermon, but about 40 minutes of music and scripture reading.  So that was lovely, and we got to sit quite close in.  They were clearly expecting many more people for the full service later on. We exited through the cloisters The Abbey is flying a Ukranian flag! A public library!  Is it still? Probably not still a public baths Then we walked, through showery weather, down to Tate Britain, one of the major art museums.  This was not the Tate Modern, but one that goes through British art history in chronological order, and also has a giant Turner collection.   We went through many rooms full of very famous paintings, but focused on a room of William Blake, some Hogarth, and two large rooms with lots of extremely famous pre-Raphaelite works -- Ophel