Howling Frog Books

  Bovo-Buch (Bovo d'Antona) , by Elia Levita Bachur Oh, this was so much fun!  Back in the early 1500s, Yiddish-speaking folks liked tales of knightly adventure too.  Elia Bachur (properly, Elijah ha-Levi ben Asher Ashkenazi) was a famous grammarian and linguist in Hebrew, and he also wrote popular Yiddish works under the pen name of Elia Bachur.  He was born near Nuremburg in 1469, but spent most of his life in Italy, where he could more easily pursue his studies.  (Nuremburg expelled all of its Jews in 1499, just a few years after Bachur left.) Bovo-Buch was first written in verse in 1507, but did not see print until 1541, when Bachur's grandsons, Joseph and Elia, decided to print all of his Yiddish works.  Bovo-Buch was the first they printed, and the only one to survive to today.  It became hugely popular.  Two hundred years later it was still going strong, and was reshaped into prose.  By that time it was known as Bove-Mayse and...

There Once Lived a Mother Who Loved Her Children, Until They Moved Back In, by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya Ludmilla Petrushevskaya's writing was suppressed for years under the Soviet Union, although her stories are entirely domestic and not at all political.  These three novellas are about family; other collections are about love or other situations.  They're stories of desperation and misery, of the extremities of domestic hell, but they are also about how utterly ordinary such lives are.  These are tired women trying to raise children amidst violent men and sick relatives, with no money whatsoever. The first story, "The Time is Night," is much the longest.  Anna is trying to raise her grandson on the few rubles she gets from poetry readings, while her son, freshly out of prison, terrorizes her and her daughter has another baby on the way.  Anna loves her children desperately but can only either criticize or spoil them.  In "Chocolates With Liqueur," L...

March is always a month to look forward to in BookBloggyWorld, because since 2012, Kristen at We Be Reading has been running DWJ March, later morphed to MarchMagics to include Terry Prachett too.  Kristen announced the March schedule a few weeks ago , and this year it's going to be a reading fest!  Four Chrestomanci books, and four Death books.  Sounds like a good combination to me: Friday, 3/3 - Charmed Life  (DWJ) Monday, 3/6 - Mort  (TP) Friday, 3/10 - The Lives of Christopher Chant  (DWJ) Tuesday, 3/14 - Reaper Man  (TP) Friday, 3/17 - Conrad's Fate  (DWJ) Weds, 3/22 - Soul Music  (TP) Sunday, 3/26 - The Pinhoe Egg  (DWJ) Friday, 3/31 - Thief of Time  (TP) As you can see, this has to skip The Magicians of Caprona (and a few short stories) and Hogfather.  Hogfather gets its own holiday event, and I might read Caprona anyway.  I'll probably read all of these.  (And Fellowship of the Ring too!...

The Hobbit, by J. R. R. Tolkien It's been about nine years since I last read The Hobbit, which is quite long enough to have forgotten some things.  (Last time I read it aloud to a 7yo, and she found the story so exciting, she had to spend much of the time jumping around the room.)  It was just delightful to read it again and notice all the details. I love my copy and wish I'd bought the others. The Hobbit was written as a children's story, and I think some people find it surprising or jarring to see it told in child's terms.  The dwarves are not as serious and solemn as we expect--in fact they complain a lot and are not overly brave--and the elves actually play tricks on people and sing silly songs.  It can be hard to reconcile Tolkien's later elves with these ones, but it's also not something I'm inclined to worry over.  Still, since my last exposure to Middle-Earth was the movies,* it took me by surprise every so often.  Smaug's ending i...

I joined the Classics Club in March 2012 and set a goal of 150 books by March 2017.  I'm just about done now, and the of the four titles I have left, I really don't want to read two of them.  Pretty soon there's going to be another Spin (right?  I hope!  I love Spins!) and I want to be ready.  So as of today, I'm going to declare my old list finished and publish a new one!  I've rolled the last two titles over. This new list is ....a bit unhinged, but you probably should have expected that.  Mostly I've just been writing down titles as I run into them, so I haven't done any research for this one or planned it out much.  It's still woefully short on some things, but let's not call it finished. It's also far too long to plausibly finish in five years.  So while I'm going to give it a start date of March 2017, the due date of March 2022 is wildly theoretical.  I can't think that far ahead anyway. So here we go... .meet the Classics Cl...

Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston I don't quite know why it took me so long to read this lovely novel.  For one thing, I didn't know what it was about, and American literature in general is a weak spot of mine (my husband read this in high school, but I took almost no American literature at all, so I'm always missing major things).  Janie Crawford is raised by her grandmother, who pressures her into marriage with a much older man in order to keep her safe.  This fear-based decision is a disaster for Janie, and she soon leaves to marry Jody, a talker with big plans.  They set up in Eatonville, a new town entirely run by black people.  Jody impresses everyone and becomes the mayor, and for twenty years, Janie runs the town store while Jody runs everything else.  He's not a bad mayor, but he oppresses and belittles Janie, and insists on living above everyone else.  Janie has more interest in living with her neighbors than in having ...

I have read almost nothing in the past few days, much less been able to blog; real life has been too exciting to allow for it.  On Sunday afternoon, the nearby town of Oroville was put under an evacuation order when officials realized that the reservoir's emergency spillway might fail--within the hour.  Regular spillway broke and eroded the hillside This situation had been developing all week, but all of a sudden it turned really dangerous.  Our family was perfectly safe; we live north, and the water would go south, so everyone was to evacuate north to our area.  As the evacuation order expanded further downriver, other people had to head south to Sacramento.  The best part of three counties was evacuated as the dam managers frantically tried to mitigate the danger.  Happily, the spillway did not fail, but we're all nervous; a lot of rain is coming in and it's possible this will all be replayed.  Everyone is back home now, but could have to lea...