Howling Frog Books

The Lark, by E. Nesbit I'd never heard of this novel by E. Nesbit until it started making the blog rounds several months ago.  It's not a children's story; it's more for adults or adolescents.  Perhaps it would have been a YA novel if such a category had existed 100 years ago.  Anyway, I've always been a big Nesbit fan, so I was excited to see this book, and it's so easy to get, $3 on Kindle.  Even I, cheap as I am, am willing to shell out $3 for a Nesbit book I've never read. Cousins Jane and Lucilla have spent the entire Great War sequestered away in school, despite being quite grown up by the end.  Now, in 1919, their guardian has finally sent for them to leave school -- only for them to find that he has lost nearly all their money, and having scrammed out of the country, has left them with a cottage and 500 pounds to live on.  Jane firmly announces that this whole thing is going to be A Lark, and they set out to earn their living.  Next thing t...

The Long Earth, by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter I've been meaning to read this series for so long, and somehow just never picked up a copy.  But then The Long Earth came to me -- somehow or other -- and I put it on my TBR shelf and finally got to it.  I love it!  It's great stuff!  I can't wait to start the next one, which I just checked out of the library. Twenty minutes into the future, instructions appear online for a gadget that appears to have no purpose or meaning -- and its power source is a potato.  Kids promptly start building their own gadgets, and the startling result is that they are transported sideways, to another Earth in another dimension.  Pretty soon everyone has a 'stepper' and is experimenting with dimension-hopping; there appears to be an infinite number of pristine Earths, each ever so slightly different than the last, and all uninhabited by humans.  Suddenly resources are infinite, as long as you can get to them. ...

The Foundation Pit , by Andrei Platonov I've had this novel floating around on the edges of my mental TBR list for years, and last year I acquired two different translations of it -- my brother had them.  I eventually chose to read the Mirra Ginsburg translation on the rationale that I have previously read her translation of Zamyatin's We , and I have a couple of her picture books; she has worked a lot with Jose Aruego, whose work I love.  So Ginsburg it was. Platonov was a Russian writer of the 1920s and a disappointed Communist.  He wanted a world where people shared willingly with each other (as in the days of early Christianity) and he got oppression and violence.  When he wrote about his disillusionment, he was of course banned, and he then remained a pretty obscure writer for a long time.  Long after his death, he was 'rehabilitated' and eventually venerated. Voshchev, fired from his factory job because of his overly-thoughful habits, walks down the...

Half A Crown , by Jo Walton This must be the longest, most put-off mystery trilogy in the history of my reading.  I really liked Farthing years ago -- pre-Howling Frog -- and then, a few years later, discovered the existence of Ha'penny and enjoyed it too.  I then got hold of a copy of Half a Crown , but I got maybe a third of the way in before stopping because it was getting so tense.  I kept meaning to pick it back up...and now, five years later, I've done it. It's 1960, a good ten years after the events of Ha'penny .  Fascism is well entrenched in Britain and the Axis rules the world.  Carmichael is now commander of the Watch, which is really the British Gestapo.  He is good at his job and nicely blackmailable, but he's also secretly using Watch resources to help Jews escape to Ireland.  When his ward, Elvira, is accidentally caught up in a street riot and arrested on the eve of her debut in London's social elite, everything threatens to unr...

Rashomon, and 17 Other Stories, by Ryunosuke Akutagawa Akutagawa is one of the great modernists of Japan, so when I came upon this very neat Penguin edition of his stories, I snapped it up.  (I have a small pile of Japanese classics to get to...)  Isn't it fun looking?  The 18 stories are arranged by the chronology of their settings, so first there is a set of stories set in the Heian period (which ended in 1185), then several in the Tokugawa Shogunate (1600 - 1868), and finally a few set in Akutagawa's own early 20th century.  A final set of pieces are semi-autobiographical, fragmenty sort of things that often reflect Akutagawa's struggle with his mental health. Since most of us have heard of Kurosawa's film Rashomon , the two stories that inspired it are first in the collection.  One story only contributed its title (the plot is illustrated on the book cover), and the second, "In a Bamboo Grove," is the actual source of the murder mystery shown in the f...

The Durrells of Corfu , by Michael Haag Hey folks, I have missed blogging so much lately!  I had a tiny little finger surgery (the most minor ever) a couple of weeks ago, and I thought I would be able to write again after a couple of days off.  Ha ha.  This is the first time I've felt capable of typing properly; I've been able to write the odd comment here and there, but first it hurt too much, so I would type funny to accommodate, and then I could hit the keyboard, but the big ol' bandage meant that I always hit more keys than I meant to.  Either way it was a huge hassle and I just didn't try very hard.  I also got sick with a nasty bug, so I forgot about a lot of my more ambitious reading plans and just read straight through most of the Anne of Green Gables series.  Even so, I now have a pile of books to write about, and I thought about doing a large multi-book post, but with two or three countries represented, I just can't.  I want individual post...

The Burning Point: A Memoir of Addiction, Destruction, Love, Parenting, Survival, and Hope , by Tracy McKay First, I want to tell you that this is a truly well-written book.  Tracy McKay can write , people.  Even if you're not a parenting/tragedy memoir sort of person, take a look at Tracy's writing, because wow .  (I have a link to the first chapter at the end of the post.)  I am completely unable to tell you how really good this memoir is; it's not sensationalistic or angry, it's just honest and insightful and true. The Burning Point starts with Tracy's moment of decision, when she knows it is time to get out.  Her husband, once a wonderful and caring man, has been spiraling down in the grip of his drug addiction  long enough, and she takes her three small children and leaves.  From then on, Tracy weaves together the story of how she survived the divorce, poverty, and attendant difficulties with flashback sections of her relationship with her h...