Howling Frog Books

 Parables of Kierkegaard , ed. Thomas C. Oden I wasn't sure what to expect from this collction, but given the general intimidatingness of Kierkegaard, I figured I could deal with some parables.  I did actually read Either/Or in college, with particular focus on "Diary of a Seducer," but that was long long ago! What this turned out to be is a collection of parable-like stories gathered from the complete works of Kierkegaard.  Perhaps it's a few sentences of anecdote, perhaps it's a long excerpt on the experiences of a particular character known in 1830s. Christianshavn.  And, each little story comes with a moral quesion that the editor inserted to clarify what Kierkegaard was getting at.  I'm not sure it helped; to my mind it mostly gave an appearance of purpose more than there was, in fact, purpose. But it was a nice and fairly interesting thing to read.

 It's time for the 45th Classics Club Spin!  You know the rules, so here's my list:  Amerika, by Kafka Thus Were Their Faces, by Silvina Ocampo Peter the Great's African, by Pushkin Lives, by Plutarch (vol I) Sybil, by Disraeli   Eichmann in Jerusalem, by Hannah Arendt   The Leopard, by di Lampedusa Life and Fate, by Vasily Grossman (this would be quite a feat!) Conjure Tales, by Charles Chesnutt Polyhistor Solinus    Folktales collected by Afanas'ev (vol I of 3)   Sagas of Icelanders (aiming for 50% by the due date)   The Law and the Lady, by Wilkie Collins The Burning Plain, by Juan Rulfo The Beggar's Opera, by John Gay Sport of the Gods, by Paul Dunbar Phineas Finn, by Anthony Trollope The Well at the End of the World, by William Morris The Tale of Sinhue (ancient Egyptian poetry) The Once and Future King, by T. H. White Hoping for: Once and Future King or Plutarch.  Nervous about: Life and Fate!  It's a brick! What do you thin...

 Bushman Lives ! , and Adventures of a Dwergish Girl , by Daniel Pinkwater As long-time readers (if any) know, Pinkwater is a favorite of mine and in fact built large sections of my brain in my youth.  But these two are fairly recent, being only a decade or so old, and I had never gotten around to them -- largely because I was quite disappointed by one of his newer books in the late 90s and was cautious about reading more.  However!  A few months ago I happened upon a ranked list of every single Pinkwater book ever, which is over 100 titles and includes quite a few different genres, so not an easy list to rank.  Anyway, this guy thought Bushman Lives! was pretty great, so I thought I would give it a try somettime, and that time was now. Harold Knishke, disaffected high school student, lives in Chicago, and his coming-of-age story involves deciding to learn to draw, getting interested in art, and meeting all the strange people in the Chicago art scene.  Real...

  On Lying and Politics, two essays by Hannah Arendt I love this cover though This little book contains two very long essays: "Truth and Politics" and "Lying in Politics."  Both take questions of the Vietnam War and apply them to a wider context.  "Lying in Politics" is a direct response to the release of the Pentagon Papers. Arendt is probably a little above my head.  I have ambitions to read her larger works, but I don't know that I even managed to plumb the depths of these short ones.  "Truth and Politics" talks a lot about what kinds of truth there are and how they might be manipulated or if truth is even very findable.  It's less concrete, more abstract than the second essay. "Lying in Politics" meditates upon the question of "how could they?" in relation to Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers,  why and how politicians lie, and particularly focuses on lying as a method of trying to make reality conform to the liar...

 Sublimia Syndrome, by Exurb1a Time for some more far-future science fiction!  Millennia in the future, mankind has spread among the stars and evolved into quite a few different variants.  In fact it's been so long that Earth is long-forgotten, the galactic empire has been through dozens of collapses and regenerations, and there are even groups like the behethan (incredibly wise space whales) that nevertheless originated from humanity at some point.   One section of space, however, is perhaps better left alone; the area the Big Sisters occupied.  They are gone now, perhaps having evolved into energy, or some other mysterious fate, but their abandoned worlds contain artifacts and buildings beyond the understanding of anyone else.  In fact, trying to figure out what the Big Sisters were up to is a good way to develop sublimia, a feeling of incomprehension and discombubulation so total that it becomes dangerous and can easily lead to madness. As with The...

 Beau Geste, by P. C. Wren Whoof, this was an exciting one!  If you're not familiar, as I was not, Beau Geste*  was a smash hit back in the 1920s, was promptly made into a big-budget film (and a lot of radio plays, more films, and a TV show), and is just the sort of book everybody read back in the day, like Ben-Hur  or Lorna Doone.  If you grew up (as I did) reading old Peanuts collections from the library, you'll remember Snoopy being a Legionnaire at Fort Zinderneuf.   Three brothers, orphans, grow up at Brandon Abbas under the care of their lovely aunt, Lady Brandon.  Michael, the oldest, is the leader and known as Beau.  His younger twin, Digby, follows, and John, the youngest, is the narrator.  Along with playmates and cousins, they love to look at Aunt Patricia's prize jewel, the huge sapphire known as the Blue Water; and one evening it's stolen.  No one could have done it but the seven people in the room, and Michael decide...

I sure wish I had this cover Wordhoard: Anglo-Saxon Stories , by Jill Paton Walsh and Kevin Crossley-Holland This must have come across the donation table; it's a library discard, but from a Delta High School.  There's no location and it can't be from the Delta I know, so it's probably from the one near Sacramento; there are several.  I would not have been attracted to it in high school.  The cover is pretty 60s and hideous.  This one, from a Puffin paperback, is much more interesting-looking, and the lettering makes me think Trina Schart Hyman may have done it, though it's not her usual style at all.  She did a whole lot of book covers though! I didn't really know what this book was, so I was actually pretty surprised to open it and find short stories based on famous Anglo-Saxon events or poems.  They're very well-written too, as you'd expect, and they go in chronological order.  Here we see a woodwose captured and find that he's a former British ch...

 Early Riser , by Jasper Fforde Here's another donation table title that's been sitting around too long.  (I'm going to go put all of these in the local Little Free Library, since the booksale is on hiatus at the moment.)  I love Fforde's Thursday Next series -- did you see a new and final one is coming out? -- but I wasn't sure what to make of this one and had a vague feeling that it was one of the Nursery Crimes series, which it is not.  It's a stand-alone. On an alternate Earth where ice ages have never ended, humanity has evolved to deal with the bone-chilling winter months by hibernating.  Pretty much everyone bunks down in dormitoria of ancient design, watched over by the few willing (or necessitated) to stay awake through the dangerous winter.  These porters, consuls, and others are supposed to protect the sleepers from the cold, the Villains who wish to plunder, and the legendary (?) Wintervolk who may plan to suck the marrow from your bones.  ...

 Castle Dor , by Arthur Quiller-Couch and Daphne du Maurier Yep, this is my copy You've almost certainly heard of the novelist Daphne du Maurier, writer of Rebecca and many other tales, often set in Cornwall.  As a young woman, she became friendly with Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, who lived in Cornwall when he wasn't being an eminent Cambridge professor of literature.  He was working on a novel, but had little time for writing, and then the war came, and he died in 1944.  The manuscript was unfinished and had no notes about where it was going to go, but in 1960, du Maurier completed the novel at the request of Q's daughter.  The result is Castle Dor , set in a factual Cornish landscape (you can look up most of these spots on the map, though Dor is Dore now), but playing with legend. In the early 1860s, a young and beautiful Mrs. Linnet Lewarne meets Amyot Trestane, a Breton sailor.  Somehow, their immediate attraction to each other sets in motion a long-past ...

 Kraken , by China Mieville Billy Harrow, inoffensive curator of molluscs, is leading a tour around the Natural History Museum in London.  His prize showpiece is the preserved giant squid in the Darwin Room -- but it is vanished, tank, preservative, and all.  How could a gigantic specimen, larger than the door itself, simply disappear?  And then Billy is thrown out of his quiet, rational life into the world of London's underground cults, and all the  knackers, criminals, and strange creatures that go with them.  The end of the world is on its way, and nobody knows how to stop it.  ,  The Church of God Kraken is convinced Billy is the prophet to solve their problems.  A terrifying murderous duo is on his track, and so is the police department that works on cultic crimes.  A dead sorcerer is perhaps back in the game? and his rival, a living Tattoo on a poor schlub's back, is determined to get there first.  Everyone wants the kraken bu...

Wow, I hate this cover.   Look at them simpering! Det Går An/It is Acceptable , by  C. J. L. Almqvist Long ago in college, I read a lot of Scandinavian literature, and one of my favorites was the Romantic novel The Queen's Diadem (Drottnigens juvelsmycker) .  The only other work of Almqvist I've been able to track down in English is Det Går An/It is Acceptable , also published as Sara Videbeck .  This was a scandalous story in 1838 and led to Almqvist's removal from his position in the church. It all starts on a ferry; sergeant Albert notices a self-possessed young woman, clearly out on business.  They get to talking, and Sara tells him about her life running the family glassworks.  Soon they are good friends, and decide to travel together.  Nothing much happens except that they build a mutually respectful friendship, and when Albert wants to marry Sara, she argues that marriage is a trap, and they'd be much better off keeping their respective jo...

 I've been pretty lax about posting, but I do have books!  It's been a busy summer so far, even if much of the activity has been sewing.  I also spent a week in Seattle, visiting my sister with my mom.  My sister has exciting plans to move back down here and start a small business of her own, as she is desperate to escape the tech world.  While we were there, an awful tragedy hit our own branch library; you may have heard about the young guy who decided to stage a mass shooting at the Chico public library.  He killed two men, and I'm grateful for the quick response from my friends the library staff who herded families to safety, and for the fact that the kid wasn't very good at what he wanted to do, and the fast police response.  The perpetrator probably didn't imagine an aftermath, but now he faces a lifetime in prison.  Our town has rallied around the families and the library.  It was horrifying, and now our library is closed; they were goi...

 The Poetic Edda: Stories of the Norse Gods and Heroes , trans. by Jackson Crawford This was fun!  I read a couple of poems per day.  These are the oldest sources we have for information about the Norse gods, and they're kind of cryptic.  It helps to have a little bit of context and background information, which Crawford provides, but not too much; he doesn't overdo it. The first poems are mostly about Thor, Odin, and Loki.  In one, Loki shows up and creatively insults everyone, and they just have to put up with it because Odin has sworn to always drink with Loki.  (The swearing of oaths seems to be a popular, and dangerous, pastime while drinking.)  Odin goes in disguise to a giant and they have a contest of wisdom.  One poem is just good advice from Odin.  In another, Odin and Thor insult each other across a ford.  I particularly liked a complicated poem about "the escape of Voland the smith," who ended up as Wayland in Britain.  ...

 The Road to Roswell, by Connie Willis This was such a fun read!  Connie Willis is now in her 80s, and this is her last novel to date, published in 2023.  I've had a copy waiting to be read for a while now.  I wasn't sure what to expect, but what I got was Willis reveling in chaos and many of her usual trademark strategies until everything comes together in a precarious but satisfying ending. Francie is headed to the wedding of her college roommate/BFF's wedding in Roswell.  Serena has a penchant for odd guys, and this one is a UFO nut.  Francie considers it her job to figure out if Serena really wants to marry him or not, and back her up either way.  So she arrives in Roswell in the middle of a UFO festival and rolls her eyes at the crowds of people who believe in alien abductions, since those are obviously not real.  So she's quite surprised when an alien does, in fact, abduct her. This alien looks kind of like a tumbleweed and is totally silent...

  Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, by Robin  Wall Kimmerer Yep, I'm ten years late to the party, but I got there!  This book made a huge splash some years ago, and rightfully so.  I'm going to hand it to my youngest, who will love it. Robin Wall Kimmerer is a botanist and a member of the Potawatomi Nation, and comes at the natural world with two perspectives that merge into one, and that were never really that different to begin with.  Her point, which she makes over and over with various stories and ecological histories from several places in the United States, is that the Indigenous peoples of North America had (and still have) massive scientific and ecological knowledge about their environments, gained through centuries/millennia of practical experience in cultivating abundance and working with local resources.  When colonizers arrived, they simply assumed that the Native peoples were ignorant, an...

 Doing well so far!  I'm deep into a more serious book, but in the meantime I enjoyed TWO children's books from the UK that probably qualify as minor classics and which I quite enjoyed. Knock Three Times! by Marion St. John Webb: this 1917 fantasy tale reminded me of E. Nesbit in its Edwardian tone with humorous asides, but it was weirder.  Nine-year-old twins Molly and Jack receive birthday presents from an aunt, and while Jack gets the paint box he'd hoped for, Molly gets a very disappointing pincushion shaped like a grey pumpkin.  But!  That night, Molly sees the pumpkin grow and roll away out of the house.  She and Jack follow it through a tree portal into the Possible World -- a pleasantly bucolic and magical land, where the inhabitants are horrified to hear that the Grey Pumpkin is back.  That Pumpkin contains an evil wizard who once menaced the kingdom, and who was imprisoned in a regular pumpkin (it turned grey from his wicked soul) and dispos...

 How to Survive in the Woods, by Kat Rosenfield    I enjoyed Rosenfield's last novel, You Must Remember This , so I grabbed this new one when it was published a couple of months ago.  It's a suspense/thriller sort of thing, not exactly a mystery, but sort of, and we get the flashbacks that explain Emma's backstory as we go through the main plot. Emma is annoyed that when she decided to kill herself, she was found in time to save her life, and so when charismatic Lucas takes charge of her, she goes along -- after all, her own choices haven't been so great, and maybe it's better if she contains herself within the bounds he sets.  Emma is the founder and CEO of a hot wellness company, with money and power; and she lets Lucas take over. As he becomes ever more controlling and abusive, she meets up with Lucas' ex-girlfriend/business partner, Taylor, who understands exactly what's going on.  And when the three of them decide to hike the hardest part of the Appala...

  The Great Shadow: A History of How Sickness Shapes What We Do, Think, Believe, and Buy, by Susan Wise Bauer  My old homeschooling guru, SWB, has also written quite a bit of history, and when she got to the Renaissance she was struck by how very many ways there were to die gruesomely back then:  I was writing about the rise and fall of kingdoms, the quest of rulers for power, the growth of new nations—but I kept getting distracted by people dying. Not just people dying, because we all will. But the ways in which they died. The historical characters I was writing about died of the most mundane afflictions. People died of splinters, sore throats, pimples, earaches. They died of abscesses in their tonsils, of eye infections, of sore knees and infected toenails. They died of stomach aches and coughs and fevers and (my personal obsession) anal fistulas. (That would be Henry II, father of Richard the Lionhearted.) And these deaths are recorded with almost no comment. I was f...

 9! A watery nine for the ICY NORTH SEA This gives me The Poetic Edda  to read by July 5th .  I'm excited about it.  I read the Poetic Edda long ago in college, but somehow that book has disappeared.  (Maybe I gave it to my sister?)  But recently I was listening to a podcast I enjoy, and the guest was an Old Norse specialist who had published a new translation of the Poetic Edda , and I was intrigued, so I ordered it.  If you're not familiar, the Poetic or Elder Edda is a collection of Old Norse poetry that is the oldest source we have for Norse mythology.  It was actually written down from oral sources a couple of hundred years after the conversion to Christianity, so on the one hand, it's not quite as primary a source as we would wish, but on the other, by then the writers don't seem to have been worried that the old beliefs would have a resurgence, so there isn't a bunch of editorializing about the horrors of paganism. The poems seem to have ...

 If there's anybody left reading my blog, we all know that I've been in a major reading slump since the beginning of 2024 and I'm not having a lot of success clawing my way out.  I'm happy to say that I have made some progress recently, even though my reading didn't get as far as posting.  Besides my usual diet of fluffy mystery and childhood favorites re-reads, I whipped through Project Hail Mary (a re-read) after seeing the movie, and I recently finished the very depressing Black Pill: How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society, and Capture American Politics , by Elle Reeve.   I read the first part of the Once and Future King , enjoyed it so much, and have yet to pick it back up for the rest of the story.  (I've read it before, of course, and wanted to go back to it for its themes of 'Might Makes Right' vs. civilization, a very timely topic.)  And I'm currently reading Susan Wise Bauer's history of diseas...