Howling Frog Books

  Robin Redbreast, by David Lack I read an old Slightly Foxed issue, which always adds to my TBR list, and this book sounded intriguing and fun.  It's a complete collection of folklore, literary references and poetry, and historical mentions of....robins!  Mostly just in the UK, where robins were popular and beloved -- while over on the continent, they were often hunted and eaten.  Now the European robin and the American robin are two totally different species, so if you're American, you have to think of a different bird. David Lack wrote an entire book observing the life of the wild robin, and this was by way of being a fun but scholarly collection of literary and cultural robins,   We start off with legends about robins, because there was a belief that robins would come and reverently cover the face of anyone they found dead in the forest -- especially if the person had been murdered.  And then, why are robins always boys, culturally married to wren...

 No Name, by Wilkie Collins  Wilkie Collins was incredibly prolific, but this is one of his 'great four' novels, along with The Woman in White, Armadale, and The Moonstone .  So now I just need to read Armadale and I'll have the set!  No Name is set in the late 1840s but was written in 1862 and serialized in All the Year Round .  It gets very exciting as it develops, and I enjoyed it a lot.  If you're interested in Victorian 'sensation' novels, this should be on your list. The Vanstones are a happy and fairly wealthy family.  Mr. Vanstone is the most amiable and generous of men; his wife, a loving and gentle woman, but weighed down with a  dangerous late pregnancy.  Their two daughters are very different: Norah, in her mid-20s, a responsible and gentle brunette, and Magdalen, an energetic and mercurial 19 with unusual light grey eyes. Ruin strikes when Mr. Vanstone is killed in a railway accident and the shock brings on labor and death to ...

 The Fifth Science, by Exurb1a  This one kid at work has been telling me about the books he's reading, which is fun.  He said he really likes this author (who seems to live in Bulgaria and is also a YouTuber sometimes), and the ebook was cheap, so I thought I'd give it a go.... Here we have a set of 12 short stories, set from the beginning of the Aerth Empire (that is, humans) until after the fall of said empire.  They don't have continuing characters or planets, anything like that, but are vignettes from various points in time and place, often thousands of years apart.  From these stories we get glimpses of the Empire, the development of truly intelligent machines and the splitting of humans into myriads of different societies, and the eventual development of the fifth science: the ability to make ordinary matter intelligent.  Humans inject stars with intelligence, and what will happen then?  Since human history, on the whole, tends to be on the brut...