Howling Frog Books

The needles excellency -- a new booke wherin are diuers admirable workes wrought with the needle ; newly inuented and cut in copper for the pleasure and profit of the industrious , by John Taylor My ambition! One of my other interests (besides books) is embroidery.  I like a lot of different kinds of embroidery and lately I've been getting into some historical forms.  I've been learning some crewel work and my next ambition is to learn stumpwork--a hideous name for a lovely kind of embroidery with three-dimensional elements.  I made my family get me some pretty stumpwork books for Christmas, and I'm even taking a gorgeous online course about embroidered caskets. Naturally, therefore, I also like reading about historical embroidery.  It's fascinating, people.  In Europe a few hundred years ago, embroidery was not only an important part of a girl's education and abilities, it was considered to be a virtuous pastime that encouraged moral thought.  Wom...

Picnic at Hanging Rock , by Joan Lindsay Summer in 1900 -- Valentine's Day, in fact -- and the students at Appleyard College for Young Ladies are going on a picnic.  Hanging Rock is a lovely setting for a day out.  Four girls--three confident and pretty seniors, and one 14-year-old hanger-on--decide to climb up a little way into the wilderness.  When only one returns, hysterical, and a math teacher is also found to be missing, a search is started, but there is no sign of any of them.  Days later, a young man bent on one last search finds one of the girls, but no one else is ever seen again. This is a mysterious story that describes the ever-widening ripples of events caused by the girls' disappearance. For the most part, I liked Picnic at Hanging Rock quite a bit.  It's a good novel, written in the late 1960s and also made into a film in the 70s, apparently a fairly well-known one.  (In fact, the back-cover blurbs highlight the film, quoting Lena Dun...

It's the last day of Book Blogger Appreciation Week, hosted by the Estella Society .  Final question: One of the unfortunate side effects of reading and blogging like rockstars seems to be a tendency toward burnout. How do you keep things fresh on your blog and in your reading ? Yeah, I have to take a week or two off sometime, and I'm not even one of those rockstar bloggers!  It's not easy to come up with posts all the time. Generally a new event or fun little activity will get me back on the bicycle.  March Magics is guaranteed to get me writing, or one of those goofy little questionnaires that go around.  The new year is always invigorating too. It's pretty rare for me to hit a reading slump, where I'm not reading something.  If I do it's generally a sign that I've picked two or three long, difficult books and have forgotten to put in anything lighter and more fun.  Bringing in a book that really grabs me will fix that.   Thanks to t...

Kaleidoscope , by Eleanor Farjeon I just love Eleanor Farjeon.  She mostly wrote short fairy-tale-like tales for children, and novels and tales for adults as well, and quite a lot of poetry too.  She also produced a children's version of the Canterbury Tales .  But I love her stories.  They are light and rather sweet and have insights anyway.  And they are nearly always illustrated by Edward Ardizzone, who I also love. Kaleidoscope is a book of vignettes about a little boy's childhood--little pieces of life that mix and are held like a kaleidoscope.  Anthony lives next to a lovely old mill-pond, and Farjeon tells of his childhood experiences and then touches them with magic.  It is all extremely English countryside and a literary vacation. Anthony was a real person, though that was not his name.  In the book, Farjeon simply calls him by his childhood nickname of Pod and doesn't identify him, but elsewhere I found out that Anthony was George...

Welcome to Day 3 of Book Blogger Appreciation Week, hosted by the Estella Society.   Today's question: What have you read and loved because of a fellow blogger? Well, quite a lot of things really, which I'm sure is the answer for most of us.  And very often I forget who blogged about a book--I put it on my list and read it months later, and by then I don't know any more.  But here are some: Kristen at We Be Reading hosts the annual DWJ fest, now to be March Magics (so as to include our beloved Pterry as well).  I guess she's sort of the head of the DWJ fanclub--you can recognize us by the fact that we all seem to have put Fire and Hemlock on our lists of five books.  As such she has come up with other things I wanted to read too. Tom at Wuthering Expectations does truly scary levels of literary erudition, and he came up with the most preposterous readalong in blog history-- What is to be Done? Brona is my go-to for Australian literature....

Day 2 of BBAW is interview day!  I was partnered with Darren from Bart's Bookshelf . Together, we came up with a list of questions; here are his answers, and you'll have to head over to his blog to see mine.  BBS: How did you get into book blogging? How long have you been doing it? Bart’s Bookshelf, started when my original but just about defunct personal blog was in it’s last gasps of life. After a few years of really not reading as much as I would have liked, I decided it was time to do something about it and force myself to get back in to the habit of reading, and I was going to do this by setting myself some targets and reviewing what I read. I also enjoyed (and still do) the work of tweaking and maintaining a blog, so this was a way of doing that. BBS: Tell me a little bit about the name of your blog and how it came to be. Longer ago than I care to admit, when I was still a teenager, I had a hairstyle that my friends decided looked like Bart Simpson’s ...

I'm just posting to say...it's spring!  The almonds and the tulip trees are in bloom!  It's so nice outside right now.  Everybody hopes for more rain soon, but meanwhile this is pretty darn great. Almond orchard!