Howling Frog Books

 I've had these sitting on the desk for a while, and I'm just going to take them all off at once.  These were all books on my TBR shelf that I finally got around to reading! The Stones Are Hatching , by Geraldine McCaughrean :  It's 1919, and Phelim and his sister live deep in the countryside.  Phelim is on his own when all the old folktales rise up at once and hit him -- the domovoy and the glashans take over the house, call him Jack o'Green, and tell him to hurry up and save them all from the Stoor Worm, as the Black Dog attacks from outside.  Phelim is to travel cross-country and gather up his allies: the Maiden, the Fool, and the Hobby-Horse -- but the trouble is, he's never been told any of the stories.  He hasn't a clue how to navigate a world gone back to every superstition come alive, and he can't understand why everyone thinks it's his job to defeat the Stoor Worm.  It's a well-told tale of discovering the world and himself. The Thorn Ogres ...

Xenophon's Anabasis (Landmark ed.) I love looking at the Landmark editions, but I'm not so great at actually reading them, unless they are Herodotus.  But my sister was here over winter break and she inspired me to pick up something more serious than I've been reading lately, and so I have now read the Anabasis .  I enjoyed it a lot, too!  I'm not that great at reading about warfare, because I find it tedious, but reading about soldiers stuck in enemy territory and trying to get home is much more interesting. So here's the background: It's 401 BC, and Xenophon, a young and elite Athenian, decides to go along with a company of 10,000 Greek mercenaries to the Persian Empire.  He's not actually in the military, but his friend says 'if you get in good with Cyrus, you'll be in great shape for a career!' and so he goes along.  Cyrus is challenging his older brother Artaxerxes for the Persian throne, and he's promised good pay to these mercenari...

 I have quite a pile of random children's books on my TBR shelf, and I've been going through them, so here are three at once! The Children of Noisy Village, by Astrid Lindgren : This qualifies as a minor classic, not as popular as the Pippi Longstocking stories, but a lovely book describing a Swedish country childhood in about the 1950s.  Lisa lives in the middle farmhouse of three, and since there are six lively children in those three farmhouses, it's known as Noisy Village.  Lisa and her two brothers, the two sisters on one side, and a boy (plus infant sister) on the other -- they all get up to mischief and fun every day.  Lindgren takes her children through most of a year, describing summer, Christmas, birthdays, and spring.  This would be a great read-aloud for a child 5 and up. Nicobobinus, by Terry Jones : It was the Terry Jones on the spine that caught my eye.  What kind of children's book would he write? It would be guaranteed to be silly and all o...

Les Misérables, by Victor Hugo It's the big ambitious 2024 book, Les Misérables !  The book I was most afraid of reading!  And I read it all!  This was enabled by a) my sister and b) a Substack that posted one chapter a day.  It so happens that Les Misérables has 365 chapters, so if you read one chapter a day, you'll get it done in a year. I was always about as ignorant of Les Misérables as it is possible to be.  I saw a local production of the musical once because some friends were in it.  So pretty much everyone else in the world knows more than I do, and I won't presume to tell you the plot, but just a couple of things I learned. I'd always assumed that this story is set during the French Revolution, but it isn't.  Jean Valjean is released from prison in 1815, and the story ends in about 1833.  The revolt that is the big climax of the story is one of the students of Paris against the government -- an anti-Orléanist demonstration.  It ...

 Here's some more November reading!  I'm thinking about going back to single-book posts, but on the other hand I'm having trouble finding time to write even these quickie riffles through several books at a time.  What do you think?     The Canceling of the American Mind: Cancel Culture Undermines Trust and Threatens Us All -- But There is a Solution , by Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott:   I've been looking forward to this book for a long time!  The title is a riff on Lukianoff's last book, co-written with Jonathan Haidt, and the two titles work together.  This time, Lukianoff is teamed up with a Gen Z writer, Rikki Schlott, to bring in a younger perspective.  The thesis here: that cancel culture (which yes, exists) is a manifestation of false ideas discussed in the earlier book, and which serve to make us less mentally healthy and less able to function as a society.  The ideas: Fragility: that people are fragile and need comfort; they...

 I'm working on that pile!  Here are three of my pile books, plus two quick reads I stuck in around the edges. Junk Film: Why Bad Movies Matter , by Katharine Coldiron -- This book was just a delight to me, but then it was written by somebody who likes many of the same terrible movies I do but is much more knowledgeable than I am.  The first third of the book is dedicated to a monograph of Plan 9 From Outer Space and what makes it so interesting as a terrible movie.  Wonderful!  She talks about a failed TV show called Cop Rock in which somebody mashed a serious procedural cop show with a musical -- "I promise this is true."  Coldiron gets into literature and compares Irene Iddesleigh with Sean Penn's novels.  She explains why a low-budget 70s horror film called Death Bed is actually pretty good.  I loved it. If you like bad movies, this is a great book for you.  Others possibly not so much.     How Democracies Die , by Steven L...

 Here are some titles from my official TBR list that I just haven't written about yet!  Mexican Gothic, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia : I saved this one for October, for an official RIP read.  And wow, this is a spooky story!  It's the 1950s, and Noem í is a debutante out for a good time in Mexico City.  Her father sends her down to the countryside to check on her cousin Catalina, who married last year in a romantic whirl.  Noem í arrives at a classic Gothic scene: a mouldering family mansion on a misty mountain, and....this is a strange place.  The silver mine that gave the Doyle family their wealth has been closed down for years, the house is festooned with mold, and everyone is very strange.  Catalina seems to be ill.  Her husband Virgil is creepy, but not as creepy as his elderly father is.  Just one family member, Francis, seems friendly, if shy and something of a weak character.  As Noemi unravels the dark family history and the se...

 Did I do it?  Did I hit my goal of 20 books by September 1st?  I did, and also I've been very busy and unable to finish this post.  So here we go... Summerbook #17: The Way to the Sea , by Caroline Crampton:   Crampton does a podcast I listen to ( Shedunnit ), so when she wrote this book I wanted to find a copy, but it was only published in the UK.  It's all about the Thames estuary - the bit between London and the sea -- which is where Crampton grew up, on a boat half the time.  She actually starts at the source of the Thames, but covers from there to Tower Bridge in the first chapter.  After that she gets down to business and covers history, the state of the river, ecology, and throws in bits of her own memory.  People have tended to ignore the estuary or use it as a place to dump things they don't want to look at, from actual garbage to sewage treatment and power stations.  These days the shipping is there too; an absolutely massive...

 I think I'm a bit behind on my reading; if we count my Spin title, I've now read 14 books of summer and have six to go, which isn't terrible.  But I'm going to need to buckle down a bit in August.  And I had this month off!  In August I have to go back to work!  I've admittedly been rather lazy, pottering about, working on crafty projects, and watching too many YouTube videos (but stitching while I did so!).  I've also done some day trips and hikes, and enjoyed air conditioning a whole lot.  And I've been getting a bit involved with the local public library!   How has your summer been going? Summerbook #9: Notes From the Burning Age , by Claire North :  Centuries after the apocalypse, humans live in a carefully balanced world built from the ruins of the old one.  At some point during a destructive world war, chimaerical monsters -- kakuy -- arose from the depths and wreaked destruction upon humankind in revenge for their hapless de...

Here we are with some bonus reading.... The Scouring of the White Horse , by Thomas Hughes : History? Novel?  What is this thing?  This 1859 publication is a novelization of Hughes' actual attendance at the 1857 scouring of the Uffington White Horse, which also serves as a sort of summary of what was then known about the chalk figure, and the history of its maintenance.  Reading it was a slightly odd experience because I thought it was supposed to be a simple account of the customs around the figure, commissioned by the heads of the nearby towns, but it reads like a novel, complete with the narrator deciding to take his annual two-week holiday at a friend's farm and falling in love with the friend's sister. Apparently Thomas Hughes, better known as the author of Tom Brown's School Days , came from the area around Uffington.  Maybe this explains it.  In the novel, while he's staying with his friend, he attends this scouring event and gets talking with an antiqua...

 How's your summer going?  We've had just the most wonderful weather, a good ten degrees cooler than usual because a string of thunderstorms keeps coming through.  I've been on some hikes, I've picked cherries and boysenberries, I finished an embroidery project!, and I've read some great books.  Invasion: The Inside Story of Russia's Bloody War And Ukraine's Fight for Survival, by Luke Harding : The first serious books about Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine started coming out last fall (another I've seen highly recommended is Overreach ) and I finally got my hands on this one.  Harding has been reporting on Ukraine and Russia for years -- he's now banned from Russia, of course -- and includes material from the past ten years here so the reader can know some background.  Each chapter covers a particular place and time: first Kyiv in February 2022 as the invasion started, and then places such as Bucha, Chernobyl (Russian invaders were kept so ign...