About Howling Frog Books

By
Hello and welcome to Howling Frog Books!  I read a lot of books, and here is where I tell you about them.  You'll find that I will read most things, but I particularly like classic and world literature, history, a certain amount of SF/fantasy, and weird old books in general.

I love comments, so please do me the honor of arguing with me or just saying hello.  I don't accept many requests for reviews, but I do accept some; feel free to ask.
 


The motto of Howling Frog Books -- "To be literate is to possess the cow of plenty" -- is taken from the motto of the Madras Library Association (MALA).  S. R. Ranganathan helped to found MALA and was its first president.  Ranganathan was not only the father of librarianship in India, but a great world influence; he developed the "Five Laws of Library Science" and invented faceted cataloging.  I think it's pretty much the best motto ever.  Pictured with the motto is Saraswati, the Hindu goddess of learning and wisdom, music, and the arts. This image was on the cover of the original edition of The Five Laws of Library Science.

The name of my blog is taken from one of my all-time favorite books, Daniel Pinkwater's The Snarkout Boys and the Baconburg Horror.  The three friends -- Walter Galt, Winston Bongo, and Rat -- go to a scruffy old mall to look for a guru, and find a bookstore:

“Welcome to Howling Frog — Books of the Weird,” the fat bald guy said. “I am Howling Frog, the owner, general manager, clerk, stock boy, and janitor — and this is my good friend and spiritual guide, the Honorable Lama Lumpo Smythe-Finkel.”

The guy's name was Howling Frog! Never in all my life had I heard such a neat name....

“Books of the Weird is the bookstore in which you can find those books you never dreamed of finding, books you never knew existed. I have books about unheard-of places, seldom visited and practically unknown. I have books dealing with miraculous events and strange occurrences. I have books on obscure topics, such as knot-worship in fifteenth-century Switzerland, and how to tell a person’s character by the shapes of his ears..." 

I recommend that you read many Pinkwater books at the first opportunity.





Comments

  1. Esther | Chapter AdventuresJuly 29, 2016 at 5:07 PM

    Hi there! I'm Esther from the blog Chapter Adventures. We were paired together for the 2016 Comment Challenge (for August). You are participating, right?
    I'm making the sign up post for today (the deadline is the 31st) and I wanted to check with you first just in case. Let me know ;)

    ReplyDelete
  2. JeanJuly 30, 2016 at 11:22 PM

    Hi Esther! Yep, I am; I'm just out of town at the moment. Will get back to you asap.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of...
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the s...
Read more

Faerie Queen Readalong I: Redcrosse, the Knight of Holiness

By
Image
I did it, I read all of Book I!  My minimum requirement was two cantos a day, but I managed three a couple of times.  I'm hoping to read ahead, because I'll be gone for two weeks in the middle of this event and I'd like to be able to prep a post ahead of time...but the schedule is already pretty demanding.  The reading is not terribly difficult, but it is slow.  I keep thinking that I've read a large chunk, only to look back and realize that in fact I have read six verses.  So here we go with analysis... Each book in the Faerie Queene features a knight, and a story, about a particular virtue.  The Redcrosse Knight, to be known as St. George after he accomplishes his feats, is all about Holinesse .  This does not mean that Redcrosse already exemplifies holiness; he doesn't.  Holiness is what he's working towards and struggling with.  His foes symbolize various forms of unholiness, and he falls into their clutches at least as often as he ...
Read more