Howling Frog Books

Time for another Spin at the Classics Club!  Oh I just love these.  The rules: Go to your blog. Pick twenty books that you’ve got left to read from your Classics Club List. Try to challenge yourself: list five you are dreading/hesitant to read, five you can’t WAIT to read, five you are neutral about, and five free choice (favorite author, rereads, ancients — whatever you choose.) Post that list, numbered 1-20, on your blog by next Monday. Monday morning, we’ll announce a number from 1-20. Go to the list of twenty books you posted, and select the book that corresponds to the number we announce. The challenge is to read that book by January 5, even if it’s an icky one you dread reading! (No fair not listing any scary ones!) Here's my list, arranged suitably randomly: Chaim Potok, 1972, My Name is Asher Lev.   Pensees , Pascal Lawrence Sterne, Tristram Shandy. Divine Meditations , John Donne Gunter Grass, The Tin Drum   Mohandas Gandhi, ...

The event I have been waiting for is here!  It's Witch Week!  Hosted by Lory of Emerald City Book Review, this is a week dedicated to the works of Diana Wynne Jones, who invented Witch Week, the days between Halloween and Guy Fawkes Day: Witch Week, when there is so much magic around in the world that all sorts of peculiar things happen... Today is the first day, and we're going to have a readalong of (nat urally) Witch Week , and there is a wonderful personal essay about Fire & Hemlock by Ana on Lory's blog today.  Go read it!  It really makes me wish I could remember my first reading of F&H, which I cannot.

How are you all doing with the readalong?  I'm finding the schedule to be a little more rigorous than I had meant it to be.  But I've finished Books VI through IX, and I thought I'd  better get going on X since it's soooo long. I had not realized that Malory was so much rougher than many of the earlier stories that I'd read.  He is way more into the fighting and the smashing and the spearing and thunder, isn't he?  And nobody seems to be as pure and well-behaved as usual.  Gawaine is awful.  Arthur, the ideal king (except for that one problem), is fairly awful too.  I've heard that Malory was in prison for behaving like a ruffian, and it seems to have worked its way into his stories more than I had expected! Interesting how, now that Arthur is settled into kingship and has conquered Europe, there is no more war--but everybody has to keep fighting, obviously, because if not there will be no point to their lives.  So they start hanging out...

Supernatural Enhancements, by Edgar Cantero I can no longer remember who reviewed this a few weeks ago, and while I tried to look through my RSS feed to find out, I subscribe to too many book blogs for that to work.  If it was you, please tell me OK?  Like most people, I saw the cover and had to read it.  The trouble with that is that I was quite worried that the story would not live up to the cover! In proper Gothic tradition, this novel purports to be a found collection of documents put into order for the reader.  The first page is missing.  We read a diary, letter, clues, and--since this is a modern novel, set in 1995--transcripts of recordings and videos. A., the diarist, is a distant cousin of the recently deceased Ambrose Wells, and has just inherited his old Virginian manor house--complete with ghost and missing butler.  A. and his companion, teenaged Niamh, an Irish kid with acquired mutism, explore the clues and puzzles scattered through the...

Tomorrow is the last day of the readathon!  Even though I haven't gotten to read as much as I wanted, I tried to make time even in very busy days for reading, and I'm happy about that.  Here's what I've done in the last couple of days: Finished volume III in War and Peace ; a little way into volume IV. Some progress in Morte D'Arthur --hoping to finish Book IX tonight. I read another novel by Emecheta, titled The Slave Girl --the life story of a favorite daughter who is sold into slavery by her own brother after their parents die.  It's set in early 1900s Nigeria, with the British becoming more powerful in their empire (that's in the background) and is very good.

Mysteries , by Knut Hamsum A few weeks ago, Tom at Wuthering Expectations posted a casual invitation to join him and a few others in reading Mysteries with this: All too soon Ricardo de la Caravana de recuerdos , and I hope many, many others, will join me in a reading of and conversation about Knut Hamsun’s 1892 novel Mysteries .  If it is like other Hamsun novels, some of that “conversation” will be closer to stunned silence and questions like “What is this?”  Well, I could hardly refuse an opportunity to ask "What is this?" so I joined in. Mysteries is an 1892 novel by the Norwegian Knut Hamsun (whose name confused me until the introduction explained that it was Hamsund, after the family's farm, but a printer's typo inspired him to drop the D permanently).  He was something of an iconoclast in Norwegian literature, determined to smash all orthodoxies and write "a new literary psychology" that was all about the stream of consciousness and its ...

We're getting toward the end of the readathon, and I don't feel like I've been able to read all that much for the last few days, but I have made efforts to make as much time as I could for it, so that alone makes it worthwhile.  Today's progress: I did, in fact, finish Supernatural Enhancements .  That was an unexpected ending for sure.  Tell you about it soon. I'm close to finished with Book VIII (not IX, oops) of Morte D'Arthur.   I'll try to finish it tonight, but I'm also going to watch a movie for the Back to the Classics Challenge, so we shall see. I forgot to mention yesterday that I had started Seventeen , by Booth Tarkington (of Magnificent Ambersons fame).  It's a quick read and pretty funny, so I took it to the girls' fencing class today and finished it.  That is my biggest thing today.