Howling Frog Books

 Circles of Stone: Weird Tales of Pagan Sites and Ancient Rites, ed. Katy Soar This is one of the British Library's titles in the "Tales of the Weird" series, in which they get researchers to read old serials and mine them for forgotten short stories.  I love this series and have a few of them; I'd happily get the whole giant collection.  And this one features spooky stories about my favorite thing: ancient stone monuments!  Yay! Some of these are famous names: E. F. Benson, Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen.  Others aren't familiar to me, and one or two are practically unknown, like Stuart Strauss, who published three stories in early Weird Tales issues and was never heard from again; presumably it was a pseudonym, but who Strauss really was is a mystery.   The stories also have a variety of themes, from villages untouched by the modern world to race cars, human imagination and stones that just eat people.  It's all very enjoyable, loved it, this...

  The Splendid Century: Life in the France of Louis XIV, by W. H. Lewis I've always been terrible at French literature and history, and I find them intimidating.  So I'm quite proud of reading this description of life in the 17th century under the reign of Louis XIV, the one who called himself the Sun King and moved the court from Paris to Versailles.  It's not at all a difficult or heavy-duty tome, but a lively and fascinating overview of a society, perfect for someone like me. Warren H. Lewis was C. S. Lewis' brother and, in later life, acted as his secretary and wrote books about French history.  But before that he made his career in the army, serving as a supply officer from 1914 until his retirement in 1932.  He therefore knew about everything there was to know about military logistics, especially horses, and this really comes through in his chapters about the French army -- and even his judgement of Louis' character, who he describes as so obsessed with de...

 Hans Christian Andersen Fairy Tales , World Edition, 4 vols. A while back I decided I wanted to find the best edition of HCA's tales possible, and I came up with this: a 1959 four-volume set issued at Odense, which is where HCA was born.*  It's a very satisfying set, with little, fat hardbacks perfect for holding in your hand.  Each one has a different portrait in the front.  They're illustrated with the original drawings by Vilhelm Pedersen, who HCA chose himself, and the final volume has illustrations by Lorenz Fr ø lich, who continued the work after Pedersen's death.  I don't know that this is a complete and exhaustive collection of HCA's tales; he wrote a lot of things that weren't exactly fairy tales or poems or plays, so it would be difficult to make a complete list.  I did notice that "The Daisy" is not in this set. I'm not sure how the stories are arranged; it's not by date (I checked) and almost all of the most famous stories are ...