My feline self being walked by Dave. The upraised tail that looks like a number 1 means this blog post will get 1 visitor. Well, maybe more. (Photo by Laurel Cummins.)

I’m Misty the Cat, and I’m here to guest-blog again for my human Dave. It’s a good time for me to do so because I recently read George Eliot’s Middlemay. Um…Dave just nudged me to say that the title of Eliot’s iconic novel is actually Middlemarch, but I try not to dwell on the past (two months ago).

Also, I and Dave recently read Walter Mosley’s The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey, and we agree that it’s a great example of how some novels contain many elements in addition to the plot and characters. In this case, Mosley explores themes such as racism, poverty, old age, dementia, and Moby-Dick buying Starbucks coffee from the Starbuck character in Herman Melville’s famous sea saga. But how does a whale hold a coffee container? And do aquatic mammals prefer decaffeinated?

To tell you the truth, Mosley did not mention Moby-Dick. But I have rarely seen a better depiction of memory loss than the one that author crafted for his nonagenarian protagonist Ptolemy. The character’s many foggy moments, coupled with a dramatic period of clarity, were compelling and poignant for a cat to experience. And…um…I forgot what I was going to write next. Oh…Lisa Genova also skillfully depicted a fading mind when spotlighting early-onset Alzheimer’s disease in her novel Still Alice. Which reminds me that when Ralph Kramden of the 1950s sitcom The Honeymooners chauvinistically joked about giving his wife Alice a smack that would send her “to the moon,” he invented science fiction.

Wait, you say the real sci-fi pioneers were authors like Mary Shelley, Jules Verne, and H.G. Wells? All I can say is Verne also wrote adventure novels, including Around the Food Bowl in Eighty Days. Cats prefer their bowls to have large circumferences.

An unusual and heartwarming element of Mosley’s book was the cross-gender and cross-generational but not cross-species friendship of 91-year-old Ptolemy and 17-year-old Robyn. That age gap was the largest since 969-year-old Methuselah (born in 3074 BC) hung out with 21-year-old singer Olivia Rodrigo (born in 2003 AD) to discuss Spotify and other music streaming services. Leading me, Misty the Cat, to wonder why Miguel de Cervantes’ 17th-century classic Don Quixote didn’t feature rock musicians when Tom Perrotta’s The Wishbones (1997) and Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom (2010) did. Any theories?

Three years after Freedom was published, acclaimed short-story writer Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Sadly, she died this past week at age 92. I’ve read only one of her story collections — Friend of My Youth — which I enjoyed except for the tale “Oranges and Apples” because felines are not fans of fruit. Which explains why The Grapes of Wrath author John Steinbeck drove around the United States with a dog rather than a cat in Travels with Charley.

Acclaimed novelist Paul Auster also recently passed away, late last month. As with Munro, I’ve read only one of his works: The Music of Chance. After doing that, I used my paw to swipe at a Chance card on my humans’ Monopoly board, expecting to hear music — like when you open those greeting cards that have sound. But, alas, all I heard was the usual clanking of machinery at the nearby factory that manufactures literature blogs.

In conclusion, I’ll mention that I have my own book coming out in a couple months. That seriocomic work, told in my own feline voice, is partly fact and partly fiction — so I guess it can be described as a memoir or a novel. It’s called Misty the Cat…Unleashed, and the ellipsis in the title was purchased from Ellipses R Us just before that retail chain went out of business.

The question of the week, which occurred to me during one of the daily cat walks my peeps take me on: Are all bloggers billionaires or just millionaires? 🤔

Dave’s 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, Dave writes the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column every Thursday for Montclair Local. The latest piece — about the results of my town’s May 14 election and the settlement of a major lawsuit — is here.

Vermeer’s iconic painting “Girl with a Pearl Earring,” which inspired Tracy Chevalier’s 1999 novel of the same name. The 17th-century artist was the father of 15 children. (Photo by Lex van Lieshout/ANP via Getty Images.)

Novels featuring families with plenty of children offer plenty of content fodder. The various kids will obviously have personality differences, fight with each other, be nice to each other, get sick at times, etc. — with the older ones perhaps acting as sort of assistant moms or dads. Large households of course also make for frazzled parents (not to mention multiple never-easy pregnancies), economic challenges, and more. And what kind of work will the children do when they become adults? Much potential to keep novel readers absorbed.

For the purposes of this post, I’m defining a big family as including four or more children.

The main point of Tracy Chevalier’s excellent novel Girl with a Pearl Earring, which I just read, is the author’s imagining the life of the teen maid (Griet) who posed for the legendary painting of the book’s title created by masterful 17th-century Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer. But one can’t help noticing along the way that Vermeer and his wife Catharina had a LOT of children: 15, with 11 surviving past infancy, of whom more than half had been born during the mid-1660s time in which Chevalier’s historical novel is primarily set. The variations between those kids, and in how they treat Griet, make for interesting reading — with one Vermeer child, Cornelia, particularly mean.

Anne Shirley eventually had seven children with Gilbert Blythe as L.M. Montgomery’s many Anne of Green Gables sequels spooled out. The beloved character was a great mother, and her kids had appealingly distinct personalities, but one couldn’t help but lament that the brilliant/spirited Anne didn’t live up to her early promise and be more than mostly a parent — important as that is. This was of course partly due to her living in a more patriarchal time with many fewer women in out-of-home workplaces, but still disappointing.

Arthur and Molly Weasley of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series also had seven children. That couple certainly struggled economically but retained personalities with some strong non-parental facets. And the kids (Bill, Charlie, Percy, Fred, George, Ron, and Ginny) were quite memorable in their ways — including the bravery or humor displayed by some of them.

Other large fictional households with diverse, hard-to-forget siblings include — among many others — those in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (five sisters), Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (four sisters), Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible (four sisters), Liane Moriarty’s Apples Never Fall (four sisters and brothers), Lisa Genova’s Inside the O’Briens (four sisters and brothers), and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (four brothers, including one “illegitimate” one who’s treated as a family servant).

There is also Cheaper by the Dozen by Ernestine Gilbreth Carey and Frank Gilbreth — with that author duo being two of the 12 children referenced in their book’s title. Not exactly a novel; it’s a memoir/fiction mix about the 14-person Gilbreth family who lived in my town of Montclair, New Jersey.

Any thoughts about this topic and/or specific books that fit this topic?

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 Montclair Local. The latest piece — about my town’s upcoming May 14 election and more — is here.

New York City police in riot gear march into Columbia University to break up peaceful protests against Israel’s war on Gaza. (Kena Betancur/AFL via Getty Images.)

The manipulation of truth to mislead people is known as gaslighting. We’ve been seeing a lot of that lately, and I’m going to discuss a real-life example before talking about gaslighting in novels.

As most of you undoubtedly know, there has been an outpouring of protest on numerous college campuses against the Israeli assault on Gaza that has left at least 34,000 Palestinians dead (the vast majority women and children), hundreds of thousands of other Palestinian civilians homeless and starving, many hospitals blown up, many schools destroyed, and more. This of course happened after the horrific Hamas attack on Israel last October 7 that killed more than 1,100 people. Which happened after years of Israel’s harsh authoritarian control over Gaza. Which happened after the Holocaust at the hands of the Nazis (not the Palestinians) — an unspeakable trauma that has influenced Israel’s actions ever since its founding. But it’s a shame when the oppressed become the oppressors.

The college protests have been overwhelmingly peaceful, but that hasn’t stopped various university administrators and elected officials from sharply escalating the situation by sending in aggressive/militarized police to attack and arrest the admirable students, many of whom were subsequently suspended and kicked out of campus housing — even as rich right-wing alumni donors threatened to derail the students’ future career prospects.

What kind of gaslighting is coming from those rich right-wing alumni donors, university administrators, mainstream-media outlets, and politicians — including not only most Republican pols and many Democratic pols (among them President Biden) in the U.S. but also Israel’s far-right prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu? It involves falsely describing the protesters as violent and (despite many of the demonstrating students being Jewish) also falsely describing them as anti-Semitic. Criticizing Israel’s government and the worst tendencies of Zionism is not being anti-Semitic. Sure, a tiny sliver of the protesters and/or protest hangers-on have said problematic things, but almost every righteous movement has bad apples who attach themselves to a cause but don’t represent the essence of it.

In fact, the only recent, major, not-by-police violence was perpetrated by a pro-Israeli mob that attacked pro-Palestinian protesters on California’s UCLA campus — with a feeble law-enforcement response to that quite different from the police crackdowns on students peacefully opposing Israel’s siege of Gaza.

Why the gaslighting of pro-Palestinian protesters? Many reasons, of course, with a key one an effort to distract from Israel’s unrelentingly disproportionate response to the vicious October 7 attack. A response that the vast majority of the world’s citizens, and a majority of Americans, feel is over-the-top.

There have been a few notable university exceptions involving schools willing to negotiate with students on such matters as considering the divestment of funds that help the powerful Israeli military. Among those schools are Brown, Rutgers, and Northwestern (the latter two my undergraduate and graduate alma maters) — and their willingness to bargain kept things calmer on those campuses. Did those universities negotiate with their students in good faith? Maybe, maybe not, but it was something.

Novels with gaslighting? In a political/governmental sense, few feature more examples of the “g” word than George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which the dictatorial leaders churn out slogans like “war is peace,” “freedom is slavery,” and “ignorance is strength.”

In another dystopian novel, The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, gaslighting is one of the tools the sicko male rulers of Gilead use to subjugate women.

On a more one-to-one level, we have the “second Mrs. de Winter” gaslit by creepy housekeeper Mrs. Danvers in Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. Mr. de Winter is no angel, either.

Edward Rochester also did some gaslighting when trying to keep a major secret from the title character in Charlotte Bronte’s iconic Jane Eyre.

Another memorable 19th-century English novel, Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White, has a gaslighting scenario too complicated to briefly summarize here…but it’s quite riveting.

Moving to more recent literature, J.K. Rowling’s The Ink Black Heart crime thriller features a nasty misogynist gaslighter who goes by the online alias “Anomie.”

In On Mystic Lake, the emotionally wrenching Kristin Hannah novel I just read, protagonist Annie is basically gaslit by two men (her old-fashioned widowed father and her sexist corporate lawyer husband who leaves her for a younger woman) into feeling she is less capable than she actually is. That’s something perpetuated by many men on many women in real life and fiction, as is also the case with the way Dorothea is treated by her husband, the Rev. Casaubon, in George Eliot’s superb Middlemarch. And gaslighting is sometimes perpetuated by women on women, with one example being the behavior of Valancy Stirling’s disapproving mother in L.M. Montgomery’s classic The Blue Castle — until Valancy finally leaves her childhood household at age 29.

One final note: When American students and others in decades past strongly/publicly protested such abominations as racism, sexism, homophobia, the Vietnam War, South African apartheid (via the divestment movement), and the U.S. invasion of Iraq, they were vilified by an “establishment” that rarely hesitated to send in the cops. Then, many years later, it became “safe” among at least part of the “establishment” to do the revisionist-history thing and acknowledge that the demonstrators had been morally correct. I suspect the students rightly protesting Israel’s collective punishment on Gaza might eventually be viewed the same way. It’s a shame that morally correct students can’t be respected in real time by “the powers that be,” but I guess those students are considered too threatening to imperial and corporate narratives.

Your thoughts about, and examples of, this topic?

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 Montclair Local. The latest piece — about a senior center and a data breach — is here.