Howling Frog Books

 Did I do it?  Did I hit my goal of 20 books by September 1st?  I did, and also I've been very busy and unable to finish this post.  So here we go... Summerbook #17: The Way to the Sea , by Caroline Crampton:   Crampton does a podcast I listen to ( Shedunnit ), so when she wrote this book I wanted to find a copy, but it was only published in the UK.  It's all about the Thames estuary - the bit between London and the sea -- which is where Crampton grew up, on a boat half the time.  She actually starts at the source of the Thames, but covers from there to Tower Bridge in the first chapter.  After that she gets down to business and covers history, the state of the river, ecology, and throws in bits of her own memory.  People have tended to ignore the estuary or use it as a place to dump things they don't want to look at, from actual garbage to sewage treatment and power stations.  These days the shipping is there too; an absolutely massive...

I've got some good reading going on!  Here are the two latest, including my WIT title. Summerbook #15: The Story of Hong Gildong :  This is a Korean classic of literature, and the author is unknown.  For a long time, Koreans were taught that this was the first story written in Hangul, the Korean script, and that it dated from the 17th century, but our translator argues that modern Korean scholarship has found that it dates from the late 19th century.  Anyway, Hong Gildong occupies approximately the same spot in Korean literature that Robin Hood does in English, that of a delightfully tricky noble robber who steals from rich and advocates for the poor, but Gildong has another dimension -- he rebels and argues against Korean laws that, back then, discriminated against illegitimate children.  Hong Gildong's father had a beautiful prophetic vision of having a brilliant son, but this son is born to a lowly concubine, and so despite his intelligence, prowess, and mast...

 First Love and Other Stories, by Ivan Turgenev Wow, Turgenev sure could write.  Here we have short stories written over 20 years of his writing career.  Most of them illuminate a short episode and its meaning for a whole life, or a zeitgeist. "The Diary of a Superfluous Man" is the final diary of a dying man -- though he is only about 30, he has just days to live, and decides to set down the one significant thing that has ever happened to him, and in which he was utterly futile, as he believes his whole life to have been.  He got to know a local family, and fell in love with the daughter (age 17), but Liza never noticed him at all.  She fell instead for a visiting nobleman, and at the end of a romantic summer, he of course left without proposing.  Our narrator wanted to warn her, to help her, to marry her afterwards, but she never wanted any of his warnings or help and married another man. "Mumu" concerns a well-to-do widow living in St. Petersburg -- real...

 I think I'm a bit behind on my reading; if we count my Spin title, I've now read 14 books of summer and have six to go, which isn't terrible.  But I'm going to need to buckle down a bit in August.  And I had this month off!  In August I have to go back to work!  I've admittedly been rather lazy, pottering about, working on crafty projects, and watching too many YouTube videos (but stitching while I did so!).  I've also done some day trips and hikes, and enjoyed air conditioning a whole lot.  And I've been getting a bit involved with the local public library!   How has your summer been going? Summerbook #9: Notes From the Burning Age , by Claire North :  Centuries after the apocalypse, humans live in a carefully balanced world built from the ruins of the old one.  At some point during a destructive world war, chimaerical monsters -- kakuy -- arose from the depths and wreaked destruction upon humankind in revenge for their hapless de...

 Happy July!  I had an unexpectedly busy week so I'm a couple of days late but who cares.  One thing I did was spend an afternoon at the county board of supervisors' budget meeting, lobbying for them not to cut the library budget (which they already did last year).  It would have brought the largest branches in the system down to three days a week.  To our great surprise, it actually worked and the board decided not to enact the cuts -- but only for one year.   We also held an unexpected early birthday party, due to various factors such as the presence of the person involved and another friend being present from out of town.  So I spent a lot of time thinking about food -- a thing I don't do a lot any more now that I'm an empty nester.  And now, on to the books!  Actually, I have been too lazy.  There are too many books here for just one post.  I'm going to put my Books of Summer here, and do another post on the books I've read...

 It's that time of year again, when we start to plan for 20 Books of Summer !  The rules are as simple as can be; pick your goal number, and try to read them between June 1 - September 1.  Cathy at 746Books is the host.  And here's my list: 20 books plus two alternates since I am a weirdo.   England Speaks:  Being Talks with All Manner of Folk, of Humble and Exalted Rank, with a Panorama of English Scenes, by Philip Gibbs Kraken, by China Mieville Codependent Discipleship: Not a How-To Guide, by Nick Galieti and Jennifer Roach My Cousin Rachel, by Daphne du Maurier Tomorrow's Crimes, by Donald Westlake The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World, by Virginia Postrel Notes from the Burning Age, by Claire North To the Diamond Mountains: A Hundred-Year Journey through China and Korea, by Tessa Morris-Suzuki    Arresting God in Kathmandu, by Samrat Upadhyay The Pushcart War, by Jean Merrill Pageants of Despair, by Dennis Hamley The W...

 Well, how did I do with the 20 Books of Summer?  I managed to blog about 17 books, most of which were on my original list.  I did get an 18th book read, but it's for Witch Week so you'll have to wait!  I'm not thrilled with my performance, but all things considered I'm happy and I had a really nice summer, which is the important part.  I got some quilting done too! I did fall down a bit with WIT August.  The first books I chose turned out not to be translated at all; it was written in English.  (Every other book I've gotten from that 'Emerging Voices' series has been translated!  I just assumed!)  I'm still reading my other choice, which is a very long mystery novel from Spain, set in Basque country.   Now it's back to work/school and there's plenty going on, which is keeping me from doing a whole lot of posting at the moment.  My younger kid is preparing to move out next week, into an apartment here in town with a friend....

 Word From Wormingford: A Parish Year, by Ronald Blythe Ronald Blythe is the fellow who collected and edited Akenfield , in which villagers talked about how things were in the old days (yes, people were closer knit, but no, it wasn't better).  I really enjoyed that book and when I saw this one described, I'm not sure what I thought it would be like, but I knew I wanted to read it.  Whatever I expected, this wasn't it, but it was a nice surprise. Ronald Blythe turns out to be a clergyman, working in three village parishes in Suffolk.  The one he lived in is Wormingford, and the book collects selections of the weekly pieces he would write for the parish news -- these date from 1993 - 1996, so presumably he went through and picked his favorites, and I think there is more than one for every week.  They are titled by the church calendar: Second Trinity, St Dunstan, and so on, but there are more than four in a month.  The pieces are meditations on the season, on ...

  A Fatal Grace, by Louise Penny I wanted to read another Louise Penny mystery over the summer.  I didn't realize that the second one in the series is a Christmas mystery that involves an incredible amount of snow, ice, and freezing everything (possibly I could have paid attention to the cover).  It's been really hot here, as it always is in August, so in a way it was nice to read about snow and ice... Our first murder victim is CC de Poitiers, self-proclaimed lifestyle guru.  She's got a book explaining her revolutionary new philosophy of Li Bien, she's planning a magazine and a home décor line, and she's certain she'll make it big once people understand.  She's also a horrible person who manipulates and abuses everyone around her, especially her husband and daughter.  When she collapses at the traditional post-Christmas village curling match, her death seems impossible, but certainly lots of people are happy she's gone. Inspector Gamache is put on the ...

  Reflections on the Psalms, by C. S. Lewis Today was the first day of the new semester, and it's looking good.  Finally, there are a reasonable number of students on campus and in the library, and the place doesn't look like a ghost town.  I was so busy today!  Lovely. At my church, I teach the adult Sunday school class once a month, and yesterday was my day to teach.  The lesson was on the psalms, and so to prepare, I thought I'd read Lewis' Reflections, which I'd never done before.  I figured I might as well count it as one of my 20 summer books, since we're obviously getting down to the end and I am not going to reach all 20 (unless you count the fluffy mysteries I read before going to sleep, but I don't blog about those). The book is quite short, and is really a series of essays.  Lewis starts with enumerating the errors a reader might fall into with the psalms.  He talks about the structure of the songs, and how they use parallelism.  ...

 Pillars of Salt, by Fadia Faqir I was saving this novel for August's Women in Translation event, and got halfway through before I looked at the copyright information and realized that Faqir, a Jordanian author, actually wrote this story in English.  So, oops.  Good thing I've got a Spanish mystery so I won't totally miss out on WIT! Two women are imprisoned in a mental asylum, and tell each other their stories.  Maha's life is told in the first person, in flashbacks.  Um Saad narrates her life to Maha each evening when the lights go out, since they aren't supposed to talk.  And a storyteller jumps in every so often to tell Maha's life through his own malicious and gossipy lens. Maha lives on a small farm with her father and no-good brother.  She is delighted to marry her husband, the Bedouin Harb, and they are deeply in love, but he spends most of the time off in the mountains, raiding English camps.  Despite this, the village is talking about Ma...

San Fransicko: How Progressives Ruin Cities, by Michael Shellenberger Michael Shellenberger is, to put it mildly, a maverick.  (And not the movie jet-flying kind!)  He started off very left/progressive, became disillusioned with the results, and now advocates for nuclear power, water desalinization, and other solutions for West Coast problems.  California recently had an election in which we voted whether or not to recall the current governor, Gavin Newsom, and if yes, who should be governor instead, and Shellenberger ran for the post.  (Newsom didn't get recalled.)   Here, Shellenberger tackles the most obvious problem in San Francisco, as well as Portland, Seattle, and the rest of the West Coast -- including my own little city -- that of homeless addicts living on the streets.  For years, we've poured billions into homelessness, only to see it getting worse and worse.  This is partly because the problem in this case is not 'just' homelessness; ...

 Our Mutual Friend, by Charles Dickens This doorstopper tome came in at over 800 pages!  So, clearly, this is a story that is going to have a lot of characters and a lot of plot threads.  Dickens does weave all of it together into a suspenseful and exciting pattern, and for the most part I enjoyed the novel and often kept reading to find out what would happen. Our story revolves, mainly, around one hero and two heroines, but they are not in a love triangle.  In fact, we start with a murder; the body of John Harmon, heir to a large fortune and just arrived to claim it, has been found in the river.   Who killed him, and who will get the money?  It is not a spoiler to let you know that John Harmon is in fact alive, but is pretty iffy on whether he wants the money.  He definitely does not want to force Miss Bella Wilfer into marriage, which is what his father has ordained in the will, although the two have never seen each other.  So the family se...

 All the Birds in the Sky, by Charlie Jane Anders I took this home because the inside cover had reviews that compared it to DWJ and Neil Gaiman.  It turned out to be a pretty good modern urban fantasy novel (and I don't mean 'urban fantasy' in the sense of 'werewolf romance'). Patricia and Laurence are both underdogs and social outcasts.  Their (improbably uninterested) parents don't understand them and usually do the opposite of what their kids need.  They're tormented at school and at home.  Patricia finds solace in nature, and is shaped by a strange encounter with a bird who speaks with her, while Laurence is a tech geek building an AI from discarded parts in his bedroom closet.  In junior high, they become friends, but social pressures and, eventually, parents make it increasingly difficult, until Patricia is whisked off to a school for magic users and Laurence finally makes it to the tech high school he's dreamed of. Years later, their paths cross a...

 Honeycomb, by Joanne M. Harris This is a rather fascinating collection of....very short stories?  chapters?  which all weave together into a complex set of tales.  Harris explains in the afterword that it started off as little stories on Twitter, which forced her to write tightly, and people would ask for more stories about their favorites, and after a while she had "a new medium for folklore.  An interlinked series of stories, all set in the same honeycomb multiverse as [two other books] and with an overarching storyline about love, magic, the power of story, and the quest for redemption."  Neat, hm? The stories revolve around the Silken Folk -- what you'd usually call Faerie, which here is also the world of insects -- and their interactions with the Sightless Folk, which are of course humans.  The Honeycomb Queen is the first of these, and her son, the Lacewing King, is the protagonist.  He grows up to be cruel and ruthless, and his various ad...

Hello!  I went to visit a friend for a week, and I had a lovely time.  Now I'm back, and --  No One Is Talking About This, by Patricia Lockwood I kept hearing about how fantastic and unusual this story is, and so put it on my summer list.  It is unusual, that's true.  I kind of liked it?  The characters remain unnamed, and it seems to (perhaps) be set in a slightly alternative America, where an unnamed dictator rules.  The protagonist is a woman famous for her viral tweets in what she calls 'the portal.'  For some reason, this gets her regular speaking gigs at TED-talk-like events.  The story is told in an endless cascade of short fragments, so that it feels much like scrolling endlessly through a social media feed. In the first half of the novel, she seems to get less and less tethered to reality, spending hours a day on her feeds and convinced that only the portal is important, while real life (which contains a slightly worried husband) isn...

 Threads of Life: A History of the World Through the Eye of a Needle, by Clare Hunter We all know I'm a sucker for a book about the history of sewing or textiles.  Clare Hunter is a Scots woman (from Glasgow) and has done a lot of community work around sewing, so she's in a great position to write a book about the history. Hunter divides her book into loosely themed chapters, such as 'Loss,' Protest,' 'Captivity,' etc.  She bounces all over history, discussing embroidery therapy for wounded World War I soldiers and then moving on to the elaborate banners once used in marches -- every community group seems to have had several, and the suffragists' banners were of course embroidered instead of printed.  Then it's off to group projects for urban pride, or the patchwork 'liberation skirts' made by Dutch women after World War II, or Hmong storycloths.  She goes all over the world in this way, just telling stories about how stitching brings people ...

 Goblin, by Josh Malerman Josh Malerman wrote Bird Box , which I think was made into a movie a few years back.  I've never read him before, or seen the movie.  The description of Goblin intrigued me, and I always love a good hedge maze (as on the cover), so I took it home for the summer. This is 'a novel in six novellas.'  There are six stories set in the town of Goblin, plus a prologue and epilogue that kind of tie the whole thing together.  Goblin is a strange town, and kind of apart from the rest of the world; it's situated next to woods that are legendarily spooky and inhabited by the Great Owls, it gets more rain than anywhere else in the world, and the police are the spookiest thing of all.  The original settlers all ran away, and it was years before anybody was foolhardy enough to try to settle it again.  The six stories all culminate in one dark and stormy night.... Richard has spent much of his life being Charles' friend; Charles needs him an...

 The Lost Island, by Eilís Dillon Eilís Dillon published 50 books during her long career; at first she wrote in Irish, and The Lost Island seems to have been her first English book.  It came out in 1952 and after that she wrote in English, and also switched to adult novels, mainly mysteries set in Ireland.  She was deeply involved in the Irish literary scene and, among other things, she founded the Irish Children's Book Trust. Somewhere on the western coast of Ireland (my own guess is the bay of Galway), Michael helps his mother run their farm.  He is 14 and his father disappeared four years ago; Michael has never been exactly sure what happens.  When a menacing tramp brings the family a message from the lost man, Michael learns that his father had been inspired to sail after a treasure, said to be found on the legendary island of Inishmanannan, from which no one has ever returned. Michael and his friend Joe just have to go in search of the lost father.  T...

This is How You Lose the Time War , by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone   In the war that rages across all the branches and braids of Time, there are two factions: the Agency, which encourages orderly technology, and Garden, which encourages chaotic nature.  Their agents engage in subtle actions that will influence the world in two generations, or two hundred years.  Or they may push a planet to war and destruction.  It doesn't sound fun, but the agents were designed and raised to this job, and they're constantly watched to make sure they do their jobs. Red works for Agency; Blue, for Garden.  They have never met, but when you've got a perfect nemesis, you get to know them well, and they've been fighting each other for a very long time; neither of them are human.  And then Red receives a letter from Blue. Their letters to each other are highly secret, and they practically never come written in ink on paper.  Instead they're coded into object...