Howling Frog Books

 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...