Howling Frog Books

Sister Emily's Lightship, by Jane Yolen Happy Halloween! I can't exactly call this an RIP read, but it has elements and so I'm going to round off the event by squeaking it in here, and incidentally segue into Witch Week!  Jane Yolen is one of the grand dames of SF/F writing, I think we can all agree (RIGHT?  *ominous glare*), and this collection of short pieces that were published all over the place is well worth tracking down. Many of these stories are twists on classic fairy tales -- "Snow in Summer," for example, is a version of Snow White set in Appalachia, or in a really genius bit, "Granny Rumple" is a realistic tale that could have been the seed for an anti-Semitic Rumplestiltskin .  "Godmother Death" is a wonderful version of a story found across cultures, in which a man outwits Death...but only for so long. There's a nice little series of stories about fey, where the characters are related or appear in various tales.  The y...

The Great God Pan, by Arthur Machen Arthur Machen wrote some early fantasy horror, and I always like to see what Victorians invented back when there were fewer scripts for how a fantasy story should go.  This one is fairly weird, but it isn't a novel; it's a collection of four short stories, though "The Great God Pan" is the longest and almost qualifies as a novella.  I have a paperback Penguin English Library copy, which appears to be unavailable in the US except as an import, but Penguin just published a fancier hardback with more stories in it than I have. In "The Great God Pan," a doctor finds a way to do brain surgery that will allow the patient to see other dimensions; what he calls "seeing the great god Pan."  The victim of this surgery at first appears to have completely lost her reason, but further chapters, set in later years, reveal bits and pieces of a much worse story.  A girl, and then a woman, appears at intervals and befriends...

City of the Shrieking Tomb, by Patrick Rogers Earlier in the year, I reviewed The Green Unknown, a memoir of hiking around the northeastern Indian state of Meghalaya.  Then Patrick Rogers contacted me again about his new book, a novel this time, also set in India and with an irresistible title.  As my friend April used to say, twist my rubber arm -- I had a lot of fun reading this ghostly tale. Rick is a photographer traveling around for a project on old Islamic architecture, and he's trying to get a bus to Bidar without going far out of his way to Hyderabad for it.  A friendly doctor, Awaz, gets him on a bus, which then breaks down at Awaz' hometown of Humayunpur -- but Awaz doesn't want Rick to stay.  Outsiders are not welcome in Humayunpur.  But since there's no alternative, Awaz reluctantly invites Rick to stay overnight, as long as he's leaving first thing in the morning. The bus is still broken in the morning, though, and Awaz softens a bit, invitin...

Every day, I plan to write on my blog, and every day, it gets crowded out!  The pile of books on my desk is not getting smaller, and I miss writing.  So I've got one scheduled for tomorrow, and here's a quick post on some other things. The school year is going nicely, with me at work, one new college student taking anatomy, and a high-school sophomore loving marching band.  Friday night was the local Big Game between the two high schools, and the marching band put on a complicated, ambitious half-time show that they've been working on for weeks.  Afterwards, they get on the field with the other school's band and have a 'battle of the bands,' playing songs for and with each other, that is really fun.  I missed out on the whole thing, sadly, because... Friday night was also the annual Trivia Bee fundraiser for the county Literacy Services.  It went really well and was a lot of fun, and our team won bronze.  If I had remembered calcium carbonate, we w...

The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner's Semester at America's Holiest University, by Kevin Roose I was happy to see this book come across the donation table, because it's been on my wishlist of "books to get around to checking out of the library" for a while.  And it was a really interesting book to read; I liked Roose and his project. Kevin Roose was a perfectly average freshman at Brown University in Rhode Island.  Evidently he also had a job doing assistance to A. J. Jacobs, the guy who makes a living by doing a project for a year and then writing a book about it -- living according to ancient Jewish law, reading the Encyclopedia Britannica, and so on.  When Roose, in the course of his job, visited an evangelical church and met some students from Liberty University, he decided to do his own project.  Lots of his friends did study abroad trips to Europe to learn about other cultures, but here was a much more alien culture right on his own doorstep.  Why not sp...

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 ...

Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World -- and Why Things Are Better Than You Think, by Hans Rosling This book has been making something of a splash in non-fiction and especially tech circles.  Bill Gates endorsed it, so that's probably making an impression in a lot of places.  It's the sort of book I really like, but I wasn't in a big hurry, so I put my name on the hold list at the public library and then didn't actually read the book until 4 days before it was due back.  I thought maybe I'd skim and get it later, but instead I was instantly grabbed, and read the whole thing in less than 24 hours.  (Although it's a thickish book, it's quite fast to read.)  Now I'm pushing it to the top of my blogging pile, since I have to return it right away! Hans Rosling was a doctor, expert in international health, speaker, and adviser to WHO and UNICEF.  His TED talks are popular, he helped co-found Doctors Without Borders in his native Sweden...