Howling Frog Books

  Down and Out in Paris and London , by George Orwell This slightly fictionalized memoir is also Orwell's first published book.  It chronicles events in the late 1920's, after Orwell had left service in Burma; he did some tramping around England to collect material for an essay he was writing.  Later, he lived in Paris for a while and spent some time in destitution and working as a dishwasher.  These experiences, somewhat edited, evolved from essays into a complete book, published in 1933. The first half is the Paris story and starts with Orwell losing his money and the work he had been doing.  For some weeks, he and a Russian friend look for restaurant work, finally finding jobs in a large hotel and then in a smaller restaurant.  The inexperienced Orwell works as a dishwasher, lowest of the low, while Boris has already been a waiter and thus gets a better job, but has to hide his disqualifying limp. Once this palls enough, Orwell wangles a job from...

The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo , by Tom Reiss This book is fascinating!  I've never been all that interested in French history, but I'd heard great things about this book, and it was sitting there on my TBR shelf when I started reading The Man in the Iron Mask .  I thought they'd be good to read together, and indeed it was; The Black Count more than lived up to expectations.  It's a Pulitzer Prize winner too, so you don't have to take my word for it. Alex Dumas died when his little boy was only four, and that boy spent the rest of his life idolizing his father.  You could hardly find a more heroic father even without the rose-colored glasses, and Alexandre Dumas wrote his father's experiences into many of his stories, eventually turning Alex into Edmond Dantes to imaginatively take revenge on the enemies who brought him low and then made sure that France forgot him. Reiss starts with the sugar cane plant...

I saw several posts that combined the Top Ten and the November wrapup, so I like that idea, and here is my Top Ten of nonfiction books I'm excited to read as soon as I can!  I don't think I can manage all of them this winter, but I can give it a good try... 10. Individualism and Economic Order, by F. A. Hayek -- I have no less than three Hayek works on my TBR.  They make me nervous. 9. The Story of Western Science , by Susan Wise Bauer -- My guru has written a book I have not yet read!  This must be rectified. 8. Memoirs of the Crusades -- I want to read more medieval literature!  I've had this a long time! 7. Lectures on Russian Literature, by Vladimir Nabokov -- A few years ago, I read Nabokov's lectures on various English classic works, and it was really fun.  I put off reading the Russian stuff until I'd read a reasonable amount of the books he talks about.  I've been looking forward to this for a while. 6. Tales of the Narts, ed. by...

 Something on Sunday is a weekly event hosted by Jenny , in which we talk about what got us through the week. This week is Leaf-Raking Week in my neighborhood, as all the trees dump at once.  I really like raking leaves, and plan to do it some more tomorrow.  We cleared a lot yesterday, but that only lasted a few hours, and the lawn is covered again.  Those mountain ash trees hold an incredible amount.  We are pretty lucky in that we have to pile all the leaves in the street, in a nice neat bank, and every couple of weeks a truck shows up to scoop them up and take them off to be ground up and added to a giant compost heap of doom.  I feel that this is a much better system than bagging, like what my brother has to do. I feel weird talking about Thanksgiving, since it involves a bunch of family members who didn't sign up to be featured in a blog post.  It was a nice day and my daughter and I got to tromp around the riverbank a bit.  The cranber...

I love this cover but it needs a microscope As Iron Sharpens Iron: Listening to the Various Voices of Scripture , ed. Julie M. Smith Laurie at Relevant Obscurity hosts this monthly event!  I've been reading this intriguing little book that is unlike religion books I've read before.  The editor, Julie M. Smith, explains that she was reading a book on how to make sense of the cultures described in the Old Testament (which is now on my wishlist) and it included a fictional dialogue between Ruth and Ezra about marriage outside the covenant, something Ruth did and Ezra fought against. They both advocate for their positions with clarity and charity.  There is no "winner" here -- just a wrestle with the complexities... Smith goes on to wonder if the differing points of view and ideas we find in scripture, and sometimes outright contradictions, are "not a bug but a feature?"  Modern Christians often try to reconcile different accounts to find one 'a...

Cloudstreet, by Tim Winton In honor of Brona's Australian November event, I read Cloudstreet .  I'd heard it was great, but I didn't know a thing about it otherwise.  It turned out to be a sort of different take on a family saga novel, and indeed it was pretty great reading, even though it's not quite my usual sort of thing. Two disasters lead to two families heading to Perth in the early 1940s.  The Pickles family -- hard-drinking, shiftless, prickly, and always trusting to luck -- inherit a large ramshackle house, and rent half of it to the Lambs -- industrious, full of rectitude and driven by a drill sergeant of a mother.  The only thing they have in common is poverty, and for twenty years they share the house but not a lot else.  Eventually, though, they pull together and find means of unity and forgiveness -- of a sort, anyway -- in the younger generation. It's a hardscrabble story, with plenty of rough edges.  It also has some supernatural ele...

Comes with secret extra chapters! The Man in the Iron Mask , by Alexandre Dumas I'm always nervous about French literature, but I really liked The Count of Monte Cristo a few years ago, and lots of people love The Man in the Iron Mask , right?  It can't be that difficult.  So this has been on my TBR pile for a while now, and I started it with high expectations for a lot of excitement and intrigue. I was having a hard time, though; 50 pages in, and nothing much had happened except a lot of intriguing over money between incomprehensibly-named people.  I recognized Aramis, one of the three musketeers, and figured out that this story takes place years later, but otherwise I was a bit lost and concluded that I should take a look at a plot summary, maybe a character list, so I could figure out what was going on.  And I was immediately stumped.  Every plot summary I looked at said that the story starts with Aramis in a secret meeting with a prisoner (the titul...