Howling Frog Books

The Deorhord: An Old English Bestiary, by Hana Videen This followup to The Wordhord was a lovely read.  Videen uses her wordhord format to write a bestiary, explaining how medieval people loved to used animals as examples of Christian ideas.   Plus I always enjoy learning about Old English words, because they are often cognate with both modern English and with Danish.  Deor (animal), which in English evolved into deer , is also related to Danish dyr  (animal). Videen has sections of everyday animals, 'wonder' animals (such as elephants), creatures that especially symbolized good and evil, and just plain mysteries.  The good animals are the lion, deer, phoenix, and panther, and the evil ones are the whale, snake, dragon, and wolf.  The mysteries are usually taken from Alexander the Great's writings about his conquest of India; one sounds kind of like a crocodile, except that it has a head like the moon and also crocodiles were well-known.  Another...

 Jewish Space Lasers: the Rothschilds and 200 Years of Conspiracy Theories, by Mike Rothschild Well I sure can't resist THAT title.  I love the Jewish Space Lasers meme/joke.  And it does make a good tail end to this history, which is really about over 200 years' worth of vicious conspiracy theories/anti-Semitism, in which the Rothschilds formed a convenient scapegoat but had nothing much to do with any of it.  Almost anyone would have done. A couple of things first: Mike Rothschild is no relation, not that anyone into conspiracy theories believes that, but he even tells a little bit of his own family history.  I read and loved his previous book, The Storm is Upon Us , about the QAnon stuff.  And, if you are unfamiliar with the origin of the phrase "Jewish Space Lasers," it dates back to 2018, when Marjorie Taylor Greene (not yet as prominent in politics as she is now) tweeted, blaming the Camp Fire on Rothschild-owned weather-controlling lasers from spac...

Android Avenger/The Altar of Asconel (Ace Double)  I thought I would kick things off right and read an Ace Double from my recent haul.  I chose Android Avenger because I had a copy before, but it had mildew damage and had to be tossed.  I was bitter.  But I got another chance! Android Avenger is not that great.  It's the stinker of the two.  In 2017, the world is carefully regulated to avoid neurosis -- defined as anything the authorities deem even slightly abnormal.  Neurotics get executed, so everyone is very careful indeed to look calm and content, and to avoid those scans as much as possible.  Our narrator, Norman, thinks he's just an ordinary guy, until the day he suddenly loses control of himself and starts running inhumanly fast and murdering people he's never seen before.  He discovers that he's a tool of the man who plans to take over society -- an easy task now that everything is controlled by central computers.  Can Norman a...

 Second-Class Citizen, by Buchi Emecheta It's no wonder this is the novel that won Emecheta fame.  It's just so well-written!  It wasn't easy to read, because Adah is having a very rough time, and yet I couldn't put it down; it sucked me right in. Adah is an insignificant daughter of a family who was expecting a son, but -- even after her father dies and she has to go live with others -- she is determined to get an education and do well for herself.  As a young woman she obtains a well-paid position in Lagos, and that means that she is desirable as a wife, because she can pay for a husband's education.  She is married off to Francis (this is the late 1960s), and her ambition is to get her family to Britain, where she can get more education and become a librarian.  So first she funds Francis' trip to go there and become a lawyer, while she stays in Lagos and has a baby.  And despite all opposition, she gets herself and her little family to London. Londo...

 Nightingale Wood, by Stella Gibbons Who among us does not love Cold Comfort Farm ?   If you don't, it's probably because you haven't read it.  This one is less well-known, but it's still a fun read, if not the perfect comedic gem that is CCF.  Nobody could pull that off twice, after all. The Withers are an upper-middle-class family near a village, and their life is completely stultifying.  The two adult daughters are repressed and not allowed to do anything much; all Madge wants is a dog to love, and Tina wants...well, a life.  Into the house comes Viola, the young widow of the oldest son.  She was, horrors, a shopgirl, and she hasn't really got anywhere to go.  Is she, too, going to see her youth wasted in the desiccated atmosphere of the Wither home? Through winding byways, walks through the wood, and heartbreak, each member of the family eventually comes to find their own version of happiness.    It's a nice read, a pleasant 193...

Chesterton's Gateway, by G. K. Chesterton, compiled by Ethan Nicolle I often listen to a comedic book podcast called The Book Pile , which features two guys, Kellen Erskine and David Vance.  Erskine is a full-time comic, and we knew him as a teenager with floppy 90s hair, so we're always interested in how he's doing.  Vance is a writer -- he's written sketches for a different comedy group I follow.   They're fun to listen to! A little while ago they had a comic-book artist on the show, Ethan Nicolle, to talk about this book he'd put together.  (I have never read any of Nicolle's comics; my husband likes him.)  So he talked about how he'd gotten really into reading Chesterton, and even had a couple of discussion groups.  But he found that most people who wanted to read Chesterton would pick up Orthodoxy , and he didn't think that was a good place to start; Chesterton was mainly an essayist and it's better to start with essays.  So he'd put tog...

 The Wheel of Ice, by Stephen Baxter    This was a fun one that has been sitting on my TBR shelf for a long time; I got it from the donation table, of course.  It's a Second Doctor story (the one who looks like Moe), to my surprise, and features companions Zoe (future math genius from a space colony) and Jamie (18th century Scotsman). The Tardis senses a hole in time and lands on an early Saturn mining colony, to the crew's surprise.  What is wrong here?  The kludged-together colony, called the Wheel of Ice, is precarious, and is solely focused on mining a rare mineral from the moon Mnemosyne.  The children born here have to work as miners, too, and they're being accused of sabotage, though they insist that elusive little blue critters they call Blue Dolls must be the ones doing it.  Has the Wheel got gremlins? It's a great story, and pretty complex, with roots reaching back to 19th century London, not to mention a relic of a civilization lost bil...

 I haven't been able to do much reading (my poor neglected summerbooks!), because I've been having adventures all over the place.... My good friend Melanie wanted to do a hot-air balloon trip for her birthday, and her husband was like 'no way' so I said I'd do it and she asked all her friends.  We got a total of just three -- Melanie, her friend Bryn (who lives near Seattle) and me.    We set out from Chico with many snacks, and dilly-dallied our way down to Tahoe.  There was no hurry, so we stopped a few times.  We went to Donner Pass and walked through the disused railroad tunnels above Donner Lake.  That was super fun, and I highly recommend it.   There are four tunnels along the hillside, with space between them.  Parts are blasted rock and other parts have been smoothed out with concrete, and a whole lot of the space is covered in graffiti.  There's still snow melting in June, so it was pretty drippy, and the four...

 11!  Take a look at your Spin list , find #11, and read that. This means that I'll be reading  Buchi Emecheta's   Second-Class Citizen .  It's been a while since I read one of her books, so that will be great!  Emecheta is probably my favorite Nigerian author.  Second-Class Citizen was published in 1974, her second novel and the one that brought her fame.  It's semi-autobiographical, and is a sequel to the earlier In the Ditch .  I've written about a few Emecheta novels before: The Joys of Motherhood,   The Slave Girl, and The Bride Price (which was my Spin #21 title).  They are all wonderful, so do give them a try.  PS I just got back from over a week of running around the West.  I had a great time and I'm tired!    

 Huzzah, it's time for another CC Spin, my favorite event!  You know the rules, so here's my list: The Leopard, by di Lampedusa  Phineas Finn, by Anthony Trollope The Well at the End of the World, by William Morris   The Law and the Lady, by Wilkie Collins It is Acceptable (Det Gaar An), C. J. L. Almqvist  The Duchess of Malfi and The White Devil, by John Webster   The Obedience of a Christian Man, by William Tyndale No Name, by Wilkie Collins Peter the Great's African, by Pushkin Stories of Washington Irving Second-Class Citizen, by Buchi Emecheta Life and Fate, by Vasily Grossman (this would be quite a feat!) Sybil, by Disraeli Polyhistor Solinus   The Tale of Sinhue (ancient Egyptian poetry)   Eichmann in Jerusalem, by Hannah Arendt Lives, by Plutarch (vol I)   Sagas of Icelanders (aiming for 50% by the due date) Two Years Before the Mast, by Richard Henry Dana  Amerika, by Kafka  Lucretius worked out really well last time and I...

 The Case of the Perjured Parrot, by Erle Stanley Gardner  A millionaire real estate mogul is found in a remote hunting cabin, shot dead, with a screaming parrot next to him.  Was it his estranged wife?  The gambling mafia?  His stepson?  His...new wife?  (Wait, what?)    I needed to read this particular Perry Mason story for one reason: the back cover matter.  Read that and tell me whether any librarian could resist the hilarity of a collection of guns at a public library, like a 1950s Library of Things .  The actual story does clarify that the gun collection is part of a small museum at the library; it's not the kind of collection where you can check items out.  It's still funny! This story features a remarkable amount of parrot-switching.  There are THREE parrots in total, all alike except for one tell-tale detail, and the victim, the murderer, and Mason play musical parrots with them.  In fact I'm not at all...

 Okay, I know I haven't been around much!  I'm still working on recovering my reading mojo, and much of it has been going into the year-long Diana Wynne Jones project, which has just five more titles to go.  (I just realized I forgot to incorporate them into my summer list, though I would really only count Reflections as a longer read.) But!  Anyway!  I decided I'd like to do the 20 Books of Summer event, and that event has moved!  It's now being hosted by AnnaBookBel and Emma at Words and Peace .  Check out the fun new graphics!  There's a bingo card, and a Mr. Linky, and all your favorite summer stuff.  The rules:   The #20BooksofSummer2025 challenge runs from Sunday June 1st to Sunday August 31st   The first rule of 20 Books is that there are no real rules, other than signing up for 10, 15 or 20 books and trying to read from your TBR.   Pick your list in advance, or nominate a bookcase to read from, or pick at whim from ...

Strange Pictures , by Uketsu This is a prose novel, not a graphic novel, but it still revolves around pictures.  We have four short stories, each of which involves a mystery about one or more hand-drawn pictures -- some by children, some by adult artists.  In the end, the narratives fit together to solve a larger mystery about a very quiet serial killer -- a story that has lasted decades.  It was a good read, on the fast and easy side. We start with an abandoned blog discovered by two students who think there's a puzzle involved.  The writer starts off happy and excited that his wife is going to have a baby, and is then grief-stricken when she dies during childbirth.  Three years later, he erases most of the entries, posts a cryptic note, and the blog ends.  Who is the note addressed to?  What of this little family?  Through three more seemingly unrelated stories, the solution eventually comes out.        The Strange House, vo...

 I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, by Jason Pargin I found the title and cover a bit irresistible, even though I haven't gotten around to reading more of the John Dies at t he End series .   Abbott, your basic failing-to-launch guy with a Twitch channel, hates driving for Lyft.  Arriving at a Circle K to pick up a client for a trip to the LA airport, she shows him an old roadie box covered in stickers and offers him $200,000 in cash if he will drive her and it to Washington, DC in four days.  He's not allowed to see inside the box, he can't tell anyone, he must leave all trackable devices behind, but she promises it's not heroin and he'll have enough money to live on his own!  And so they head off to the highway. Within a few hours, an ex-FBI officer, a biker thug, Abbott's dad, and the entirety of Reddit are on their tail and rumors are spreading faster than wildfire.  The box contains a dead body -- an alien -- a nuclear bomb -- a...

  De Rerum Natura (The Way Things Are, or On the Nature of Things), by Titus Lucretius Carus, trans. by Rolfe Humphries I didn't really know quite what I was getting into with this book, but it worked out great.  Thanks to Tom the Amateur Reader, I got an excellent translation that I enjoyed a lot.  I won't claim to have understood it particularly well -- for that I'd need a whole deep dive and probably a class -- but for a basic first read, I'm calling it a success. So here we go... We don't know all that much about Lucretius, except that he was a Roman poet and philosopher, upper-class, and this is the only surviving of his works.  He was born around 99 BCE and died, at 44, in 55 BCE.  St. Jerome said he went mad from a love potion and killed himself, which seems to be inaccurate, but the slander stuck around for centuries, right up to the modern era.  Our poem was very nearly lost, but a single surviving copy was found in a German monastery in the early ...

 The Let Them Theory, by Mel Robbins This was my book club book!  I think we all agree that while the book could easily be half the length, the thesis is an important one that is particularly useful to people like us -- women socialized to make everyone else happy (whether they like it or not).  Also, you can really tell that Mel Robbins is a motivational speaker with a podcast.  Which I might listen to. All it boils down to is -- let people do what they're going to do, and don't worry about it so much.  Then decide what it is that you need to do, and do that. So if (as in her example) your teen kid wants to go for tacos in a tuxedo in the rain without a coat, just let him do that without fussing.  If people are judgemental, that's okay.  The only person you can control is yourself, so what are you going to do with yourself? Useful interludes include: What if I'm feeling envious of everybody else?  What if my life is a disaster?  What if some...

 Some Desperate Glory, by Emily Tesh On a small asteroid, a tiny remnant of humanity cling to their ideology.  Earth was destroyed in the Majo War, and most of the human survivors live on one world of the massive, peaceful, and multispecies Majoda civilization that is managed by the Wisdom, a millenia-old transdimensional artificial intelligence.  But on Gaea Station, these survivors live an extremely Spartan existence dedicated to revenge. Valkyr has spent her life training as a soldier, just like her twin brother Mags, just like every Gaean child.  Now her group is up for assignment; each girl will be given a lifetime job in a section of Gaea to keep it running.  Kyr and her brother, as warbreeds, are excellent soldiers and both expect to be assigned as such, but Mags doesn't want it and Kyr discovers that she's expected to spend her life bearing children in Nursery, what with her valuable genetics and all.  The capture of a majo serves as the catalyst th...

 Happy March Magics!  Back in July of 2024, I joined a group of Diana Wynne Jones fans in reading the complete works, in publication order.  You can see the host at her blog!   She gave us a schedule and we dove in.  This has been such a fun project for me, and a real lifesaver during some rough times. It's very enlightening to read the books in order, because I could see her writing talent developing.  Every so often she would hit a new level of descriptiveness, of plot layering, of subtlety.   Themes come up and into focus, and get several treatments before subsiding in favor of some new theme.  So for example, Homeward Bounders (arguably her most tragic story) and Time of the Ghost (most horrifying) were written right next to each other.  What does that say about what she was thinking at the time? Reading so continually also brings out characteristics that last across many books, such as a love of joyful, possibly destructive, chaos...