Howling Frog Books

Chesterton's Gateway, by G. K. Chesterton, compiled by Ethan Nicolle I often listen to a comedic book podcast called The Book Pile , which features two guys, Kellen Erskine and David Vance.  Erskine is a full-time comic, and we knew him as a teenager with floppy 90s hair, so we're always interested in how he's doing.  Vance is a writer -- he's written sketches for a different comedy group I follow.   They're fun to listen to! A little while ago they had a comic-book artist on the show, Ethan Nicolle, to talk about this book he'd put together.  (I have never read any of Nicolle's comics; my husband likes him.)  So he talked about how he'd gotten really into reading Chesterton, and even had a couple of discussion groups.  But he found that most people who wanted to read Chesterton would pick up Orthodoxy , and he didn't think that was a good place to start; Chesterton was mainly an essayist and it's better to start with essays.  So he'd put tog...

 Disobedient Women: How a Small Group of Faithful Women Exposed Abuse, Brought Down Powerful Pastors and Ignited an Evangelical Reckoning, by Sarah Stankorb I've been paying quite a lot of attention to the evangelical world for the last year or so, so this title naturally caught my attention.  Stankorb, a journalist, grew up on the edges of this world, and chronicles the efforts of many people over a long time to bring attention to problems of ecclesiastical abuse.  Evangelicals, in their efforts to build parallel institutions that would allow Christian families to live largely in bubbles insulated from the dangerous outside world, didn't really build in any safeguards -- after all, this was supposed to be their safe space.  Since every institution (schools, businesses, churches, Little League teams, whatever) is vulnerable to predators who seek to use it for access to victims, safeguards are always important.  And in these parallel institutions, children were t...

 Revelations of Divine Love, by Julian of Norwich In 1373, a 30-year-old nun was dying of an illness.  Instead of dying, she had a series of visions and got well.  Over the next 15 years or so, she composed two narratives of the visions she had seen -- a short version, and a long version containing everything she felt like she'd learned about her revelations since.  Julian of Norwich was an anchoress attached to -- surprise -- Norwich cathedral and she became quite well known.  Margery Kempe visited her, which means two of the earliest women writers we have in English knew each other.  These visions were about the Crucifixion and about God's infinite love for His creations.  Here are a few of my favorite bits, some of which are very well-known:   'It is true that sin is the cause of all suffering, but all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.' 'Since I have set right what was the greatest harm, it is my will ...

 ...to read lots of books?  That doesn't rhyme.  I have to do it right. ...to be a robin lightly dressed, concocting soup inside my nest! Mix it once, mix it twice, mix that chicken soup with rice! No, actually, I'm not making soup, I'm reading books.  Quite a few books, so here at the halfway point I'm doing a post.  The Marquis' Secret, by George MacDonald:   I'm a bit of a sucker for these sort-of translated 1980s Bethany House versions of George MacDonald's very Victorian Scottish romances.  This one was originally The Marquis of Lossie , a sequel to Malcolm.  Malcolm, a poor fisher-boy, is the true heir to the estate of Lossie, but his half-sister Florimel (a definite Faerie Queene reference!) thinks she is, and so he becomes her groom in hopes of finding a way to break the news to her without ruining her life.  Confusion and hijinks ensue; Malcolm despairs of influencing his sister for good; and also he falls in love.  Can this ...

 Word From Wormingford: A Parish Year, by Ronald Blythe Ronald Blythe is the fellow who collected and edited Akenfield , in which villagers talked about how things were in the old days (yes, people were closer knit, but no, it wasn't better).  I really enjoyed that book and when I saw this one described, I'm not sure what I thought it would be like, but I knew I wanted to read it.  Whatever I expected, this wasn't it, but it was a nice surprise. Ronald Blythe turns out to be a clergyman, working in three village parishes in Suffolk.  The one he lived in is Wormingford, and the book collects selections of the weekly pieces he would write for the parish news -- these date from 1993 - 1996, so presumably he went through and picked his favorites, and I think there is more than one for every week.  They are titled by the church calendar: Second Trinity, St Dunstan, and so on, but there are more than four in a month.  The pieces are meditations on the season, on ...

  Reflections on the Psalms, by C. S. Lewis Today was the first day of the new semester, and it's looking good.  Finally, there are a reasonable number of students on campus and in the library, and the place doesn't look like a ghost town.  I was so busy today!  Lovely. At my church, I teach the adult Sunday school class once a month, and yesterday was my day to teach.  The lesson was on the psalms, and so to prepare, I thought I'd read Lewis' Reflections, which I'd never done before.  I figured I might as well count it as one of my 20 summer books, since we're obviously getting down to the end and I am not going to reach all 20 (unless you count the fluffy mysteries I read before going to sleep, but I don't blog about those). The book is quite short, and is really a series of essays.  Lewis starts with enumerating the errors a reader might fall into with the psalms.  He talks about the structure of the songs, and how they use parallelism.  ...

  The Imitation of Christ, by Thomas à Kempis This book has been on my Spin list so many times, but it never gets picked!  However, one of my classics challenges said to pick the title that has been on your TBR pile the longest, and I think this one is it. Thomas Hämerken (Haemmerlien), of Kempen, Germany, was born in 1380 and died in 1471 -- that's a pretty long run!  His devotional book was written in Latin and appeared in 1470.  It was translated into English just about 30 years later.  The translation I read in an old Oxford classics edition dates from 1613 -- at first I assumed it was written in KJV-style English as an affectation to sound Biblical, but no, it's actually written in the English of King James.  And as a fun aside, my copy contains an inscription from 1943 from the president of Trinity College in Texas.  It was given to a lady named Grace, and since she dated her highlights and notes, I know that she must have read it several times...

Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation, by Kristin Kobes du Mez Well, that's an arresting title!  When I heard about this book, I knew I had to read it.  Kristin Kobes du Mez is in a good position to write it, too; she's a long-time member, observer, writer, and journalist in the American Protestant culture.  If she's going to say that it has 'corrupted a faith and fractured a nation,' she's in a position of some authority to do so, and to discuss what she calls 'militant masculine Christianity.'  Du Mez writes a cultural history of about the last 100+ years of Evangelicalism and conservatism in American Christianity, especially the history of cultural attitudes about masculinity, the roles of men and women, and how race has combined with that.  (She specifies white Evangelicals because black churches are mostly very different.)  She documents Billy Graham, Jerry Falwell, Mark Driscoll, and cultural shifts t...

 The Popol Vuh (Definitive Edition of the Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life and the Glories of Gods and Kings), translated by Dennis Tedlock I am so happy with my Spin title!   The Popol Vuh is amazing stuff, and Tedlock puts in plenty of explanatory material to help with comprehension.  I loved it.  Mythology/religion readers, put this on your list! The Popol Vuh is the holy book of the Quiché people in Guatamala -- the Mayans.  The book tells of the creation of the earth, the start of the Quiché, and goes right down to the writers' own day, which was the 1550s.  The men who wrote it down kept themselves anonymous for fear of punishment.   (Tedlock is of the opinion that they were the three Masters of Ceremonies mentioned near the end.) Of course I can't go through the whole thing, but...at first there is nothing but a quiet sky and sea.  The gods arrive and decide to create an earth and people for it; they want the people to be able to na...

  The White Witch, by Elizabeth Goudge I've been saving this for a treat.  I read it several years ago, when I was just getting started with Goudge, but I didn't remember anything about it, and I bought my own copy so I just put it on the TBR shelf.  I'm trying to collect Goudge books, but the ones I don't have are the ones that are hard to get and expensive. Elizabeth Goudge must have had a thing about the 17th century.  Quite a few of her historical novels are about Charles I or II -- a set of kings that I personally haven't got much interest in.  But anyway, this story is set at the start of the English Civil War.  Charles I is just starting to fight it out with the Parliamentarians, and Oliver Cromwell isn't even running his side yet. We have several interconnected people: the Haslewood family -- Robert has joined the Puritan side -- his sort of cousins, a group of Romany that habitually camp nearby, and Froniga, the half-Romany white witch of the title...

I'm back!  We had a great roadtrip, but we didn't really do anything terribly exciting; we went and saw old friends, hung out at the beach, and ate a lot of perfect tri-tip, which is exactly what I wanted out of it.  The drive back home up I-5 was brutal.  Now it's back to life, back to reality. my idea of a perfect day at Pismo Beach -- no hot burny sun   A Place to Belong: Reflections From Modern Latter-day Saint Women, ed. Hollie Rhees Fluhman and Camille Fronk Olson This was my reading on the trip; I couldn't take my giant Nazi history book with me, and that was just as well.  This is a book of essays by LDS women ranging around a general theme of belonging, but covering just about every facet of life: career, children, education, faith. A funny thing I've noticed about LDS women is that we all think we're the odd one out, and feel we don't really belong...somehow or other.  I was lucky to figure this out at 19, when I got together with two high school ...

 Song of Names: A Mormon Mosaic, by James Goldberg and Ardis E. Parshall Here are another two LDS writers I've followed for a while, and they have produced an amazing, lyrical work.  Ardis Parshall is a historian and runs a fascinating blog of historical bits, Keepapitchinin .  James Goldberg is a writer and poet, and also has a blog, Mormon Midrashim, which he hardly ever posts to but it's worth it when he does.  James writes: A few years ago, Ardis and I started writing a book together. An ambitious book, that would combine history and poetry to give people a viewed of Mormon history through individual lives as varied as stained glass. We wanted to take the extra research steps and writing steps to get at pieces of the past left out past the edges of our collective memory.   We did our best to find and sing forgotten names. So this is a book of poems about the lives of real people.  Each one starts with a page of context -- a short description of th...

 If Truth Were A Child: Essays by George Handley I had been wanting to read this book of essays for some time, and when a friend had it on her summer pile I told her that I wanted to borrow it when she was done.  She loved it so much that she thought I needed my own copy, and gave it to me as a gift!  How lovely of her!   And, the odd title is explained by the use of the story of the two mothers who appeal to King Solomon.  George Handley is a professor at BYU who does a lot of writing about "the intersection between religion, literature, and the environment."  His degrees are in comparative literature (Spanish being one specialty) but he teaches in interdisciplinary humanities, which to me sounds a lot like 'comp lit with other stuff too.'    Anyway I followed his blog, when it existed, and I'm always interested to see what he's writing. And these essays are fantastic; I enjoyed them so much.  There must be 20 little tabs marking t...

 Old Testament Legends: Being Stories Out of Some of the Less-Known Apocryphal Books of the Old Testament, by M. R. James Remember a little while ago I read the Apocalypse of Abraham ?  It's this very fun legendary story about Abraham figuring out that idols are just wood or stone.  Well, M. R. James (of spooky ghost story fame) thought it was a neat story too, so he put it into a book for children, along with other spurious legends about Old Testament characters. ...Perhaps I have now said enough to show of what sort the tales are that are told in this book -- some of them told for the first time in English.  They are not true, but the are very old; some of them, I think, are beautiful, and all of them seem to me interesting. The stories include the deaths of Adam and Eve, how Asenath became the wife of Joseph of Egypt, an elaboration of the story of Job, how Solomon controlled demons, and others.  There's one about a man who went to gather figs and then slept ...

The Apocalypse of Abraham and Ascension of Isaiah Some time ago, I happened to be reading about ancient scripture and the author mentioned "The Apocalypse of Abraham," which sounded intriguing.  With the magic of the internet, which has made so many old and difficult-to-obtain texts available to anybody willing to look for them, I found this Victorian translation of the Apocalypse and, as a bonus, "The Ascension of Isaiah."  Both of these are ancient texts that originally existed in Hebrew, but the only versions that survived into the present day were in Old Slavonic -- perhaps translated directly from the Hebrew, or perhaps mediated through Greek texts. "The Apocalypse of Abraham" is an apocryphal text that tells the wonderful story of young Abraham (in the first person), his realization that his father's idolatry is wrong, and a vision/conversation with God.  It comes in three parts: This is really pretty delightful.  Abraham's father, Terah, is ...

 Understanding the Book of Mormon: A Reader's Guide, by Grant Hardy I've read this book very slowly this year; it's fascinating, but it's also fairly heavy-duty.  Grant Hardy's complaint is that, in academia/the world outside the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, everybody spends so much time arguing about the origins of the Book of Mormon that they never examine the contents.  He proposes a different approach that doesn't need everybody to agree about whether the book is fiction or history: why not examine the narrative as we would a literary work?  The Book of Mormon has several different narrators, and we can examine their methods and motivations in the same way whether they were real or not. . ..if the Book of Mormon does not qualify as a literary masterpiece, it is nevertheless a complex and coherent work of literature, and its narratological strategies are of more than passing interest.  Professors in English departments are probably not used...

 OK, so the whole 'readalong' thing is maybe not quite true any more, but no matter.  I'm keeping the post series title anyway.  I did, in fact, take a little extra time off and only got back on the wagon in this last couple of weeks.  It's not easy to keep the momentum going for this long!  But I'm now over 600 pages along; only 200ish more to go.  Stay on target! Some of these were very long chapters filled with accounts of various religious practices.  He got very long-winded and I couldn't always see the point (besides anthropological interest, but he was explaining these in much more detail than usual).  The general theme was practices around animals, and it's a bit of a hodgepodge honestly.  Frazer could get any meaning he wanted out of this stuff. XLIX.  Ancient Deities of Vegetation as Animals. Dionysus, the Goat and the Bull: Certain animals were generally sacred to particular deities, and the corn-spirit is often represented as...