Howling Frog Books

 Wow, this is taking a long time!  We're almost to the end of summer and I am on track with my reading, which means it's going to take, I think, another three months.  Still, I think this is the best way for me to be reading it; three chapters a reasonably easy weekly assignment to fulfill and I would probably give up in despair if I tried to read it all at once.  Since I fell behind on the notes, I decided to just take two weeks off, and I'm going to start back up now. Boy these sections had a lot of examples.  This is all about popular folk-customs of the harvest (now mostly gone), and obviously those customs varied slightly according to the region.   XLVI.  The Corn-Mother in Many Lands. The Corn-Mother in America:  Native American customs around maize (short). The Rice-Mother in the East Indies: So many examples of customs around rice. The Spirit of the Corn Embodied in Human Beings:  That last ceremonial reaper is often considered t...

 Black Renaissance, by Miklós Szentkuthy  Miklós Szentkuthy, Hungarian and cosmopolitan (that is, he was in favor of pan-Europeanism rather than nationalism), wrote a sort-of-fictional synthesis of European history and culture, seen through his own very strange lens, and narrated by "St. Orpheus."  The ten volumes of St. Orpheus' Breviary span decades of work and centuries of history, and swirl around the 'marriage of Athens and Jerusalem' -- the contradictions, fractures, and cruelties that make up European history -- but nothing about this is straightforward or anything most people would recognize as history, or logic, or even narrative.  Black Renaissance was written in 1939 (but the title doesn't seem to have anything to do with contemporaneous events).  Also, I love the cover so much, I can't even tell you.  This is a fantastic cover. Now, obviously a work like that is going to be way over my head.  I won't claim to have understood this book....

  There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby: Scary Fairy Tale s, by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya This is the second collection of Petrushevskaya's stories I have read, and she is a great writer, although her material is mostly raw misery, Russian style.  In the other post, I quoted a review blurb as saying, "nothing about it screams 'political' or 'dissident' or anything else.  It just screams."   That said, the 'fairy tale' genre works well.  It actually took me all summer to read this collection; since I often get tired of too many short stories at once, I eked it out over months.  Even so, I can recall first story in the book -- the one about the woman who tried to kill her neighbor's baby -- as though I read it yesterday.  Another story deals with a plague in the city and the family that tries to survive it.  Or there's a teenage girl who dies, and her father makes a deal to save her. Twin ballerinas run afoul of a ...

 Well, I guess since the semester starts today, it's not quite summer any more, but it's sure hot!  We are all fine here, but the world has gone even madder than usual; we had a nasty heat wave and lightning storm with very little rain, and the result is that half the state is on fire -- and there's another storm coming in.    There is nothing very near to us, but the smoke is heavy, so we can't go outside much.  As my brother said, inside entertainment is closed and outside entertainment is on fire, so we just sit around.  The lack of exercise is difficult for me, but since we're about as fortunate as it's possible to be during a pandemic/heat wave/state on fire, I can hardly complain. I did pretty much take the week off from any serious reading, though.  I was up-to-date on The Golden Bough until this week (though I have yet to write up the notes post I should have posted a week ago) and was making decent progress on two books of summer.  ...

 Seeing Red, by Lina Meruane (Sangre in el ojo) I was quite interested in this Chilean novel, which I saw billed as "one of Chile's most exciting young writers" in her first work translated into English, which was about trauma and its effects.  I didn't quite expect what I got! Lina is a young Chilean grad student living in the US with her boyfriend, Ignacio, but she has to be extremely careful with her eyes, which have a bunch of extra veins growing in them, and they're brittle.  So the first thing that happens is that the veins burst and Lina becomes very nearly blind as one eye fills with blood and the other comes pretty close.* Immediately, her life becomes far more difficult, as she has to take a leave of absence and usually depends on Ignacio to get around.  The doctor wants to wait and see if the blood kind of goes away.  Her family back in Chile want her home immediately and for her to see a proper Chilean doctor; she and Ignacio do travel down, but Lina...

Beside the Ocean of Time, by George Mackay Brown I like to listen to the Slightly Foxed podcast, which has added quite a few things to my reading wishlist. A while back, they did an episode on George Mackay Brown (pronounced MaKEE), who is mainly considered a poet -- one of the greats of 20th century Scottish literature -- but who wrote stories, essays, and plays as well.  He was from the Orkney islands, and those islands were very important to his writing.  This 1995 novel is Brown's last, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Thorfinn Ragnarsson lives on the tiny island of Norday* -- it's the 1930s, and Thorfinn is known as the laziest, most useless boy on the island, because he prefers to spend his time daydreaming, imagining himself in other times.  In imagination, Thorfinn sails with his Viking ancestors and rides to the Battle of Bannockburn.  Stories of other islanders are interspersed with Thorfinn's voyages, and we even see the island in 'the future,...

Zima: Origins (Z-Tech Chronicles) , by Ryan Southwick  Readers may possibly remember that in 2018 I reviewed a tech thriller, Angels in the Mist, by my old buddy Ryan Southwick.  He also sent me the second volume, Angels Fall , and you'll see that review in October, when it's published, but first -- a prequel! Here is Zima's story between escaping her former life and the start of Angels in the Mist .  Instead of being an AI implanted in a psychopath, she has her own cyborg body.  But that means she has a lot to get used to and to learn, and she figures the best way to do that is to go out and find herself a family.  How better to learn the normal human interactions she knows nothing about? Zima finds siblings Emilio and Rosa, and applies for membership in their family.  Rosa, a bouncy little 8-year-old, loves this idea.  Emilio, 17, thinks it's pretty strange.  But even though he's sure that he's got his life under control, it turns out he could ...