Howling Frog Books

Just a note: I wrote this post a couple of weeks ago, before all the worrying events that are happening right now.  Like all of you, I am sad and outraged and feel a bit helpless.  Meanwhile, here's a post about Australia over 100 years ago... So 80s! The Fortunes of Richard Mahony, by Henry Handel Richardson (Ethel Florence Lindesay Richardson) Australia Felix (1917); The Way Home (1925); Ultima Thule (1929) Wow, this was quite a story!  This three-volume novel is a fictionalized version of Ethel Richardson's parents' lives.  We follow Richard Mahony, an English emigrant to Australia, and his wife Mary for nearly 30 years.  I wound up with some historical notes and comparisons at the end of this post, so...this is a long one, folks. Australia Felix starts with Mahony in his early 30s, in 1850s gold-rush Ballarat.  Although a qualified doctor, he runs a general-goods shop, badly.  He meets Polly, aged 16, a quiet, intelligent girl living with a rollic...

When I found out that a few people (including Cleo ) were planning a summer read-along of The Mysteries of Udolpho, I begged to be allowed into the club.  So here we are!  I even made a badge in GIMP -- this was my first one, and it's pretty dang amateur but I had fun and learned skills.  Cleo made one at the same time and it's a good deal prettier.  So I'll alternate! This is the most casual of read-alongs.  Check out Cleo's post for details, but here's the schedule: June 1 – 7                Chapters I – IV (Volume I) June 8 – 14               Chapters V – XIII June 15 – 21             Chapters IX – XIII June 22 – 28             Chapters I – III (Volume II) June 29 – July 5        Chapters IV – VI July 6 – 12                 Chapters VII – IX July 13 – 19   ...

The Bards of Bone Plain, by Patricia McKillip I do think this is an awfully good title.  It just begs to be picked up and read!  This is only the second Patricia McKillip book I've read in my life (the other one was The Bell at Sealey Head), and I've liked both pretty well.  I do find the cover a bit amusing; a lot of McKillip books have this kind of cover and it's very pretty.  It's also a little much, though, and a bit ironic for this book given that the heroine spends all her time in working clothes.  It's sure pretty though! Belden is a modernizing kingdom -- I imagine it rather Edwardian -- and the capital contains the ancient and prestigious bardic college.  It's also got an active archaeology program!  Phelan, a talented but unenthusiastic student, is about to graduate, but he has to write a final paper.  Beatrice, the youngest daughter of the king, is a very enthusiastic archaeology student under Phelan's talented but very eccentric father...

The Castle on the Hill, by Elizabeth Goudge I acquired this book sometime last year and saved it for a special treat.  Or for Elizabeth Goudge Day, but I wasn't very good at that event, and the publisher moved its interest to Instagram, and I wound up skipping it.  (Am still up for next year, maybe?)  Anyway, a global pandemic seemed like a good time to enjoy a new-to-me Goudge title.  This one was published in 1942, in the middle of the war, and probably everybody needed a nice uplifting read right then. It's 1940, and Miss Brown is homeless and jobless, at her wits' end to find a solution.  She's not wanted for war work, and all she's ever done is run a boarding house -- and there are a lot of people looking for jobs as housekeepers.  A train journey gone wrong brings her to Torhaven, in the West Country, where several mismatched people have been washed up by the war: a destitute Jewish refugee; a daring pilot and his brother, a dedicated pacifist; and tw...

A S trange Sti rring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at t he D a w n of the 1960s, b y St ephanie Coontz I've meant to read The Feminine Mystique for years, since it was so influential back in the day, but it's huge and I figured it would be boring.  When I spotted this analysis of the book, it took me a while to decide to read it without reading Feminine Mystique first.  But I'm pretty happy that I did, because Coontz is interesting and also not 800 pages long. Coontz offers up a capsule description of the book itself, the context it was written in, the impact it made, and the book's strong and weak points -- as well as some things Friedan wasn't necessarily entirely truthful about.  It makes for pretty good reading! She also tries to blow up some myths about Feminine Mystique .  People have often described it as a book that encouraged women to ignore husband, children, and home in favor of focusing on a full-time career, which apparently is not real...

This is something my mom and I have been working on during this lockdown.  I've probably mentioned before that my mom is enthusiastic about local history, and some years ago she wrote a much-needed book about the founder of our town, John Bidwell.  All the local schools study the Bidwells, but there were no kid-level books about them.  That was a 10-chapter biography aimed at 4th grade and up.  Then the 3rd-grade teachers, who also teach local history, asked for a picture book that 8-year-olds would enjoy, and so she wrote that, and then two other picture books.  You can see all of them at her website/blog, Goldfields Books, where she writes regular posts about California history . Well, now that school is done from home, the teachers can't read the picture book to their students.  My neighbor down the street mentioned to me that teachers would be thrilled if we made a video of the book, so they could have their students watch it.  This was obviously a...

I'm going to try out doing Golden Bough posts every couple of weeks, and I think I'm going to do a quick outline format just to keep track.  I'm finding that Frazer likes to pile on the evidence "evidence." Frazer's goal is to investigate the origins of religion and magic.  He figures there was a sort of Ur-practice back in ancient days, and that world religions (at least, I think he's implying this) developed from this pre-historic practice, which involved -- so far -- a king who was killed and then symbolically reborn as a kind of fertility rite.  But, since he doesn't really lay his argument out in the way we would expect from a modern author, it's hard to follow.  Instead, he meanders around, poking into this or that aspect of magic or religion.  Any folk-magic practice or religious belief that he likes, he'll throw in as a piece of evidence for his theory -- which seems like obvious cherry-picking of data -- and apparently he wasn...