December Reading Plans & Year-End Goals
Somehow the end of the year is less than four weeks away, so it’s time to start getting realistic about what I can read before 2018 begins. I wish I was the sort of person who was always reading books 4+ months before the release date and setting trends, but I’ve only read three 2018 releases so far, and it’s doubtful I’ll get to more than another handful before the end of the year. Any that I do read and can recommend I will round up briefly in a couple weeks or so.
I’m at least feeling pleased with myself for resuming and/or finishing all but two of the 14 books I had on hold as of last month; one I finally DNFed (The Unseen by Roy Jacobsen) and another I’m happy to put off until the new year (Paradise Road: Jack Kerouac’s Lost Highway and My Search for America by Jay Atkinson – since he’s recreating the journey taken for On the Road, I should look over a copy of that first). Ideally, the plan is to finish all the books I’m currently reading to clear the decks for a new year.
Some other vague reading plans for the month:
I might do a Classic of the Month (I’m currently reading The Awakening by Kate Chopin) … but a Doorstopper isn’t looking likely unless I pick up Hillary Clinton’s Living History. However, there are a few books of doorstopper length pictured in the piles below.
Christmas-themed books. The title-less book with the ribbon is Seven Days of Us by Francesca Hornak, a Goodreads giveaway win. I think I’ll start that plus the Amory today since I’m going to a carol service this evening. On Kindle: A Very Russian Christmas, a story anthology I read about half of last year and might finish this year.
Winter-themed books. On Kindle: currently reading When the Professor Got Stuck in the Snow by Dan Rhodes; Winter by Karl Ove Knausgaard is to be read. (The subtitle of Spufford’s book is “Ice and the English Imagination”.)
As the holidays approach, I start to daydream about what books I might indulge in during the time off. (I’m giving myself 11 whole days off of editing, though I may still have a few paid reviews to squeeze in.) The kinds of books I would like to prioritize are:
Absorbing reads. Books that promise to be thrilling (says the person who doesn’t generally read crime thrillers); books I can get lost in (often long ones). On Kindle: The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden.
Cozy reads. Animal books, especially cat books, generally fall into this category, as do funny books and children’s books. My mother and I love Braun’s cat mysteries; I read them all starting when I was about 11. I’ve never reread any, so I’d like to see how they stand up years later. Goodreads has been trying to recommend me Duncton Wood for ages, which is funny as I’ve had my eye on it anyway. My husband read the series when he was a kid and we still own some well-worn copies. Given how much I loved Watership Down and Brian Jacques’ novels as a child, I’m hoping it’s a pretty safe bet.
Books I’ve been meaning to read for ages. ’Nuff said. On Kindle: far too many.
And, as always, I’m in the position of wishing I’d gotten to many more of this year’s releases. In fact, there are at least 22 books from 2017 on my e-readers that I still intend to read:
- A Precautionary Tale: How One Small Town Banned Pesticides, Preserved Its Food Heritage, and Inspired a Movement by Philip Ackerman-Leist
- In the Midst of Winter by Isabel Allende
The Floating World by C. Morgan Babst- The Day that Went Missing by Richard Beard
- The Best American Series taster volume (skim only?)
- The Heart’s Invisible Furies by John Boyne*
- Guesswork: A Memoir in Essays by Martha Cooley
- The Night Brother by Rosie Garland
- Difficult Women by Roxane Gay
- The Twelve-Mile Straight by Eleanor Henderson
- Eco-Dementia by Janet Kauffman [poetry]
- The Rules Do Not Apply by Ariel Levy
- A Stitch of Time: The Year a Brain Injury Changed My Language and Life by Lauren Marks
- Hug Everyone You Know: A Year of Community, Courage, and Cancer by Antoinette Truglio Martin
Homing Instinct: Early Motherhood on a Midwestern Farm by Sarah Menkedick- One Station Away by Olaf Olafsson
- Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan’s Disaster Zone by Richard Lloyd Parry
- Memory’s Last Breath: Field Notes on My Dementia by Gerda Saunders
- See What I Have Done by Sarah Schmidt
- What She Ate: Six Remarkable Women and the Food That Tells Their Stories by Laura Shapiro
- Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore by Matthew J. Sullivan
- Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward*
* = The two I most want to read, and thus will try hardest to get to before the end of the year. But the Boyne sure is long.
[The 2017 book I most wanted to read but never got hold of in any form was The Resurrection of Joan Ashby by Cherise Wolas.]
Are there any books from my stacks or lists that you want to put in a good word for?
How does December’s reading look for you?
Cats I’ve Encountered in Books Recently
Even when it’s not a book that’s specifically about cats, cats often seem to turn up in my reading. Maybe it’s simply that I look out for them more since I became a cat owner several years ago. Here are some of the quotes, scenes or whole books featuring cats that I’ve come across this year.
Cats real and imaginary
Readers see some of the action from the perspective of Polanski the cat in The Plimsoll Line by Juan Gracia Armendáriz. While the feline might not grasp the emotional importance of the scenes he witnesses, we do. “The cat narrows its eyes when it sees the man lean against the window frame, overcome by a fit of sobbing that has nothing to do with sadness, or sorrow, but with an internal crumbling, like the collapse of a wave breaking on the shore of his skin and sweeping away his memory.”
From Anna of the Five Towns by Arnold Bennett: “Anna was disturbed by the arrival at the front door of the milk-girl. Alternately with her father, she stayed at home on Sunday evenings, partly to receive the evening milk and partly to guard the house. The Persian cat with one ear preceded her to the door as soon as he heard the clatter of the can. The stout little milk-girl dispensed one pint of milk into Anna’s jug, and spilt an eleemosynary supply on the step for the cat. ‘He does like it fresh, Miss,’ said the milk-girl, smiling at the greedy cat, and then, with a ‘Lovely evenin’,’ departed down the street, one fat red arm stretched horizontally out to balance the weight of the can in the other.”
From Kilvert’s Diary by Francis Kilvert: “Toby [the cat] sits before the fire on the hearthrug and now and then jumps up on my knee to be stroked. The mice scurry rattling round the wainscot and Toby darts off in great excitement to listen and watch for them.” (18 Oct. 1870)
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami starts with a missing cat. “So now I had to go cat hunting. I had always liked cats. And I liked this particular cat. But cats have their own way of living. They’re not stupid. If a cat stopped living where you happened to be, that meant it had decided to go somewhere else. If it got tired and hungry, it would come back. Finally, though, to keep Kumiko happy, I would have to go looking for our cat. I had nothing better to do.”
I’m also 64 pages into Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore; in Chapter 6 we meet another seeker of lost cats, Nakata, when he has an absurd conversation with a black cat named Otsuka. (Perhaps he’s the creature pictured on the cover of my paperback?)
Picture books
Doorkins the Cathedral Cat by Lisa Gutwein: This sweet children’s book tells the true story of how a stray cat wandered into London’s Southwark Cathedral in 2008 and gradually made it her home. It proceeds day by day through one week to give a helpful idea of the range of activities the cathedral hosts – everything from a wedding to a regular Sunday service – but also showcases important events like visits from the Bishop and the Queen. In every case we get to see how Doorkins insinuates herself into proceedings. I liked how the bright colors of the illustrations echo the cathedral’s stained glass, and appreciated the photo gallery and extra information at the end. The author, a doctor whose husband is a verger at the cathedral, and illustrator Rowan Ambrose, a dentist, met at King’s College London, where I used to work.
The Church Mice in Action by Graham Oakley: My third from the series, I think. The mice suggest to the parson’s sister that she might enter Sampson into cat shows to earn enough to repair the church roof. They then do their best to rig the results, but couldn’t have predicted the consequences. I loved the late summer/onset of autumn atmosphere.
On the extreme reluctance to remove a cat from one’s lap.
From The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë: Miss Millward, Eliza’s older sister and the vicar’s daughter, when he passes her a ball of wool that’s rolled under the table – “Thank you, Mr. Markham. I would have picked it up myself, only I did not want to disturb the cat.”
From the essay “On Cat-Worship” in George Mikes’s How to Be Decadent: “Having joked for decades about how the English worship the cat, like the ancient Egyptians only more so, I have fallen for the cat myself. It has become my sacred animal. … I have been late for appointments, failed to go shopping and missed planes because Tsi-Tsa was sitting on my lap.”
Other cat-themed reading on the horizon:
- The Cat Who Stayed for Christmas by Cleveland Amory, borrowed from the public library, should make a good pre-holiday read.
- I’m keen to get hold of The Travelling Cat Chronicles by Hiro Arikawa, which comes out in November.
- My husband gave me a copy of Tom Cox’s The Good, the Bad and the Furry for my birthday.
- I have Jason Hazeley’s The Fireside Grown-Up Guide to the Cat and Thomas McNamee’s The Inner Life of Cats on my Kindle.
- It’s not particularly geared towards cat lovers (see Eleanor’s review), but it is called My Cat Yugoslavia by Pajtim Statovci and is also on my Kindle.
- I have copies of Cats in May by Doreen Tovey plus a couple of anthologies of cat-related writing picked up in Hay-on-Wye.
Yet More Books about Cats
I reviewed two sets of cat books last year, one in April and another in October. When you start looking, you realize there are endless pet books out there, with cat books seemingly second only to dog books in popularity. In the past few months I’ve encountered five more books about cats: a Christmas classic, a scientist’s introduction to cat behavior, an anthology of church-themed fiction, an installment of a charming children’s series, and a very funny memoir.
The Cat Who Came for Christmas by Cleveland Amory
In the late 1970s Amory was a bona fide animal lover (he’d founded the NYC-based Fund for Animals, after all) but didn’t have a pet of his own until he was involved in the rescue of an unprepossessing stray one Christmas: Polar Bear, the cat who would introduce his fussy habits to a bachelor’s household and complicate his life in all kinds of ways. Cat owners will recognize so many things – the 3 a.m. bowl-emptying snack, testy relations with various other species – but I found the book strangely belabored and irrelevant as it goes into the history of the domestic cat, the business of naming cats, and Amory’s travels on behalf of the Fund. [Public library] 
Favorite lines:
- “For an animal person, an animal-less home is no home at all.”
- “The fact is that most cats, most of the time, have already met everybody they care to meet.”
Cat Sense: The Feline Enigma Revealed by John Bradshaw
Bradshaw is the founder and director of the Anthrozoology Institute at the University of Bristol. He writes as both an expert in animal behavior and a cat lover. I only skimmed this one rather than reading it in full because I expected it would repeat a lot of the information in Abigail Tucker’s The Lion in the Living Room. There is indeed a fair amount of overlap in the discussion of domestic cat evolution and the environmental effects of cats’ hunting instinct, but Bradshaw’s book is unique for the amount of time it gives to cat genetics and behavior, especially things like breeding and how cats interact with other cats and with people. This would be a good halfway house if you want a readable but quite scientific book about cats. The Lion in the Living Room is the better all-round introduction, though. [Public library]
Bradshaw’s diagram of a cat landing on its feet.
Favorite lines:
- “Part of the pleasure of owning a pet comes from projecting our thoughts and feelings on to the animal, treating it as if it were almost human. We talk to our cats as if they could understand our every word, while knowing full well that they certainly can’t.”
- “Purring therefore seems to convey a general request: ‘Please settle down next to me.’ In the gentlest way, the purring cat is asking someone else, whether cat or human, to do something for it.”
The Church Cat: Clerical Cats in Stories and Verse, edited by Mark Bryant
This seems like an impossibly narrow category: stories and poems that combine cats with a church setting. But Bryant has found some real gems that fulfill just that criterion. A few of the short stories, by Ellis Peters, M.R. James and Ernest Dudley, are compact murder mysteries. I most enjoyed Arnold Bennett’s “The Cat and Cupid,” about spinster sisters and “notorious cat-idolaters” who squabble over the handsome new organist; W.L. Alden’s “The Yellow Terror,” about a ship’s cat who insists that his owner hold church services onboard; and Christopher Park’s “The Case of the Cross-eyed Sphinx and the Holy Ghost” (my overall favorite) in which a newly married man meets his wife’s family, including a defrocked chaplain in a wheelchair and his barking mad wife, all of whom have “had an overdose of cat worship.” Of the 21 pieces, only five or six stood out for me (and none of the poetry, really). [Charity shop]
The Church Mice Adrift by Graham Oakley
This 1976 picture book was my introduction to the 14-strong “Church Mice” series. The town of Wortlethorpe is looking to modernize: tearing down all its heritage buildings in favor of glass-fronted monstrosities. This leaves a troop of rats without a home, but they spy an opportunity when they sneak through Sampson’s catflap in the church door. The wily creatures displace the church mice and even Sampson the ginger wonder cat can’t take back his territory. So the cat and his mice are forced to get creative, and come up with a plan that involves a doll’s house turned into a floating café for rats…
I loved the illustrations (the 1970s clothing on the few human characters cracked me up!) and the plot, a good mixture of humor and mild peril. There’s a fair number of words on each page, yet not too many. I can see this being ideal to read aloud with young children before having them take over the reading at age 5 or 6. I look forward to experiencing more of the church mice’s adventures. My thanks to Margaret of From Pyrenees to Pennines for recommending this charming series. [Public library] 
Cats in the Belfry by Doreen Tovey
Solomon stalking a neighbor dog.
Do you think your cat is noisy and troublesome? Be thankful you don’t have Doreen Tovey’s Siamese cats! This 1957 book was the first of her many cat-themed memoirs and is perfectly delightful for any animal lover. Their first Siamese was Sugieh, who loved nothing more than to jump into a full bath and frighten the life out of the bather. They bred her and kept two of the littermates, Solomon and Sheba, a mischievous pair whose first three years of antics fill much of the book: terrorizing dogs, pulling down the curtains, following horses, and developing, er, ‘refined’ tastes – “What with spiders, string, and the occasional butterfly caught napping on a cabbage which he ate wings and all, Solomon was, of course, frequently sick. But never, ever, was he so gloriously sick as the day he ate the cream cakes.” [Charity shop]
Up next:
I have Thomas McNamee’s The Inner Life of Cats (coming out on March 28th) and Jason Hazeley’s The Fireside Grown-Up Guide to the Cat (coming out on April 4th) on my e-readers.- I’m sure to borrow more books from the public library by Tovey and Bradshaw, who has a book about training your cat (ha!).
- I covet I Could Pee on This, Too: And More Poems by More Cats by Francesco Marciuliano.
Whether you consider yourself a cat lover or not, do any of these books appeal?
Tidings by Ruth Padel & Other Christmassy Reading
Ruth Padel is one of my favorite poets, so I jumped at the chance to read her new book-length holiday poem, Tidings: A Christmas Journey. Set across one Christmas Eve and Christmas day and narrated by Charoum, the Angel of Silence, the poem switches between Holly, a seven-year-old girl excited for Christmas, and Robin, a forty-four-year-old homeless man who follows a fox to a Crisis Centre. Here he gets a hot meal and some human kindness to make up for the usual bleakness of the holidays:
Christmas is the salt mine.
Salt in the wound, a nothing-time.
I was loved once. Who by? Can’t remember.
I especially liked the fragments that juxtapose this contemporary London story with centuries of history:
Up here the evening glides over golden moss
on the flat-top tomb of Mary Wollstonecraft
&
Pagan Christmas fizzes and teems with ghosts,
midwinter fires, mummers and waites, Yule
logs and mistletoe.
The poem also journeys to Jerusalem and Rome to survey a whole world of Christmas traditions, then and now.
It’s a lovely little volume, with the red, black and white theme offset by touches of gold. The illustrations are gorgeous, but the story line disappointed me: starting with the character names, it all felt rather clichéd. Padel has treated urban foxes much more successfully in her collection The Soho Leopard, and apart from a very few instances – like the above quotes – the verse struck me as largely undistinguished, even awkward (like the out-of-place clinical vocabulary in “Love, / and the lack of it, can change the limbic brain”). This means that, for me, this book fails to earn a place as a Christmas classic I’ll reread year after year.
Tidings was published in the UK by Chatto & Windus on November 3rd. My thanks to Cat Mitchell of Random House for the free review copy.
My rating: 
Other Christmassy Reading
This year I’m resuming my place in Waiting on the Word, Malcolm Guite’s selection of religious-slanted poems to read from the start of Advent through Epiphany. For those who want to explore the history and interpretation of Christmas, I can recommend The First Christmas by the late Marcus Borg, one of my favorite progressive theologians.
As I have for the past several years, I’ll dip into The Ecco Book of Christmas Stories, edited by Alberto Manguel. My favorites are by Truman Capote, John Cheever, Jane Gardam and Jeanette Winterson (who has a brand-new, full-length Christmas story collection out this year). I’ll also sample some Russian classics via A Very Russian Christmas, which has short stories from Tolstoy, Chekhov and more.
In addition, I have Cleveland Amory’s The Cat Who Came for Christmas and The Cat Who Stayed for Christmas out from the library, which should make for some very cozy reading under the cat. I’ll browse the numerous Christmas-themed poems in U.A. Fanthorpe’s Collected Poems, another library book. And I may even deign to try Hogfather, one from my husband’s beloved Discworld series by the late Terry Pratchett.
[See also this wonderful list of Christmas reading suggestions from Heaven Ali.]
Are you reading anything special this Christmas season?
More Books about Cats
Back in April I reviewed five books about cats, several of which proved to be a mite disappointing. I’m happy to report that in the meantime I have searched high and low and found some great books about cats that I would not hesitate to recommend to readers with even the slightest interest in our feline friends. I’ve got a book of trivia, a set of heart-warming autobiographical anecdotes, two books of poems, a sweet memoir, and – best of all – a wide-ranging new book that combines the science and cultural history of the domestic cat.
Fifty Nifty Cat Facts by J.M. Chapman and S.M. Davis
This one’s geared towards children, but I enjoyed the format: each page pairs a cute cat photo with a piece of trivia you might or might not have known. I learned a few neat things:
- a cat’s internal temperature is higher than ours (more like 101.5° F)
- cats have no sweet taste buds and have a dominant paw
- all calicos are female (orange spots being an X-linked genetic trait)
- cats could actually drink seawater – their kidneys are effective enough to process the salt
- people who say they are allergic to cat fur are actually allergic to a protein in the saliva they use to wash themselves!
My rating: 
Cat Stories by James Herriot
When I was a child my mother and I loved Herriot’s memoirs of life as a primarily large-animal veterinarian in Yorkshire. One story from this volume – the final, Christmas-themed one – is familiar from a picture book we brought out around the holidays. The rest are all drawn from the memoirs, though, so the fact that I don’t remember them must be a function of time; it could be as many as 22 years since I last picked up a Herriot book! In any case, these are charming tales about gentle medical mysteries and even the most aloof of stray cats becoming devoted pets. I especially liked “Alfred: The Sweet-Shop Cat” and “Oscar: The Socialite Cat,” about two endearing creatures known around the village. I also appreciated Herriot’s observation that “cats are connoisseurs of comfort.” With cute watercolor illustrations, this little book would make a great gift for any cat lover.
My rating: 
I Could Pee on This: And Other Poems by Cats by Francesco Marciuliano
Cat owners must own a copy for the coffee table. That’s just not negotiable. You will recognize so many of the behaviors and attitudes mentioned here. This is a humor book rather than a poetry collection, so the quality of the poems (all from the point-of-view of a cat) is kind of neither here nor there. Even so, Chapter 1 is a lot better than the other three and contains most of the purely hilarious verses, like “I Lick Your Nose” and “Closed Door.” Favorite lines included “I trip you when you walk down the stairs / So you know I’m always near” and “I said I could sit on your lap forever / Don’t you even think of trying to get up / Well, you should have gone to the bathroom beforehand”. “Sushi” is a perfect haiku with a kicker of a last line: “Did you really think / That you could hide fish in rice? / Oh, the green paste burns!”
My rating: 
Well-Versed Cats by Lance Percival
A cute set of poems, most of them describing different breeds of domestic cats and a few of the big cats. There are a lot of puns and jokes along with the end rhymes, making these akin to limericks in tone if not in form. My favorite was “Skimpy the Stray?” – about a wily cat who wanders the neighborhood eliciting sympathetic snacks from various cat lovers. “The routine still goes on, so I mustn’t be too catty, / But she ought to change her name from ‘Skimpy’ into ‘Fatty’.” Our cat had a habit of stealing neighbor kitties’ food and a history of “going visiting,” as the shelter we adopted him from put it, so this particular poem rang all too true. The illustrations (by Lalla Ward, wife of Richard Dawkins) are also great fun.
My rating:
Raining Cats and Donkeys by Doreen Tovey
Originally from 1967, this lighthearted memoir tells of Tovey’s life in a Somerset village with her husband Charles, two demanding Siamese cats named Solomon and Sheba, and Annabel the donkey. “Nobody misses anything in our village,” Tovey remarks, and along with her charming anecdotes about her pets there are plenty of amusing encounters with the human locals too. In my favorite chapter, Annabel is taken off to mate with a Shetland pony and Solomon has a tussle with a hare. I can recommend this to fans of animal books by Gerald Durrell and Jon Katz. Tovey wrote a whole series of books about her various Siamese cats and life in a 250-year-old cottage. I found a copy of Cats in the Belfry on my visit to Cambridge and will probably read it over Christmas for a cozy treat.
My rating:
The Lion in the Living Room by Abigail Tucker
Now this is the amazing cat book I’d been looking for! It’s a fascinating interdisciplinary look at how the domestic cat has taken over the world – both literally and figuratively. A writer for Smithsonian magazine, Tucker writes engaging, accessible popular science. The closest comparison I can make, style-wise, is to Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, even though that has much heavier subject matter.
The book traces domestic cat evolution from the big cats of the La Brea tar pits to the modern day, explaining why cats are only built to eat flesh and retain the hunting instinct even though they rarely have to look further than their designated bowls for food nowadays. Alongside the science, though, is plenty of cultural history. You’ll learn about how cats have been an invasive species in many sensitive environments, and about the bizarre, Halloween-scary story of the Toxoplasma gondii parasite. You’ll meet the tender hearts who volunteer for trap, neuter and release campaigns to cut down on the euthanizing of strays at shelters; the enthusiasts who breed unusual varieties of cats and groom them for shows; and the oddballs who buy into the $58 billion pet industry’s novelty accessories.
The lion in my living room.
From the earliest domestication of animals to the cat meme-dominated Internet, Tucker – a cat lady herself, as frequent mentions of her ginger tom Cheeto attest – marvels at how cats have succeeded by endearing themselves to humans and adapting as if effortlessly to any habitat in which they find themselves. A must for cat lovers for sure, but I don’t think you even have to be a pet person to find this all-embracing book pretty enthralling.
My rating:
Up next: The Church Cat, an anthology from a recent charity shop haul; The Cat Who Came for Christmas by Cleveland Amory, Cat Sense by John Bradshaw, and Talk to the Tail by Tom Cox from the public library.
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
Bookish Beck 