Howling Frog Books

 ...17!    That means I'll be reading Wilkie Collins' No Name , a dramatic 1862 mystery about the complexities of illegitimacy and inheritance.  It's supposed to be one of his greats, up there with The Woman in White and The Moonstone, both of which I have read twice.  So this ought to be fun!

 The Observant Walker: Wild Food, Nature and Hidden Treasures on the Pathways of Britain, by John Wright Oh, this book was a delight.  As we know, I'm now a devotee of the Ridgeway, and so I've been collecting books about walking in Britain (and other places) for a while.  There are a lot of them, so I'm not planning to be exhaustive!  I actually got this book on the Ridgeway hike, when we were staying in Wallingford.  There was a bookshop, and I asked what she would recommend if I liked books about walking in nature, but I don't like Robert MacFarlane . That stumped her a little bit but she recommended John Wright, and him I like! Wright is all about the plants.  He likes to walk around and drive everyone else crazy by spending all his time carefully studying the plants and fungi and lichens he sees.  (And if the lichen is in London, he'll lie in the gutter to get a good photo.)   He and Tolkien would have a grand time standing in one plac...

 My favorite thing is still happening ; it's time for the 42nd Spin!   You know the rules, so let's get to the list: The Leopard, by di Lampedusa  Phineas Finn, by Anthony Trollope The Well at the End of the World, by William Morris The Tale of Sinhue (ancient Egyptian poetry)   Eichmann in Jerusalem, by Hannah Arendt Lives, by Plutarch (vol I) Sybil, by Disraeli Polyhistor Solinus    Folktales collected by Afanas'ev (vol I of 3)   Sagas of Icelanders (aiming for 50% by the due date) Two Years Before the Mast, by Richard Henry Dana  Amerika, by Kafka  Complete tales of Hans Christian Andersen   The Law and the Lady, by Wilkie Collins It is Acceptable (Det Gaar An), C. J. L. Almqvist   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 Life and Fate, by Vasily Grossman (this would be quite a feat!)  My preference would be Polyhistor, ...

 The Book: A Cover-to-cover Exploration of the Most Powerful Object of Our Time, by Keith Houston Well, I did manage ten books of summer, but I failed to write about the last one.  And I've been very slow with my reading in the last month or so.  As far as I can tell, I've been under enough stress that I don't have a lot of brainpower left over for reading; there are lots of big, heavy tomes on important topics that I want to read, but I mostly take refuge in stitching and fluffy reading.  Of course, I also spend too much time doomscrolling!  I'm trying to spend more energy and time in the real world, but we all know how difficult that can be.  ANYWAY.... I purchased this fun history of books for the library at work several years ago, but didn't plan to read it.  Then Robin Sloan, author of Moonbound , said he'd had a lot of fun with it, and I thought I'd give it a whirl.  It is a fun read!  Of course I know quite a bit about the history of...