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Formidable Fiction Is ‘Furmidable’ to a Feline

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I, Misty the cat, might be the first kitty to write a blog post while asleep. (Photo by my human Dave.)

Last week, Dave blogged about the appeal of escapist fiction as a diversion from the dire 2025 political climate faced by people, cats, and blue-footed booby birds who migrated from red-footed states. This week, as I, Misty the cat, do the every-two-month feline takeover of Dave’s blog, I’ll discuss a few of the many challenging novels I’ve read amid the escapist stuff, if only to keep up my paw strength as I swatted those weighty books off the table.

Currently, Dave and I are in the middle of Orfeo by Richard Powers, who later wrote the acclaimed environmental tree saga The Overstory — a novel not about me hovering over a short story. Orfeo is a book featuring a rather complex musical motif as well as sudden swings between the present and past, yet it’s still quite readable in its way. How did I, Misty the cat, learn a word like “motif”? In The Idiot’s Guide to Pretentious Vocabulary.

Some other challenging novels? James Joyce’s Ulysses comes to mind, but I haven’t read it because of my lack of interest in American Civil War general Ulysses S. Grant. There’s also Marcel Proust’s many-volume In Search of Lost Time, of which I managed to finish the initial Swann’s Way book. Here’s what I discovered: gorgeous language, kind of a slog to get through, and a swan and blue-footed booby will both eat a madeleine if it’s slathered in A1 steak sauce.

Plenty of food for thought (but no madeleine) in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, set after the American Civil War in which the aforementioned Grant waged battle against alliterative author names like James Joyce. I also liked Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, even though my cat eyes are green. Everything is not all about me! 99.9% about me? Sure, but not 100%.

Then there’s late-career Henry James. Those novels contain plenty of long and convoluted sentences, but, yes, Long and Convoluted would make a great name for a rock band. Dave and my feline self did enjoy James’ late-career novel The Ambassadors, which was about the Ambassador cars from India and the United States meeting cute before asking James to write The Turn of the Ignition. Or maybe that novel was about an American’s trip to Paris to try to bring back a young man to the family business. The Family Business would be a so-so name for a rock band.

An early-career novel by Eleanor Catton, published when the author was still in her 20s, is also quite ambitious. That would be The Luminaries, which combined a plot about the 1860s New Zealand gold rush with an astrological motif. (I’m a Sagittarius cat.) There’s that fancy word “motif” again, which I was moved to reuse after reading The Idiot’s Guide to Repeating One’s Self in a Blog Post.

I liked Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway a lot despite it not being the easiest of reads. The whole book unfolds in a day, which makes me wonder if it’s a multigenerational saga unfolding across several centuries. Let me think about that.

There’s also Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, about the yin and yang of my relationship with the chipmunk I often see during my daily leashed walks. Given its tiny size, the chipmunk only reads one-page novels, and gets its musical fix solely by watching NPR “Tiny Desk Concerts” — including excellent ones featuring Taylor Swift and Chappell Roan. It’s a small world after all…

Speaking of Russian novels, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s tome The Brothers Karamazov is a challenge, too, with many chapters that are wonderful and some chapters that sort of drag. But when it’s good it’s GOOD. The Sisters Karamazov didn’t leave as much of an impression on my feline self because that book doesn’t exist. The Second-Cousins-Once-Removed Karamazov? A real banger. Which reminds me to bang on my food bowl because it feels like I haven’t been served my chow since the 19th century in Russia. It’s been almost five minutes!

Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s sweeping One Hundred Years of Solitude echoed my angst when I was once forced to endure One Hundred Nanoseconds of Solitude. Fortunately, I also read The Idiot’s Guide to Being Alone for Under a Minute.

Dave told me he twice tried William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury but couldn’t get past the first few chapters, unlike that author’s more readable Light in August and As I Lay Dying. I tried The Sound and the Fury myself, and went into a reading coma. Or maybe it was a food coma “as I lay digesting” too many cat treats.

Comments will be answered by Dave as I read The Idiot’s Guide to Recovering from Digesting Too Many Cat Treats.

I, Misty the cat, say: “I see the ghost, but where’s Mrs. Muir?”

Dave and I’s comedic 2024 book — the part-factual/part-fictional/not-a-children’s-work Misty the Cat…Unleashed — is described and can be purchased on Amazon in paperback or on Kindle. It’s feline-narrated! (And Amazon reviews are welcome. 🙂 )

This 90-second promo video for the book features a talking cat: 🙂

Dave is also the author of a 2017 literary-trivia book…

…and a 2012 memoir that focuses on cartooning and more, and includes many encounters with celebrities.

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 a huge school budget deficit that grew even larger — is here.

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Summer in the City? No, Summer with a Kitty

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My feline self sprawled next to Elizabeth von Arnim’s The Enchanted April, which I will not discuss today because I haven’t finished reading it yet. The first letters of that novel’s title spell “tea,” which I don’t drink. Thank you for your attention to these two matters. (Photo by Dave.)

Misty the suburban cat here with my every-two-month blog post. My previous guest piece was in June, this one is in August, and the next one will be in October. Except that U2’s October album was released in 1981, so I’m not sure how my next blog post will be in…October. There IS a song on that album called “Stranger in a Strange Land,” which is about me at the vet for my yearly check-up.

Anyway, my adult humans Dave and Laurel saw the Superman movie this month, and enjoyed its thrills, acting, and empathy. But I, Misty, was not allowed in the theater because of being a cat. I was actually kind of relieved, because sitting through 25 minutes of ads and previews would have had me yowling loud enough to be heard on Mars — which billionaire bozo Elon Musk, aka the Tesla dude, wants to not only colonize but have The Martian Chronicles author Ray Bradbury write a 2025 sequel called The SpaceX Chronicles. Given that Bradbury died in 2012, he…missed the pleasure of seeing the catastrophic flop of Musk’s stupid Cybertruck.

The Superman film reminds me and other kitties of Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, the 2000 novel partly based on the real-life Jerry Siegel/Joe Shuster duo who created the Superman character for comic books in 1938 — the year the iPhone minus-69 was released.

More generally, the 2025 movie starring the “Man of Steel” also reminds my meowing self of fictional characters possessing abilities beyond the capacity of most mortals. One is the Lee Child-created Jack Reacher — who’s not a superhero but displays unusual strength, incredible fighting abilities, great intellect, and other attributes in the 29-book series that began in 1997. Exactly a century after Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), which stars a vampire who acts out in all kinds of ways after Frankenstein defeats him in pickleball. A tip of the hat to Mary Shelley.

Another character who combines exceptional brains with exceptional physical abilities is the prehistoric protagonist Ayla of Jean M. Auel’s The Clan of the Cave Bear and its sequels. Ayla’s many accomplishments included inventing things and being the only person able to ride Baby the lion (a feline like me!), although she never played pickleball with her horse Whinney.

Some fictional people even rise in the air or fly — in magic-realism novels and other books. Among them are Remedios in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Margarita in Mikhael Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, and the title character of J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan — which was first a play, then a novel, then an animated movie, then a live TV film, and finally a jar of peanut butter which also flew when Dave tossed it out the window to compare its hang time with a jar of Skippy peanut butter. Denying me the opportunity to swat both brands off the counter with my cat paws.

There are also characters who might not be extraordinarily adept in a brute physical way but are really, really smart. Hermione Granger of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books, Sherlock Holmes of Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective fiction, Hercule Poirot of Agatha Christie’s mysteries, Lisbeth Salander of Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and its sequels, etc. Lisbeth sadly did not have a cat tattoo, but I forgive her because she’s Swedish and thus might toss some Swedish meatballs my way.

Dave will reply to comments so that I have time to eat the aforementioned meatballs. Rest assured that I maintain a balanced diet — one meatball in each side of my mouth.

I, Misty the cat, say: “After years of study, I’m finally qualified to inspect Belgian blocks.”

My and Dave’s comedic 2024 book — the part-factual/part-fictional/not-a-children’s-work Misty the Cat…Unleashed — is described and can be purchased on Amazon in paperback or on Kindle. It’s feline-narrated! (And Misty says Amazon reviews are welcome. 🙂 )

This 90-second promo video for the book features a talking cat: 🙂

Dave is also the author of a 2017 literary-trivia book…

…and a 2012 memoir that focuses on cartooning and more.

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 my school district’s huge, recently discovered deficit — is here.