Howling Frog Books

Well, this is handy.  There are some books that I want to re-read, but that are kind of on the heavy side, so I was thinking a nice little re-reading challenge would be just the thing to encourage me to pick up Hayek again.  And what do you know, Lois at You, Me, and a Cup of Tea is hosting the perfect challenge!    She says: Rules (And when I say rules please realize I'm one of the most flexible people in existence) First off, this challenge is for EVERYBODY! That means YOU! I want anyone and everyone to join in on the fun! I suggest you make a list of books that you want to re-read for 2015 and post it with your sign up post. You are welcome to add to it as the year goes on and you definitely don't have to read them all. I recommend it be a suggested list and you can just chose books off of it as you go along. The challenge officially runs from January 1, 2016 to December 31, 2016. ONLY books started AND finished in that time frame will count......

Zuleika Dobson , by Max Beerbohm I really didn't know what to expect from Zuleika Dobson , except that I had heard it was witty.  The cover of the edition I checked out at work (see below) is so hideous that you would never know it's a comedy, would you?  I found you a nicer cover too.  I'm pretty sure my copy qualifies as one of the ugliest book covers ever produced.  If you can top this, I'll buy you lunch. Zuleika--who makes her living by conjuring--arrives in Oxford to visit her grandfather, the Warden of Judas College.  She is so charming and bewitching that every young man who sees her promptly falls in love with her.  She is used to this and takes it as her due, but she can never fall in love with anyone who throws himself at her feet so easily.  When the impeccable dandy the Duke of Dorset actually ignores her for an entire dinner, she falls in love for the first time--only to fall out again when he confesses that he also loves her....

The Castle, by Franz Kafka This unfinished novel is one of Kafka's longer works, and it's, well, Kafka-esque.  So much so that I had kind of a hard time with it; 400 solid pages of never getting anywhere got pretty difficult to take. K. arrives at a village to take up a job as a land-surveyor at the Castle that overlooks the little town.  Everyone there either works for the Castle or wants to land a job there, but K. is not allowed to go there.  Nor can he meet with Castle officials.  There doesn't seem to be any land-surveying to do, but he is assigned two assistants, who do nothing to help him but do bother him a lot.  He makes friends with a messenger who isn't quite a messenger, and he meets a girl and becomes engaged, but that doesn't last long.  All his efforts lead nowhere. All the conversations K. has with people in the village are the same; long, long monologues about village/Castle relations that meander around, contradict themselves with...

My Brilliant Career, by Miles Franklin It's AusNovember, and I read one of the really obvious classics, this novel by Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin, who wrote it for friends when she was only a teenager, It was published in 1901, when she was about 22.  It was a hit, but Franklin was upset by some reactions--I think an awful lot of people assumed it was more biographical than it was, or than she wished them to think it was--and she withdrew it for decades.  It discouraged her from writing more novels for a long time. Sybylla is an imaginative, intelligent, discontented girl living in near-poverty on her family's station.  Once her father owned beautiful farmland, but his bad business decisions landed them all on a desolate station, and he has become a useless, tragic drunk.  Mother and children work hard and earn little, and it is with relief that her mother sends Sybylla to live with her grandmother at Caddagat.  There Sybylla blossoms, but not withou...

The Buried Giant , by Kazuo Ishiguro I've had a spotty track record with Ishiguro.  I didn't really like Never Let Me Go at all.  But I thought I'd give The Buried Giant a try since it's about Anglo-Saxon Britain.  And it's a pretty odd book, but I really liked it. Axl and Beatrice are an elderly married couple on the social edge of their British village.  The Romans are gone, and Arthur lived a generation ago; the Saxons have come and live in separate villages of their own.  A strange forgetfulness lies across the land, and no one is able to recall much of the past or even stay focused on one idea for long, but Axl and Beatrice finally remember that they have a grown son, and they decide to go on a journey to find him. They meet a Saxon warrior and a young orphan boy (in a scene reminiscent of Beowulf) , who then join them on their travels.   We meet Sir Gawain and start to get an idea of what troubles the land, and the whole thing is a sort of ...

The Brothers Karamazov , by Fyodor Dostoevsky I've been working on this novel for a couple of months.  Now I'm not sure what to say about it.  What is there for me to say about one of the great masterworks of the 19th century and of Russian literature?  It is beautiful, and I loved most of it.  I wasn't too hot on the trial and the long lawyers' speeches.  I thought the translation was pretty great.  Not that I know a lot about translating Russian literature, but I liked the feel and I could tell it was Dostoevsky and not Gogol or Tolstoy.  I read the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation, and it came with a good tip: Karamazov is pronounced with a regular old Z, not a ZT sort of sound like Mozart.  Who knew? This is a pretty hopeless post really but hey everybody, read The Brothers Karamazov if you can!  It's a great work of literature and a great experience too.

Radical Son: A Generational Odyssey , by David Horowitz Why, you might ask, would I read a memoir by David Horowitz?  ( Who the heck is David Horowitz? ask the younger readers.)  Excellent question, and my own husband wondered that as well.  But it's his fault really.  Warning: this got super-long.  Here is what I knew about Horowitz 3 weeks ago: he's a conservative speaker dude, he's probably retired by now, and when I was at Berkeley in the mid-90s he came to speak, but was screamed down by people who didn't like him on account of the conservatism.  I didn't hear about it until afterwards--partly, I seem to recall, because the newspapers mentioning it were stolen--but I and most other students I knew thought that it was pretty shameful to scream down a speaker and not allow him to speak.  Free Speech Movement birthplace, remember?  We're always bragging about it, maybe we ought to try to live up to it once in a while? (Also at that time...