Howling Frog Books

Lost At Sea: The Jon Ronson Mysteries, by Jon Ronson Here's the second half of my Jon Ronson spree.  This is a collection of pieces that, as far as I know, all appeared elsewhere before being collected.  They're pretty random; from stories about artificial intelligence to Stanley Kubrick to the injustices home chemists can face, Ronson will follow anyone and chronicle anything interesting.  How about Indigo children?  Sylvia Brown? The first piece is about the Insane Clown Posse, who I hadn't heard anything about in years, but guess what, they announced some time back that they are devoted Christians!  Foul-mouthed Christians who rap about extreme violence, but Christians nonetheless.  They were disappointed by the reaction they got. I had fun with a hysterical piece written for Ian Fleming's 100th birthday, in which Ronson talks himself into a sponsored road trip that re-creates James Bond's road trip in Goldfinger .  This is from London to Ge...

Wesley the Owl: the Remarkable Love Story of an Owl and His Girl, by Stacey O'Brien In 1985, a young Caltech biologist took home a newborn barn owl with a damaged wing.  He would never be able to live in the wild, so Stacey adopted him.  For the next 19 years, Stacey and Wesley were best friends. O'Brien describes Wesley's life with great love and with scientific accuracy, introducing the rest of us to the world of barn owls.  It's completely fascinating, and also hilarious, and also tragic.  Wesley communicated in great detail with Stacey, had interesting preferences and a lot of emotions, and eventually helped her get through some extremely rough health problems. Loved this book, am going to make my kids read it -- anybody who remotely likes animals will love it.  I am not an animal person and I did.  Oh, and Jim Henson studios is making a movie of it, so if you read it now, you'll be right on trend! Here's a video with some nice pictures and foot...

THEM: Adventures With Extremists, by Jon Ronson I've been on a bit of a Ronson spree, I guess, even though I didn't know anything about him until I'd already started.  I knew Ronson as the author of So You've Been Publicly Shamed , a book I liked.  I got this one off the donation table, and then another, and only when I was almost done with them did I find out that he also wrote The Men Who Stare at Goats and is apparently quite well known -- just not to me.  Wikipedia calls him a gonzo journalist who assumes a " faux-naif" persona in his writing. This is Ronson's second book, written over some time and published in 2001, "a snapshot of life in the Western world on September 10, 2001," when he thought all these people he was interviewing were getting very dramatic over nothing much and nothing would really happen.  By the time he wrote the foreword of my 2002 edition, things looked different.  And now, in 2018, they look different again. ...

The Spin number was given out this morning , and it's.... This number has the appropriate feel, I think Oh, waily waily! as the Nac Mac Feegle would say.  My title -- for a very jolly Christmas read -- is Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment , the newish Oliver Ready translation, which I've actually been quite excited about, but I'm not too sure about reading it over Christmas.  It's not exactly cozy . I feel like the bosun in Tim's Last Voyage .  I don't know if you're familiar with the Little Tim books by Ardizzone (if you're not, you should be!), but in this one, a terrible storm engulfs the ship where Tim is signed on as a cabin boy.  The bosun takes to his room in a cowardly manner and unhelpfully howls "Doom" at everybody. The funny thing is that I'm always putting a book I'm scared of into the #1 spot, on the obviously untenable and mathematically illiterate grounds that it's somehow less likely than the ot...

I now have seven books sitting in front of me to review, and some of them were read well before the fire.  Now I can barely remember them.  So, I'm going to do quickie reviews of all of them, and consider that a fresh start to the winter season. The Infernal Library: On Dictators, the Books They Wrote, and Other Catastrophes of Literacy, by Daniel Kalder:     Oh boy, this was not to be missed!  How do you pass up that title?  Kalder gives us a tour of the terrible, awful literary productions of 20th century dictators, from Lenin on down.  The material is no fun, but he helps the reader survive with a large dose of wit.  The big names go first, with Mao taking up quite a lot of space, but there's room for a whole lot of less-famous dictators, such as Salazar of Portugal and Hoxha of Armenia.  Everybody felt the need to write books that would dictate how the world should work: Gaddafi wrote the Green Book , Saddam Hussein wrote allegorical...

Oh, how I love a Spin, and boy I could sure use one right now.  So let's do it!  The newly-renovated Classics Club is hosting a special chunkster edition of its Spin : On Tuesday 27th November, we’ll post a number from 1 through 20. The challenge is to read whatever book falls under that number on your Spin List, by 31st January, 2019 .  Yes, you read that date correctly: the 31st January 2019 ! This is an extra special, super-dooper CHUNKSTER edition of the Classics Club Spin. We challenge you to fill this spin list with 20 of those HUGE books you’ve been putting off reading because you didn’t have enough time. With this spin we are giving you the time  – nearly 10 weeks in fact – to tackle one of those imposing tomes on your classics shelf. This is an excellent plan.  I usually put very few chunksters on my Spin lists because the time is short (but I always put a few, because Danger is my middle name!).  So here is my Terrifying Chunkster...

Hi folks, I guess I ought to start getting back to books, but before that I want to talk a little bit more about the news around here.  The fire is still not fully contained, but they've been gaining about 5% a day, which is amazing to me.  As far as I can tell, tremendous efforts by both firefighters and townsfolk have saved Stirling City (though I don't think the danger is entirely over there).  We're supposed to get heavy rain starting tomorrow, which is both a blessing and a problem; it will help tremendously and lessen further fire danger, but it will also produce a lot of toxic sludge, which will enter streams, and without healthy plants to hold the soil down, there may be mudslides.  There doesn't seem to be any way to stop those things from happening. They're starting to let people in a little teeny bit, but mostly they're still looking for the dead and surveying the damage.  There are still lots of people who don't know whether their homes are the...