Howling Frog Books

My desk is inundated with books from 3 different libraries and my own shelves.  I'm going to have to continue with the mini-reviews! Fathers and Sons , by Ivan Turgenev -- I enjoyed this so much, but I finished it right when I lost energy to blog.  Now all the impressions are dim.  But here we have two young men, Arkady and his good friend Bazarov.  Bazarov has been a controversial figure since the day he stepped on to the page; he's a Nihilist who claims to believe in nothing.  He wants to smash all of society, clear the ground so that a new and better world can be built from scratch, but he has little to say about what that world should look like.  Sort of proto-communist and scientific--Bazarov likes science, though not very much.  Then he falls in love, which he can't deal with at all.   Turgenev is showing us the generation gap he experienced.  I loved it, but I can't tell you too much about it in a mini-review. Shadow on the Mounta...

Well, fooey.  I love DWJ Month but I run out of energy right at the same time.  I feel sad that I didn't participate as much as I wanted to, and yet I couldn't seem to just do it.   So once again I'm going to post several things in order to catch up a bit: The Dalemark Quartet:   Oh, how I love Dalemark.  It is just about my favorite place, especially in Spellcoats and The Crown of Dalemark .  I love the green roads and the strange Undying who aren't gods unless they are bound. The Homeward Bounders : I think this might be the single saddest DWJ book.  I reviewed it a year or so ago.   Go ahead and take a look. Black Maria : This is a fantastic one.  I love it.  I love the punning title too.  (In the US it's Aunt Maria , which isn't nearly so good.)  Aunt Maria is one of the scariest villains in DWJ, I think.  Like Tanaqui in Spellcoats , Mig only starts to understand what is happening when she writes it all d...

My mojo is still lost, but I really miss my blogging.  I think it's just tiredness; homeschoolers mostly get really tired around about February, and I've been pulling back on online/bloggy stuff to conserve energy, I guess.  Anyway, I'm going to borrow a strategy from Ekaterina and throw out some mini-reviews, or I will never get out from under the pile of books I have!  Come to think of it, I'm pretty sure I have forgotten some by now.  I gave one to my daughter to read and now I don't know what it was. Not Without Laughter , by Langston Hughes -- I started this near the end of February, actually.  It's a great novel about a boy growing up in Kansas, and all his family members.  I enjoyed it very much and still want to read more Harlem Renaissance books, but I had to return the volumes to the library.  (That has been happening to a lot of my library books lately.) Call the Midwife , by Jennifer Worth -- The BBC series was based on the memoir, ...

I don't quite want to skip over all those prompts from the last week because some of them are my favorite books.  So: Wizard Derk:  Two very different books!  Dark Lord of Derkholm is a hilarious sendup of traditional sword-and-sorcery quest-type fantasy books, a genre full of Tolkien imitations.  I think it reached its peak in the 70s and early 80s, and now things are really kind of different, but if you've ever read Terry Brooks or other innumerable fantasies, Dark Lord is hysterical.  It also has a real story going on amid the scramble to put on a show, and some things cannot be fixed by a magic wand at the end of the story.  Then, The Year of the Griffin is a whole different kind of story; Elda, one of the younger griffin siblings from Dark Lord, goes off to university.  It's a wonderful take on college life--the way you find a group of friends and then help each other muddle through.  Elda's friends are from all over the world and each o...

...and I miss it.  I have lots of books to tell you about and DWJ fangirling to do, but I have just not been getting to it.  It's beautiful spring weather, though.  I'm going to try to do some writing today; I'm missing all my very favorite DWJ books! Spring!

I don't know a ton about DWJ fan art on the web, although I've really enjoyed some of it.  But!  I do have a little artist right here in my home, and after she read The Lives of Christopher Chant a couple of weeks ago, she drew this picture for me.

The Candide Readalong has begun , and I'm already kind of behind schedule.  I tried to get hold of a copy that would have more helpful notes and whatnot, but my attempt failed, so I'm reading my little Dover Thrift Edition, which to my surprise actually does have some footnotes, but not many.  There are maybe 15.  Anyway, I read chapters I-VIII last night (except I'm posting this two days later) .  They are very short, but you have to pay close attention or you'll miss something. Candide was written as a vicious satire of the brand of philosophy that insisted that this is the best of all possible worlds, and that everything happens for a really good reason and it couldn't be better.  So we are about to read a story in which Candide, an innocent young man, and his teacher Pangloss, the tutor who preaches this philosophy and insists that there is no free will but everyone makes choices, are about to spend the next 100 pages seeing horrible disasters, sufferin...