Howling Frog Books

 Our Mutual Friend, by Charles Dickens This doorstopper tome came in at over 800 pages!  So, clearly, this is a story that is going to have a lot of characters and a lot of plot threads.  Dickens does weave all of it together into a suspenseful and exciting pattern, and for the most part I enjoyed the novel and often kept reading to find out what would happen. Our story revolves, mainly, around one hero and two heroines, but they are not in a love triangle.  In fact, we start with a murder; the body of John Harmon, heir to a large fortune and just arrived to claim it, has been found in the river.   Who killed him, and who will get the money?  It is not a spoiler to let you know that John Harmon is in fact alive, but is pretty iffy on whether he wants the money.  He definitely does not want to force Miss Bella Wilfer into marriage, which is what his father has ordained in the will, although the two have never seen each other.  So the family se...

I don't know why the image comes out with red.  It's bright Penguin orange.  The Third Reich at War, by Richard J. Evans It took me a good six weeks, but I did it!  I finished the Evans trilogy.  This is a huge book, 760 pages without all the notes and such, and I tried to read one sub-section per day.  I actually finished it a couple of weeks ago, but have had trouble getting around to writing it up, and now we're seeing Putin try to pull some of the same moves that are chronicled at the start of this book.  So I guess it's appropriate. Evans offers a solid analysis of everything Germany did, with (I think) something of an emphasis on atrocities and the Eastern front.  There is not quite as much about the Western side of the war, possibly because most people already know more about that, while the eastern side has been less known until pretty recently.  We don't see much of the US part of the war, and there's nothing about the Pacific arena since...

 Becky's Book Reviews is hosting a Chunkster Challenge this year, and I'm thinking I'll sign up.  This year I want to read at least some of the attractive but gigantic books I've got waiting for me!  I don't seem to have a theme focus this year as I've had for the last couple of years, which I enjoyed a lot.  This year I'm feeling like I want to read a bunch of children's literature that is new to me, and those big books.  So here we go. There are few rules.  450 pages is the minimum for a chunkster, and I just read however many I want.  Do you think I can do 12, one per month??

The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck For Karen's Back to the Classics Challenge, I needed a classic set in a place where I have lived, and the solution was obvious: The Grapes of Wrath .  Cleo wanted to do a readalong in December, which suited me just fine, and so three people set out to read it together.  It's possible the timing was less than ideal, as this is the least wintery or Christmassy book I have ever read in any December ever.  It's an August book for sure. What connection do I have to the locations in this novel?  The Joads set out from Oklahoma and take Route 66, with their destination being Bakersfield, California.  It's the only time I've ever seen anybody describe the land around Bakersfield in glowing terms.  I was born in Bakersfield, and so was my dad; his parents were not Okies, but they were pretty much part of the same migration west around that time.  (I did have a great-aunt who was an Okie; she said when she was little th...

Blackout and All Clear, by Connie Willis Instead of finishing off my official TBR challenge list, I dived into Connie Willis' gigantic and sprawling time-travel epic story of World War II, the double-volume Blackout and All Clear .  Each is a good 600 pages long, so it could easily have been a quartet! In 2060 Oxford, several historians are preparing to jump around in World War II, observing various aspects of the war.  Merope, alias Eileen, is working with evacuated children in the countryside.  Polly goes to 1940 to observe the London Blitz.  And Michael will be Mike, an American reporter in Dover who just happens to see the home end of the evacuation of Dunkirk.    Other historians have plans too, and Colin, age 17, keeps hoping to go along even though he isn't even an Oxford student yet. Things go very pear-shaped right away for the three historians; they arrive just a bit off-target, and their drops stop working.  E...

Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets: An Oral History, by Svetlana Alexievich Wow, this book is...an achievement.  Alexievich won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and it was well-deserved.  It's not a regular book of history; it's more like a monument, really. What Alexievitch does -- has been doing for well over twenty years -- is interview people and transcribe their stories.  Mostly just ordinary people, and the stories are not edited much.  They're just set down.  The result is very immediate; you can almost see the people as they speak. Many of the people in this book are elderly, and tell of long Soviet lives.  Others are quite young and may not even remember Soviet life. There's a former Soviet officer, who offers the rather stunning information that a good 70% of the Soviet economy was militarized, and in his opinion that was only correct.  They weren't about to convert tank factories into factories for toasters!  They had to be ...

The Adventures of Roderick Random, by Tobias Smollett Why on earth would I read a very long 18th-century picaresque comedy-drama that is practically unreadable by modern standards?  Well, as with so many things, it's John Bellairs' fault.  I am a big fan of his books, and like many of the more obsessive Bellairs fans, I think it's neat to do things connected with them.*  In one of the later books, Professor Childermass informs Johnny that the reason his brother Perry's proper name is, preposterously, Peregrine Pickle, is that their father was a fan of Tobias Smollett.  The professor himself is named Roderick Random.  So why not see what ol' Dad Childermass admired so much? Roderick Random was Smollett's first, and most famous, novel, published in 1748.   After that come Peregrine Pickle and Humphry Clinker , and I do have both, but who knows if I'll read them.  Smollett was in the same London as so many other famous Georgian writers, but he ...

Black Earth: the Holocaust as History and Warning, by Timothy Snyder This is a truly great work of history, one I would highly recommend.  It's also quite a dense and difficult read, which is why it took me something like 3 months to get through.  It took some concentration to read -- something I don't always have in large supply! -- and it was one of those books where it's very easy to read two pages and then realize you have no idea what those pages said.  It was very worth it, though; this is an important work. An interesting thing about this book is that it barely touches on the usual focus of the Holocaust: Auschwitz and other famous concentration camps.  Most of this book is about the political background and development of the Holocaust, the beginnings, who cooperated and how.  There is much more about death squads in Eastern Europe. Snyder gives the most lucid and practical explication of Hitler's philosophy -- if such it can be called -- that I ...

I think this is my last one...really!  I haven't done a chunkster challenge in a while, and I have quite a few piled up around here, so here we go.  Becky at Becky's Book Reviews is hosting, and I'm putting all the rules here so I don't forget, because there's a whole system! 2019 Chunkster Challenge Host: Becky's Book Reviews ( sign up here ) Duration: December 2018 - December 2019 # of books: Ultimately up to you The mission: see how many points you can earn reading chunksters in 2019. Can you earn 100 points and get that A+? Each book will have a point value attached to it. Bonus points are possible so you can earn extra credit to help you get that perfect grade. E-books do count if their print counterparts are over 450 pages. Audio books, if unabridged, DO count if their print counterparts are over 450 pages.  If a book is over 450 in large print, but NOT over 450 in regular print, then it doesn't count.  Point System Basics: Mi...

War and Peace, by Lev Tolstoy,  translated by Pevear and Volokhonsky It took me 3 months, but it was completely worth it.  I'm not sure else what to say about the mother of all chunkster classics, but I'll give it a go: We've got a cast of characters in Russia during the Napoleonic Era.  It takes a while to get to know them all!  There are three or four main families and their paths touch here and there over the course of the novel, eventually cohering into one.  The story takes years, and some of the characters change very much.  We get to know the main players so well that we sympathize with them and want them to be happy even when they're not choosing very well. There is a lot about the war, first in Prussia, then in Russia itself.  Napoleon himself is a character, and Tolstoy has some very pointed things to say about "great men."  By the end, he is expounding on power, freedom, and war--the epilogue, which you hope will have more story i...

In the Steps of the Master, by H. V. Morton H. V. Morton was quite a famous journalist in his day.  He made his career by being the first to report on the discovery of Tutankhamen's tomb, and then he wrote a lot of very popular books about spots in Britain (I have read and loved a couple of them).  This book is the account of a trip he took to Palestine in about 1934, and though he writes quite a bit about Crusaders and Arabs and Romans, his main focus is on the events of the New Testament and on the Hebrew people. The amazing thing about this book is that Morton was there 80 years ago--before the modern state of Israel was established, and just about before much modernization had occurred at all.  I'm quite sure that if I went to the same spots, they would all be very very different now.  Although much had changed in 2000 years, Morton was able to see quite a few things--ways of life, habits, and so on--that had changed relatively little.  Every so often...

The Guns of August, by Barbara Tuchman  I wanted to re-read this classic of history this summer, and I was sure right!  This is such a great book, and I'd forgotten everything.  The Guns of August is not Tuchman's first book, but it is the book that launched her into well-deserved fame.  She covers the first month of World War I in detail, from all sides--after giving the necessary background as well--we go day by day, seeing decisions as they were made and as if we don't all know how it's going to turn out.  It works really well. The book actually starts with Edward VII's funeral, a glittering parade that brought 70 countries together for one last gasp of the old order.  Even at the official parties, Kaiser Wilhelm II ("possessor of the least inhibited tongue in Europe") couldn't help trying to wheel and deal in politics, usually to the horror of everyone else including his own staff.  We then see the world hurrying towards disaster. Tuchman c...

August 1914 , by Aleksandr Solzenitsyn In January, I put this novel on my mental list for the year, thinking that it would be good for the 100th anniversary of WWI.  I hoped it would give me more insight into the Eastern front of the war, which I really know very little about.  August 1914 did do that, and although it's not my favorite Solzhenitsyn novel, it was very worth reading. Like In the First Circle , this is a sketch of an entire society at a particular moment in time.  There is a vast cast of characters, all doing their own thing and sometimes intersecting with each other.  We do not only see the warfront; there are people on country estates, in the cities, in schools, and even chapters consisting entirely of snippets from newspapers.  But the vast majority of the novel does take place with the soldiers going to war.  We don't see nearly as much of all the other things. Troop movements take up at least 2/3 of the book, and while I was interes...

Maidenhair , by Mikhail Shishkin This book has been a long-term project.  It's a Russian modernist novel that made a big splash a few years ago.  I've been reading it, slowly, since...January?  It's not that it was incredibly difficult; it's weird but if you let it wash over you it's not overwhelming.  But taking it slowly worked pretty well for me. There are several strands in the braid that make up Maidenhair : A translator at a Swiss border post interprets for Russian people seeking asylum.  They tell long, elaborate stories (often untrue) and Peter sometimes does too.  In fact, sometimes you wonder which is which. He writes letters to his son, "Nebuchadnezzarsaurus," about the boy's imaginary kingdom. There are sections of the diary of a Russian singer who was a young teen in 1914 and who lived to see the USSR crumble. The interpreter re-lives his affair with his son's mother (his wife?) and his obsession with her former lover, calling...

What is to be Done?  by Nikolai Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky I read this for Tom's April readalong , and I was quite excited about it because What is to be Done? was an important part of a literary debate in 19th century Russia about what Russian society should be.  Turgenev first asked the question in Fathers and Sons, and here Chernyshevsky tries to answer it.  He doesn't claim great literary talent; in fact, he says right out that he hasn't got much.  He wrote a novel--while in prison--because that was the way Russians got around the censors to write about revolutionary ideas.  Such ideas are very thinly veiled in this novel, which likens Russia to a bad wheatfield that is sorely in need of drainage and general reform. There is a plot, though.  Vera is a young woman who is desperate to escape her family, especially her mother, who is a crook and a cheat, and who wants to arrange an advantageous marriage for her daughter.  Vera is rescued by Lopu...

Travels in Siberia , by Ian Frazier I picked this book off the shelf at work on a whim just before winter vacation; I just happened to see it and thought it might be interesting.  Nope, it was fabulous!  At about 500 very dense pages, it is a slow and detailed read, and I enjoyed every minute.  Frazier, a well-known non-fiction writer, fell in love with Russia in the early/mid-1990s and visited as often as he could.  His Siberian visits started with a flight from Alaska, and eventually decided that he wanted to drive all the way across Siberia--an idea that daunted most of his Russian friends.  So he hired a guy, who hired another guy, and they got a van and packed it full of stuff, and they started driving.  They mostly camped along the way, washing in rivers, or sometimes visited people.  Then they did it again by train, and then Frazier went back for a mid-winter visit.   He describes all of it in fascinating and humorous detail, and delves...

The Long Ships , by Frans Bengtsson Folks, this book is fantastic.  Now you know, so you will go out and read it too, right? This is the life story of Red Orm, who is captured as a teenager and ends up joining a Viking raiding ship as an equal.  So his years of adventure begin, pillaging, fighting, being captured as a slave, working as a bodyguard...Orm travels around the Europe of 1000 AD and even meets up with a few eminent people.  I was happy that he spent quite a bit of time at the court of Harald Bluetooth.  Eventually Orm even travels to Kiev. The really wonderful thing about this book is that Frans Bengtsson gives an amazing picture of life a thousand years ago, and he does it amazingly convincingly.  As far as I can tell, Bengtsson really understood how Vikings thought .  (Not that I would know, but he sure is good at conveying that impression and I think he knew his stuff.)  The whole time, I felt convinced that people were really like ...

I enjoyed the 2013 Chunkster Challenge so much that I've just got to sign up again.  This time, Vasilly is hosting the 2014 Challenge , and she has changed the rules a little bit: Welcome to the 2014 Chunkster Challenge! I’m your host, Vasilly .  Wondering what’s a chunkster? A chunkster is an adult or YA book, non-fiction or fiction, that’s 450 pages or more.   Rules for this challenge: Audio books and e-books are now allowed . You want to listen to a chunkster on audio? Be my guest.   Essay, short story, and poetry collections are allowed but they have to be read in their entirety to count. Books may crossover with other challenges. Anyone can join. You don’t have to list your book ahead of time. Graphic novels don’t count. Sorry guys but reading a chunkster graphic novel isn’t the same as reading a non-graphic chunkster. I’ve been thinking long and hard about the levels of participation that have always been a part of this chal...

The Chunkster Challenge people say: It’s December which means this year’s Chunkster Challenge is coming to an end. If you wrote a wrap-up post or plan to, please use Mr. Linky below to link up to your post. If you don’t have a blog, leave a comment in the comments section telling us how you did with this challenge. We would all love to know what your favorite chunkster was this year. Was there a chunkster you didn’t enjoy? Let us know that too.  I think this may be my best challenge of the year, in that it got me to read some of the most rewarding books.  I said a couple of days ago that Anna Karenina, A Suitable Boy, and In the First Circle were some of my best books for 2013.  I also really enjoyed nearly all my other picks, except for one.  Pamela started off well but went downhill, especially in the second volume.  I should have just read the first one. Here are the books I read:   Anna Karenina, b y Lev Tolstoy (963 pages)   Po...

The Doll, by Bolesław Prus A few months ago I decided to make The Doll my main October read.  I've been looking forward to it for a while, and it did not disappoint.  Now that it's been nearly two weeks since I read it, I hope I can still say some good things! Bolesław Prus (IRL Aleksander Głowacki) 1847-1912, was a Polish journalist and novelist.  From what I can tell, he is still one of the great 19th century Polish names, and The Doll is widely read.  There is actually very little about a doll in the novel; Prus would have liked to call it Three Generations to highlight the main theme.  Instead, this is a story of Polish society.   Stuck between decadent, useless aristocrats who waste money, and a huge population of hard-working people who are live so close to the edge that minor disasters are enough to ruin lives, Poland cannot seem to progress.  The three men of the story (well two mainly, plus a minor one) are of three generations. ...