Howling Frog Books

 The Book: A Cover-to-cover Exploration of the Most Powerful Object of Our Time, by Keith Houston Well, I did manage ten books of summer, but I failed to write about the last one.  And I've been very slow with my reading in the last month or so.  As far as I can tell, I've been under enough stress that I don't have a lot of brainpower left over for reading; there are lots of big, heavy tomes on important topics that I want to read, but I mostly take refuge in stitching and fluffy reading.  Of course, I also spend too much time doomscrolling!  I'm trying to spend more energy and time in the real world, but we all know how difficult that can be.  ANYWAY.... I purchased this fun history of books for the library at work several years ago, but didn't plan to read it.  Then Robin Sloan, author of Moonbound , said he'd had a lot of fun with it, and I thought I'd give it a whirl.  It is a fun read!  Of course I know quite a bit about the history of...

 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...

 Hi ho!  I've been doing a lot of reading, but much of it is pretty heavy-duty long stuff and I won't be done right away.  (And I also indulged in two Barbara Michaels gothics -- fun!)  Here are the books I read in the first half of February:   Dark Archives: A Librarian's Investigation Into the Science and History of Books Bound in Human Skin , by Megan Rosenbloom --  a bit macabre, and an interesting read.  Not all books claiming to be bound in human skin actually are, and Rosenbloom's research group is able to do a test that confirms what kind of leather a binding is made from.  (You can't do a DNA test; the tanning process destroys all DNA.)  Most of the books in the English-speaking world were made by 19th-century doctors who were doing autopsies or dissections anyway, and lifted some skin while they were at it.  So Rosenbloom kind of goes all over the place, talking about the development of medical ethics and all sorts of things....

I'm hoping to get this year wrapped up in this final week.  Which is kind of a lot to leave undone until December 26, so wish me luck! I've read some neat books and a good bit of fluff in the last couple of months, and I'm just going to run through some of the ones I want to count for challenges...    Mink River, by Brian Doyle Doyle writes the story of a town: Neawanaka , a tiny place on the Oregon coast where a river meets the sea.  It's beautifully written, and I highly recommend it. Read Dangerously, by Azar Nafisi Written as letters to her (deceased) father, Nafisi discusses the importance of reading literature, especially in troubled times.  I wanted to save a couple of quotations: It is when you cast off the mantle of victimhood that you become a menace, a danger to your oppressor.  It it intriguing that in order to cease being a victim, you must accept responsibility for who you are and who you might become -- thus, ironically, acknowledging ...

 Caldecott & Co.: Notes on Books and Pictures , by Maurice Sendak This was a nice collection of short essays about various illustrators or author/illustrators.  Most were pieces published in newspaper "books and culture"-type sections, some are reviews or introductions to various volumes, and there are a couple of talks as well.  Mostly, Sendak chooses a favorite illustrator or writer, and just talks about what he loves in each one.  His detailed analysis of certain pictures is fasinating, but inevitably the reader wants more of the pictures included; only rarely is the discussed image actually there to study.  If they reprinted it now there would probably be more, but this edition dates from 1988 and they just weren't going to put a lot of illustrations in. Many of my own favorite writers or illustrators are included here, such as Caldecott (of course),  Hans Christian Andersen, Edward Ardizzone, even George MacDonald (!)  Beatrix Potter gets two ...

  The Diary of a Bookseller, by Shaun Bythell This was fun.  Shaun Bythell runs the Book Shop, a large used bookstore in Wigtown, in Galloway, Scotland.  Wigtown is the Scottish equivalent of Hay-on-Wye, and hosts an annual book festival.  Since a used bookstore needs as many revenue streams as possible, Bythell has also written a few books about bookselling, of which this is the first.  I get the impression that this book really made the Book Shop famous. It's just a daily diary of bookshop doings in 2014, with anecdotes about strange or irritating customers, lamentations about Amazon, accounts of trips to pick up book collections, and endless stories about the batty clerk, Nicky.  Each entry also has the number of customers and takings for the day. Bythell also talks about store programs like the Random Book Club , in which subscribers receive a monthly book, guaranteed in good condition.  It sounds like a lot of fun, and I suspect that this diary ma...

 Breaking Bread With the Dead: A Reader's Guide to a More Tranquil Mind, by Alan Jacobs I quite like Alan Jacobs and have been following his blog, Snakes and Ladders .  I only ran into him a couple of years ago when I read his book, How to Think.   Evidently he's doing a sort of series of that, this, and The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction , which I have not read.  Here, Jacobs lays out his reasoning on why old books is a good idea, and important to do.  With me he's pretty much preaching to the choir, as a look at Howling Frog will show, so the question is, was it worth reading as an already convinced old-book-reader? Jacobs starts by acknowledging that reading old books is often painful.  Yes -- old literature is frequently racist, sexist, or just plain alien.  Why should we even subject ourselves to reading difficult or ugly or incomprehensible books when there are plenty of less painful books to read that we can more easily understand...

 Ivory Apples, by Lisa Goldstein  I think it was Jenny who loved this book a while back, and I've meant to read it ever since.  RIP finally stirred me to it.  Wow.  It is a great story, and also takes some very unexpected turns. Every couple of months, Ivy's dad, Philip, takes her and her three sisters to go visit their Great-Aunt Maeve, who lives way out in the country.  Philip takes care of her mail and business, and the girls are never supposed to tell anyone that Maeve Reynolds is actually Adela Madden, author of the beloved fantasy novel Ivory Apples .  Maeve can't, and won't, handle the publicity and the fans. At the park, the sisters meet Kate Burden, a remarkably friendly young woman who insinuates herself into the family's life.  She is an obsessive fan of  Ivory Apples , and in fact she wants what Adela Madden had in order to write the story, which is not something easy to come by.  She is willing to destroy the entire family ...

The View From the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction, by Neil Gaiman Oh, I do like Neil Gaiman, though as usual I'm late to the party.  This is a very long collection of non-fiction -- I have noticed before that absolutely everybody wants him to write introductions.  So I took it fairly slowly and read it over lunches, so as not to overdose.  Gaiman, however, is not easy to overdose on. The book starts with my very favorite essay, which I would have put in front too, the one about how important libraries are.  I may be a librarian, but since I'm not a writer, I can't defend libraries with quite this much eloquence.  If you've never read this one, be sure to do so .  I gave you the link, so you have no excuse.  After that there are some more good essays on various bookish and writing topics before a set of pieces on 'People I Have Known,' which of course include the expected DWJ, Pterry, and Douglas Adams, as well as lots of other well-known and not so fa...

Heidi's Alp: One Family's Search for Storybook Europe, by Christina Hardyment Way back in 1985, this British family borrowed a camper-van, bundled their four daughters in, and took weeks to drive around Europe on a storybook-themed trip.  Hardyment, the mom, wrote up this lovely book to tell the story. Obviously it was a tricky proposition to take that much time off, so what they actually did was start the trip with Mom and four daughters, plus a friend and her year-old baby.  After a few weeks, the friend and baby went home and Dad joined them.  Mom being a writer, she seems to have been able to pull off the long trip. They start in Holland, with Hans Brinker (which I have actually never read, I really should), exploring the cities and dikes of the Netherlands.  Then it's off to Denmark, where Hans Christian Andersen will be a major guide on the trip; they first visit Legoland, Odense, and Kronborg (that's the castle at Helsingør, Hamlet's Elsinore).  This gave...

In Search of Lost Books, by Giorgio van Straten This was just this fun little volume -- originally written in Italian -- about famous, or less-famous, lost books -- some of which might still be out there somewhere.  As, for example, the early works of Hemingway; his first wife was bringing them to him in a suitcase, and she just hopped out of the French train for a second to buy a Perrier.  When she got back, the suitcase was gone, and it was never recovered. I was happy to see the story of Bruno Schulz, whose short stories I have read .  He was a Polish Jew, and so during World War II he hid the manuscript of his great life work novel with some Gentile friends.  Schulz was murdered by a Nazi officer who was annoyed with the Nazi officer who was keeping Schulz as a slave.  And the manuscript disappeared in the war and has never been found. There's a chapter on Lord Byron's memoirs -- deemed too scandalous for publication, they were probably burned by the p...

Slightly Chipped*: *Footnotes in Booklore, by Lawrence and Nancy Goldstone This is one of those fun books about the joys of antiquarian book-collecting.  The Goldstones find their entertainment in going on day trips to book dealers or book fairs, and buying beautiful first editions that they just can't resist.  They are not wealthy, but they do give the impression of having boundless leisure for browsing in bookshops. There are humorous descriptions of book dealers and book sales, a section on mysteries, and a fascinating story about Cudjo, a Jamaican rebel hero.  Just a nice mix of stories like that. Because the copy I read was a hardback in brand-new condition, I thought this was a pretty recent book, but it turned out to have been published in 1999.  It has an extensive chapter on the brand-new phenomenon of online book dealing, and how to enter this new world.  Why would anybody want to buy a book without inspecting it first?  Will Amazon take ov...

Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore, by Robin Sloan Hello summer!  I finished my semester at work about 10 days ago, and I thought I would relax and take it easy for a few days, but the universe had other plans and dumped a bunch of random stuff in my lap.  I can't even remember what, but it sure kept me busy.  Now $20booksofsummer has started, and I have six books waiting to be blogged about, all of which I started before June 1st.  So I'm going to play a bit of catchup here... My neighborhood has a Little Free Library, and I found this novel in there one morning.  I was skeptical that it would be any good -- novels about bookstores abound, after all -- but I didn't quite want to not read it.  The book startled me quite a bit by glowing at me in the dark after I'd gone to bed; all the books on the cover are printed in glow-in-the-dark ink, on the spine and the back and everything.  And once I got into it, I found that I was pleasantly surprised by...

The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, by Elif Batuman This was such a fun book -- at least, if you like Russian literature, or wry stories about oddball academics, or information about Uzbekistan.  I like all of those things. Elif Batuman writes a sort of memoirish thing about her time in grad school -- some chapters were originally articles, so it's not always a smooth narrative, but it sure is fun.  Instead of writing a novel, she ends up at Stanford studying Russian literature. And then she goes to a conference on Tolstoy, right at Tolstoy's estate!  Eccentric academics abound, Batuman formulates a theory that Tolstoy was murdered, and fun is had by all.  It's finished off by a group dinner so strange and uncomfortable that a faculty member despairingly groans  "It was a dinner from Dostoevsky, that's all." There is some quite fascinating stuff about Isaac Babel, a library display, King Kong , and Soviet propaganda...