Howling Frog Books

  De Rerum Natura (The Way Things Are, or On the Nature of Things), by Titus Lucretius Carus, trans. by Rolfe Humphries I didn't really know quite what I was getting into with this book, but it worked out great.  Thanks to Tom the Amateur Reader, I got an excellent translation that I enjoyed a lot.  I won't claim to have understood it particularly well -- for that I'd need a whole deep dive and probably a class -- but for a basic first read, I'm calling it a success. So here we go... We don't know all that much about Lucretius, except that he was a Roman poet and philosopher, upper-class, and this is the only surviving of his works.  He was born around 99 BCE and died, at 44, in 55 BCE.  St. Jerome said he went mad from a love potion and killed himself, which seems to be inaccurate, but the slander stuck around for centuries, right up to the modern era.  Our poem was very nearly lost, but a single surviving copy was found in a German monastery in the early ...

 Hey everybody!  I disappeared for a while there, and I'm not quite sure what I am going to do, but I'll tell you about it.  My reading mojo disappeared; I mean, it took a long vacation and I wondered if it was coming back.  I think it had mostly to do with my husband's layoff back in January; worry took up most of my brainspace and there was not much left over.  I could read the fluffiest mysteries, and Diana Wynne Jones.  I read something like eight of Anne McCaffrey's Pern novels, would you believe -- I liked those when I was around 13.  But I couldn't seem to keep up with blogging, or anyone else's blogs, or read anything new or in the least challenging.  I saw the CC Spin and I just couldn't do it!  Instead I embroidered things and played too much on my phone. A couple of weeks ago, my husband got a nice contracting gig, and I instantly felt much better.  Pretty soon my reading came back, and with renewed energy -- I read two Shakes...

 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...

Agricola and Germania, by Tacitus I've been meaning to read Tacitus (well, the easy bits) for some time, but what kicked me into gear was the book on my shelf all about the influence of Germania on European culture and history.  I am allowed to start reading it after I write this post! Tacitus is considered the best Roman historian -- at least, he's the best we've got!  We certainly don't have everything he wrote.  Large chunks are missing from one of his longer works.  I read two really short things; a life of Agricola, Tacitus' father-in-law, and this sort of tour of the territory of Germania, which was most of Northern Europe. The largest part of Agricola's biography covers his time as governor of Roman Britain.  It has a short description of Britannia, and of how Agricola extended Roman rule right up to the Pictish territory; I think this is as far as it ever got, up to the Firth of Forth.  There are famous stories in here.  This is how we...

Confronting the Classics: Traditions, Adventures, and Innovations, by Mary Beard I like books about the classical world (that is to say, ancient Greeks and Romans), especially about reading their books.  I thought this book would be about reading classical literature, but it turned out to be a collection of reviews of books about the classical world, the kind of reviews that are essays several pages in length and that can include many of the reviewer's own thoughts before getting around to the book review part.  So, while it was an OK read, I kind of felt like it was cheating a little bit to collect a bunch of book reviews and not mention that on the back of the book; I was reading about books I've never read and have no wish to read. That said, many of the essays are quite interesting; it's just that they're also pretty random.  Beard imposes a bit of structure on them by categorizing them into sections that then move chronologically through ancient Greece and the ...

Constellation Myths, by Eratosthanes and Hyginus,  with Aratus' Phaenomena When I was a kid, we had a copy of D'Aulaires Greek Myths that I read over and over.  It had beautiful illustrations, and if you've got kids, you need to give them this book.  Of course, I never thought about where the stories came from, or how they had been preserved and passed down.  Some of them come from Homer, Ovid, or Sophocles, but there are quite a few other tales as well -- and now I know where some of thems came from. Eratosthenes is a well-known favorite ancient Greek (at least of mine, and he certainly ought to be of yours); he was the third librarian of Alexandria, and he figured out a way to estimate the circumference of the Earth -- he got it just about right, too.*   He also wrote down the enjoyable little stories people used to tell about the constellations and how they got that way, which are called catasterisms .   They're a little fuzzy; sometimes people...

Off the Beaten Track in the Classics , by Carl Kaeppel A couple of years ago, Dwight the Common Reader did a series of posts on this little book , and it sounded so fun that I put it on my wishlist.  I finally got around to ILLing a copy for myself and it came from all the way across the country, and very glad I am too.  I wish I had my own copy of this fun little book! Carl Kaeppel was a classical scholar from Melbourne who worked in the British Museum (does this therefore count as AusLiterature?), and the book was in fact printed in Australia in 1936, but in association with Oxford, so it happily received wider exposure.  It's a collection of short essays about slightly lesser-known classical works; in fact some of them are lost works that we only know through references and excerpts.  Nearly all of them are about travel or geography somehow. The first essay is on the work of one Gaius Julius Solinus, otherwise known as Polyhistor, who collected wonder-tales...