Misty the cat says: “I’m perched today next to ‘The Boys from Biloxi.’ I am NOT a boy from Biloxi.” (Photo by me.)

My cat Misty hasn’t hijacked this blog since early 2021, but he’s back on the computer today discussing some of the novels his human (me) has read during the past two-plus years. Has Misty read those books, too? Perhaps, although his Goodreads account lists him as only reading the labels on cat-food cans. Is that great literature?

Anyway, here’s Misty:

“‘Is that great literature?,’ my male human asked. Depends. How do we know that, say, Dostoevsky and George Eliot didn’t write the words on cat-food-can labels? All authors have to start somewhere.

“Anyway, I was thrilled that one of the novels Dave read since early 2021 was Kristin Hannah’s The Nightingale! I could practically taste that avian protagonist until I pawed through the book and learned that ‘The Nightingale’ was a nickname for a female HUMAN who did heroic things during World War II. Now I’m itching to start World War III by swiping my food bowl off the table.

“Despite the persona I just put forth, I’m a very nice kitty most of the time. For instance, when Dave read Barbara Kingsolver’s Unsheltered, I cried tears of empathy for the homeless animals that novel undoubtedly depicted. But the book turned out to be people-focused. Still, I will always have a soft spot in my feline heart for Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible, in which a missionary converts dogs into cats. Religious zeal? You gotta love it.

“Actually, the missionary did NOT convert dogs into cats, so those canines howling in the Pink Floyd song ‘Dogs’ can just shush.

“The barkers in that prog-rock tune have no names, which reminds me of Wilkie Collins’ novel No Name. The title actually make sense once you read the book, as does the title of that author’s The Moonstone — about a member of The Rolling Stones visiting the moon in the 19th century. Yes, Keith Richards looks, and is, that old.

“Now that I’m name-dropping, I read Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist assuming it was a fictional work about my friend Al the chemist. It was not. I also thought Morgan’s Run by Colleen McCullough was about 18th-century character Richard Morgan competing in the Boston Marathon. It was not. Maybe he was actually an 18th-century pickleball player?

“As for Bel Kaufman’s Up the Down Staircase, the first-floor apartment my humans and I share doesn’t have stairs, so I don’t know how Dave can relate to that book. Still, there are hallway stairs that lead to the second and third floors of our basic, plain-looking rental building. Shirley Jackson authored We Have Always Lived in the Castle, but she needs to speak for herself. There isn’t even a moat around here.

“But there’s an inhaler in my apartment, because I’m an asthmatic cat. Thus I thought Breathing Lessons would be a very valuable instructional read for me and other felines in my situation. Alas, that Anne Tyler novel — like the aforementioned Unsheltered — focused on people. No wonder I can’t get a library card.

“As some of you know, I’m given a leashed walk every morning around my apartment complex. The other day, I saw a puddle of rain from the night before, and was awestruck to realize I was witnessing the very body of water that’s the titular setting for Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile. Cue the soundtrack for The Bangles’ ‘Walk Like an Egyptian.’

“The title of Song of Solomon also evokes the Mideast, although Toni Morrison’s novel is set in the United States. Did King Solomon rule the U.S. sometime between the presidential terms of FDR and Jimmy Carter? Morrison ignores that question in her book, but everyone knows the Electoral College works in strange ways.

“It’s also strange that Irving Stone’s The Agony and the Ecstasy isn’t about me being fed five seconds late one day. Instead, it’s about some guy named Michelangelo. Wasn’t he a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle?

“More questions: Was Lorna Doone a novel first or a cookie first? R.D. Blackmore wrote the book, but who wrote the list of ingredients on Lorna Doone cookie boxes? Not Dostoevsky or George Eliot, because they were busy writing for cat-food cans.”

Misty the cat will reply to comments between naps.

My literary-trivia book is described and can be purchased here: Fascinating Facts About Famous Fiction Authors and the Greatest Novels of All Time.

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column every Thursday for Baristanet.com, which has merged with Montclair Local. The latest piece — which comments on a negative report about my town, among various other topics — is here.

This month, the G20 Summit was held in India, with the U.S. president subsequently visiting Vietnam. Also this month, the leader of North Korea met with the leader of Russia — a country partly in Asia. Next month, my New Jersey town’s “AAPI Montclair” organization representing Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders will hold several events. Countries such as China and Japan are often in the news, too.

All that is my excuse for writing this week about novels I’ve read by living authors who reside in Asian nations or reside elsewhere but are of Asian or part-Asian descent. I’ll also mention a few Asia-set books by non-Asian writers.

Among the titles that immediately came to mind is The God of Small Things, the 1997 debut novel by author/activist Arundhati Roy of India. It’s a depressingly riveting story featuring fraternal twins and other memorable characters.

I’ve only gotten to one novel so far by Japan’s Haruki Murakami — his intriguing After Dark (2004) that unfolds during a single night. (I’ve also read The Tale of Genji, the 11th-century work by Japan’s Murasaki Shikibu, but she’s not a living author as far as I know. 🙂 )

I recently read (and discussed in last week’s blog post) Nadia Hashimi’s Afghanistan-set The Pearl That Broke Its Shell, an absorbing 2014 debut novel about two women separated by a century. Hashimi’s parents emigrated from Afghanistan a few years before their daughter’s 1977 birth in New York.

Afghanistan-born American author Khaled Hosseini is known for works such as The Kite Runner (2003), also an excellent debut novel — this one set in Afghanistan and California.

Another now-American writer, Viet Thanh Nguyen, was born in Vietnam — the partial setting for his intense/tragic/cleverly crafted novels The Sympathizer (2015) and The Committed (2021).

Jhumpa Lahiri was born in London to Indian immigrants parents who soon moved to the U.S. I enjoyed her novels The Namesake (2003) and The Lowland (2013) as well as her 1999 short-story collection Interpreter of Maladies.

Kazuo Ishiguro is a Japanese-born British novelist known for works such as 1989’s The Remains of the Day (which I liked a lot) and 2005’s Never Let Me Go (which I found slow going).

Amy Tan? I’ve read and been impressed with three novels — The Joy Luck Club (1989), The Kitchen God’s Wife (1991), and The Bonesetter’s Daughter (2001) — by that American author of Chinese descent.

Among the novels that have stuck with me by non-Asian living writers using Asian settings are Adam Johnson’s 2012 The Orphan Master’s Son (set in North Korea) and Lawrence Osborne’s 2020 The Glass Kingdom (set in Thailand). I also loved James Clavell’s 1975 Shogun (set in Japan), but that author is no longer with us.

Your thoughts about, and examples of, this week’s theme?

My literary-trivia book is described and can be purchased here: Fascinating Facts About Famous Fiction Authors and the Greatest Novels of All Time.

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column every Thursday for Baristanet.com, which has merged with Montclair Local. The latest piece — about a cyber attack and more — is here.

Nadia Hashimi

There are several obvious reasons why some of literature’s female characters dress as males.

Males tend to get more respect and “perks” in our sexist, misogynist, patriarchal world. Also, they’re often considered physically stronger, so females might feel safer — from general attack and/or sexual assault — being in male garb. Etc.

Nadia Hashimi’s compelling Afghanistan-set novel The Pearl That Broke Its Shell, which I just finished, gives readers a double dose of cross-dressing. In the 21st century, the girl Rahima becomes known as the boy Rahim. And, in the book’s parallel story unfolding 100 years earlier, her beleaguered great-great-grandmother Shekiba passes as a male, too. Both also appear as the females that they are in parts of the novel, so we get quite a contrast with how differently they’re treated when seen as a person of each gender — especially in a women-oppressing, double-standard-rife country such as Afghanistan with many brutal male leaders. As Shekiba thinks to herself late in the book: “Only a daughter could know what it was to cross that line, to feel the freedom of living as the opposite sex.”

J.R.R. Tolkien’s otherwise superb The Lord of the Rings unfortunately mostly focuses on men, so it’s perhaps no surprise that one of the few women getting some authorial attention is the Eowyn character who eagerly heads off to battle disguised as a man by the name of Dernhelm. But she is a secondary player in Tolkien’s trilogy.

Moving from fantasy fiction to dystopian lit, Lauren Olamina poses as a male to try to be safer in a dangerous post-apocalyptic world. Plus she feels her masculine disguise gives her more gravitas as the leader that she is. All in Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower.

Another brave cross-dressing young woman is Eliza Sommers, who travels from Chile to Gold Rush-era California in Isabel Allende’s Daughter of Fortune.

Set much further back in time, we have the legendary 15th-century teen warrior who dresses as a male in Mark Twain’s historical-fiction novel Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc.

I know there are various other works of fiction that include females passing as males; in this post, I’ve just mentioned the ones I’ve read. Your thoughts about, and examples of, this theme?

My literary-trivia book is described and can be purchased here: Fascinating Facts About Famous Fiction Authors and the Greatest Novels of All Time.

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column every Thursday for Baristanet.com, which has merged with Montclair Local. The latest piece — about a problematic municipal clerk, the first day of school, a large local jazz festival, and more — is here.

Terry Pratchett (photo by Rob Wilkins/Doubleday)

Many avid readers occasionally stray out of their literary comfort zone. I’m one of them. 🙂

Doing that can be interesting, educational, mind-expanding, challenging, rut-avoiding, tolerance-enhancing, and…fun.

The majority of novels I’ve gotten to in recent years are 21st- or 20th-century works of general fiction by authors from the United States or England. (I used to focus a lot on 19th-century literature from those two countries, but after a while one reads most of what one wants to read from that era and the authors are, um, not around anymore to produce new books.)

Also in recent years, I’ve enjoyed quite a few 21st- and 20th-century Canadian novels (Margaret Atwood, L.M. Montgomery, etc.); 20th- and 19th-century French novels (Camus, Colette, Balzac, Dumas, Hugo, Zola, etc.); and 19th-century Russian novels (Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, etc.). So, not really far out of any comfort zone.

A little less often on my list have been novels by authors from Australia (Liane Moriarty and Colleen McCullough!), Brazil (Jorge Amado and Paulo Coelho!), Chile (Isabel Allende!), Colombia (Gabriel Garcia Marquez!), the Czech Republic (Jaroslav Hasek!), Germany (Erich Maria Remarque and Hermann Hesse!), India (Arundhati Roy!), Italy (Elsa Morante and Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa!), Japan (Haruki Murakami!), New Zealand (Janet Frame!), Nigeria (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Wole Soyinka!), Scotland (Sir Walter Scott!), South Africa (Nadine Gordimer and Alan Paton!), Sweden (Stieg Larsson and Fredrik Backman!), and Switzerland (Johanna Spyri!), among other places. An incomplete list by me, and some of those authors ended up moving to other countries.

But getting out of one’s comfort zone is not just a geographical thing. For instance, I just read Terry Pratchett’s fantasy novel Small Gods despite — with a few exceptions such as J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings — my not being much of a fantasy buff. The weird, satiric, religion-questioning, often-dark, often-funny Small Gods — part of Pratchett’s Discworld series — was quite good, actually, after a slow-ish start.

Also somewhat off the beaten track for me have been long-long-ago novels (such as Miguel de Cervantes’ 17th-century Don Quixote and Murasaki Shikibu’s 11th-century The Tale of Genji), experimental/modernist fiction (as in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway), novels in poetic form or with a good chunk of verse (Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin and Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire), very lengthy novels (James Clavell’s Shogun, Anne Rice’s The Witching Hour, a number of Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander books), sci-fi (the great Octavia E. Butler, anyone?), young-adult literature (I must revisit the aforementioned L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables in the not-too-distant future), mysteries, etc.

What do you read to vary your fiction focus?

My literary-trivia book is described and can be purchased here: Fascinating Facts About Famous Fiction Authors and the Greatest Novels of All Time.

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column for Baristanet.com every Thursday. The latest piece — with more on a developer’s bait-and-switch project — is here.