jean-m-auel

What Is So Rare as a Cat Post in June?

Posted by

96

SO ready for my close-up. (Photo by some human.)

I, Misty the cat, am back for my every-two-month guest blog post — this time starting with a book-related complaint. Is my beef the fact that few males in literature are as handsome as my feline self? Well, that’s an issue, but my complaint actually involves libraries not always having every book in a series — causing me to slap photos of not-there novels on milk cartons under the word MISSING.

Sure, I realize some of those novels are being borrowed by library users, but my cat intuition suspects that in other cases the whole series were not ordered by acquisitions departments. If Amnesty International didn’t have infinitely more important things to do, they’d investigate.

I most recently wrestled with missing-book syndrome after looking several times for Y Is for Yesterday, the 25th and final installment of Sue Grafton’s wonderful series of alphabet mysteries (the author unfortunately died before authoring Z). I decided not to write 25 strongly worded…letters.

Then, after reading Peter May’s riveting thriller The Blackhouse and its equally intense sequel The Lewis Man (unexpectedly not about Jerry Lewis in The Nutty Professor), I returned to the library several times with hopeful tail in air looking for the third installment: The Chessmen. But it was never there. Not even a single cheap plastic pawn, rook, or bishop. Sure, I could try to get on a waiting list (if my local library had those books) or do the interlibrary loan thing, but I have so many books on my to-read list that I just ended up borrowing other novels. After briefly sobbing for multiple days.

During my last library visit vainly seeking The Chessmen, I randomly chose a different Peter May novel called Lockdown. Didn’t like it at all; I abandoned the book after struggling through nearly 100 pages — though I kindly gave the library some clues about where I had abandoned said book. (Hint: it’s buried near where labor leader Jimmy Hoffa disappeared in 1975.) Even the best authors can write the occasional clunker, and their prison terms for doing so tend to be only several years.

More clunkers by otherwise excellent authors who are not cats like me? Stephen King’s Cell, Kristin Hannah’s Fly Away, Willa Cather’s Sapphira and the Slave Girl, and Jack London’s A Daughter of the Snows, to name four. I’d love to see what’s in the parent-name boxes on that snow daughter’s birth certificate.

Nary a clunker among George Eliot’s big-five novels published in this chronological order: Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner, Middlemarch, and Daniel Deronda. Oddly, Mary Ann Evans wrote the same five novels — meaning she and Eliot may have been smoking noms de plume.

Daniel Deronda reminds me — the intermittently meowing Misty — that many fictional works have alliterative titles: Black Beauty (Anna Sewell), Captains Courageous (Rudyard Kipling), Cat’s Cradle (Kurt Vonnegut), Golden Girl (Elin Hilderbrand), Gone Girl (Gillian Flynn), Make Me (Lee Child), Marjorie Morningstar (Herman Wouk), Nicholas Nickleby (Charles Dickens), Perestroika in Paris (Jane Smiley), Peter Pan (J.M. Barrie), Rob Roy (Walter Scott), The Cuckoo’s Calling (J.K. Rowling), The Custom of the Country (Edith Wharton), The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald), The Master and Margarita (Mikhail Bulgakov), The Boys from Biloxi (John Grisham), The Plains of Passage (Jean M. Auel), etc. Oh, and Crime and Crunishment.

What does “crunishment” mean? I think it has something to do with being bombarded by croutons.

It’s June and the sun is often out, so I would like to conclude this post with some novels that have “Sun” in their titles. The Sun Also Rises, of course, which I feel is overrated Hemingway — although he was a big fan of never-overrated cats. Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro. A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini. And so on. I, Misty the cat, do not live in “The House of the Rising Sun” but instead dwell in “The Apartment of the Rising Sun” — from which I emerge every morning for my daily leashed walk to do more reading: STOP signs, street signs, graffiti, license plates, T-shirt logos, and the occasional plane skywriting “Where’s the final alphabet mystery?”

My human Dave will reply to all comments because “crunishment” is not a word.

Misty the cat says: “I’m inches from garden-bag greatness.”

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 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, including 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 — with primary election results, a governor’s mixed reaction to protests against an awful immigrant detention center, and more — is here.

Summer in the City? No, Summer with a Kitty

Posted by

80

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.