Reading Wales Month: Tishani Doshi & Ruth Janette Ruck (#ReadingWales25)
It’s my first time participating in Reading Wales Month, hosted this year by Karen of BookerTalk. I happened to be reading a collection by a Welsh-Gujarati poet, and added a Welsh hill farming memoir to my stack so I could review two books towards this challenge.
A God at the Door by Tishani Doshi (2021)
I discovered Doshi through the phenomenal Girls Are Coming out of the Woods, which I reviewed for Wasafiri literary magazine. This fourth collection is just as rich in long, forthright feminist and political poems. Violence against women is a theme that crops up again and again in her work, as in “Every Unbearable Thing”: “this is not / a poem against longing / but against the kind of one-way / desire that herds you into a / dead-end alley”. The arresting title of the sestina “We Will Not Kill You. We’ll Just Shoot You in the Vagina” is something the former Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte said in 2018 in reference to female communist rebels. Doshi links femicide and ecocide with “A Possible Explanation as to Why We Mutilate Women & Trees, which Tries to End on a Note of Hope”. Her poem titles are often striking and tell stories in and of themselves. Several made me laugh, such as “Advice for Pliny the Elder, Big Daddy of Mansplainers,” which is shaped like a menstrual cup.
In defiance of those who would destroy it, Doshi affirms the primacy of the body. The joyfully absurd “In a Dream I Give Birth to a Sumo Wrestler” ends with the lines “How easy to forget / that all we have are these bodies. That all of this, all of this is holy.” Poems are inspired by Emily Dickinson and Frida Kahlo as well as by real events that provoke outrage. The clever folktale-like pair “Microeconomics” and “Macroeconomics” contrasts a woman dutifully growing peas and trying to get ahead with exploitative situations: “One man sits on another if he can. … One man goes / into the mines for another man to sparkle.” I also found many wise words on grief. Doshi is a treasure. (Secondhand – Green Ink Booksellers, Hay-on-Wye) 
Place of Stones by Ruth Janette Ruck (1961)
“Farming is rather like the theatre—whatever happens the show must go on.”
I reviewed Ruck’s Along Came a Llama several years ago when it was re-released by Faber. This was the first of her three memoirs about life at Carneddi (which means “place of stones”), the hill farm in North Wales that she and her family took over in the 1950s. After college, Ruck trained at a farm on the Isle of Wight and later completed an apprenticeship at Oathill Farm, Oxfordshire under George Henderson, who seems to have been something of a celebrity farmer back then (he contributes a brief but complimentary foreword). By age 20 she was in full charge of Carneddi, where they kept sheep, cattle and fowl. Many of their neighbours had Welsh as a first or only language. At that time, farmers were eligible for government grants. Ruck put in an intensive hen-rearing barn and started growing strawberries and rearing turkeys for Christmas.
Even when things were going well, it was a hand-to-mouth existence and storms or illness could set everything back. The Rucks renovated a nearby cottage to serve as a holiday let. Another windfall came in the bizarre form of a nearby film shoot by Twentieth Century Fox (The Inn of the Sixth Happiness, starring Ingrid Bergman). Mountainous North Wales stood in for China, and the film crew hired Ruck as a driver and, like many locals, as an occasional extra. This book was light and mildly entertaining, though probably more detailed about everyday farm work and projects than I needed. I was reminded again of Doreen Tovey, especially in the passage about Topsy the pet black sheep, but also this time of Betty Macdonald (The Egg and I) and Janet White (The Sheep Stell). (Secondhand – Lions bookshop, Alnwick) 
Winter Reading, Part II: “Snow” Books by Coleman, Rice & Whittell
Here I am squeaking in on the day before the spring equinox – when it’s predicted to be warmer than Ibiza here in southern England, as headlines have it – with a few snowy reads that have been on my stack for much of the winter. I started reading this trio when we got a dusting back in January, in case (as proved to be true) it was our only snow of the year. I have an arresting work of autofiction that recreates a period of postpartum psychosis, a mildly dystopian novel by a First Nations Canadian, and a snow-lover’s compendium of science and trivia.
As it happens, I’ll be starting the spring in the middle of We Do Not Part by Han Kang, which is austerely beautiful and eerily snowy: its narrator traverses a blizzard to rescue her friend’s pet bird; and the friend’s mother recalls a village massacre that left piles of snow-covered corpses. Here Kang muses on the power of snow:
Snow had an unreality to it. Was this because of its pace or its beauty? There was an accompanying clarity to snow as well, especially snow, drifting snow. What was and wasn’t important were made distinct. Certain facts became chillingly apparent. Pain, for one.
The Shutter of Snow by Emily Holmes Coleman (1930)
Coleman (1899–1974), an expatriate American poet, was part of the Paris literary milieu in the 1920s and then the London scene of the 1930s. (She worked with T.S. Eliot on editing Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood, for instance.) This novella, her only published work of fiction, was based on her experience of giving birth to her son in 1924, suffering from puerperal fever and a mental breakdown, and being incarcerated in Rochester State Hospital. Although the portrait of Marthe Gail is in the omniscient third person, the stream-of-consciousness style – no speech marks or apostrophes, minimal punctuation – recalls unreliable first-person narration. Marthe believes she is Jesus Christ. Her husband Christopher visits occasionally, hoping she’ll soon be well enough to come home to their baby. It’s hard to believe this was written a century ago; I could imagine it being published tomorrow. It is absolutely worth rediscovering. While I admired the weird lyrical prose (“in his heart was growing a stern and ruddy pear … He would make of his heart a stolen marrow bone and clutch snow crystals in the night to his liking”; “This earth is made of tar and every morsel is stuck upon it to wither … there were orange peelings lying in the snow”), the interactions between patients, nurses and doctors got tedious. (Secondhand – Community Furniture Project, Newbury)
Moon of the Crusted Snow by Waubgeshig Rice (2018)
A mysterious total power outage heralds not just the onset of winter or a temporary crisis but the coming of a new era. For this Anishinaabe community, it will require a return to ancient nomadic, hunter-gatherer ways. I was expecting a sinister dystopian; while there are rumours of a more widespread collapse, the focus is on adaptation versus despair, internal resilience versus external threats. Rice reiterates that Indigenous peoples have often had to rebuild their worlds: “Survival had always been an integral part of their culture. It was their history. The skills they needed to persevere in this northern terrain … were proud knowledge held close through the decades of imposed adversity.” As an elder remarks, apocalypse is nothing new. I was more interested in these ideas than in how they played out in the plot. Evan works snow-ploughs until, with food running short and many falling ill, he assumes the grim task of an undertaker. I was a little disappointed that it’s a white interloper breaks their taboos, but it is interesting how he is compared to the mythical windigo in a dream sequence. As short as this novel is, I found it plodding, especially in the first half. It does pick up from that point (and there is a sequel). I was reminded somewhat of Sherman Alexie. It was probably my first book by an Indigenous Canadian, which was reason enough to read it, though I wonder if I would warm more to his short stories. (Birthday gift from my wish list last year) 
The Secret Life of Snow: The science and the stories behind nature’s greatest wonder by Giles Whittell (2018)
This is so much like The Snow Tourist by Charlie English it was almost uncanny. Whittell, an English journalist who has written history and travel books, is a snow obsessive and hates that, while he may see a few more major snow events in his lifetime, his children probably won’t experience any in their adulthood. Topics in the chatty chapters include historical research into snowflakes, meteorological knowledge then and now and the ongoing challenge of forecasting winter storms, record-breaking snowfalls and the places still most likely to have snow cover, and the depiction of snow in medieval paintings (like English, he zeroes in on Bruegel) and Bond films. There’s a bit too much on skiing for my liking: it keeps popping up in segments on the Olympics, avalanches, and how famous snow spots are reckoning with their uncertain economic future. It’s a fun and accessible book with many an eye-popping statistic, but, coming as it did a decade after English’s, does sound the alarm more shrilly about the future of snow. As in, we’ll get maybe 15 more years (until 2040), before overall warming means it will only fall as rain. “That idea, like death, is hard to think about without losing your bearings, which is why, aware of my cowardice and moral abdication, I prefer to think of the snowy present and recent past rather than of the uncertain future.” (Secondhand – Community Furniture Project, Newbury)
Whittell’s mention of the U.S. East Coast “Snowmaggedon” of February 2010 had me digging out photos my mother sent me of the aftermath at our family home of the time.
Any wintry reading (or weather) for you lately? Or is it looking like spring?
Reading Ireland Month, I: Donoghue, Longley, Tóibín
St. Patrick’s Day is a good occasion to compile my first set of contributions to Cathy’s Reading Ireland Month. Today I have an early novel by a favourite author, a poetry collection inspired by nature and mythology, and a sequel that I read for book club.
Stir-Fry by Emma Donoghue (1994)
After enjoying Slammerkin so much last year, I decided to catch up on more of Donoghue’s way-back catalogue. She tends to alternate between contemporary and historical settings. I have a slight preference for the former, but she can excel at both; it really depends on the book. I reckon this was edgy for its time. Maria (whose name rhymes with “pariah”) arrives in Dublin for university at age 17, green in every way after a religious upbringing in the countryside. In response to a flat-share advert stipulating “NO BIGOTS,” she ends up living with Ruth and Jael (pronounced “Yale”), two mature students. Ruth is the mother hen, doing all the cooking and fretting over the others’ wellbeing; Jael is a wild, henna-haired 30-year-old prone to drinking whisky by the mug-full. Maria attends lectures, takes a job cleaning office buildings, and finds a friend circle through her backstage student theatre volunteering. She’s mildly interested in American exchange student Galway and then leather-clad Damien (until she realizes he has a boyfriend), but nothing ever goes further than a kiss.
It’s obvious to readers that Ruth and Jael are a couple, but Maria doesn’t work it out until a third of the way into the book. At first she’s mortified, but soon the realization is just one more aspect of her coming of age. Maria’s friend Yvonne can’t understand why she doesn’t leave – “how can you put up with being a gooseberry?” – but Maria insists, “They really don’t make me feel left out … I think they need me to absorb some of the static. They say they’d be fighting like cats if I wasn’t around to distract them.” Scenes alternate between the flat and the campus, which Donoghue depicts as a place where radicalism and repression jostle for position. Ruth drags Maria to a Tuesday evening Women’s Group meeting that ends abruptly: “A porter put his greying head in the door to comment that they’d have to be out in five minutes, girls, this room was booked for the archaeologists’ cheese ’n’ wine.” Later, Ruth’s is the Against voice in a debate on “That homosexuality is a blot on Irish society.”
Mostly, this short novel is a dance between the three central characters. The Irish-accented banter between them is a joy. Jael’s devil-may-care attitude contrasts with Ruth and Maria’s anxiety about how they are perceived by others. Ruth and Jael are figures in the Hebrew Bible and their devotion/boldness dichotomy is applicable to the characters here, too. The stereotypical markers of lesbian identity haven’t really changed, but had Donoghue written this now I think she would at least have made Maria a year older and avoided negativity about Damien and Jael’s bisexuality. At heart this is a sweet romance and an engaging picture of early 1990s feminism, but it doesn’t completely steer clear of predictability and I would have happily taken another 50–70 pages if it meant she could have fleshed out the characters and their interactions a little more. [Guess what was for my lunch this afternoon? Stir fry!] (Secondhand – Awesomebooks.com) 
The Ghost Orchid by Michael Longley (1995)
Longley’s sixth collection draws much of its imagery from nature and Greek and Roman classics. Seven poems incorporate quotations and free translations of the Iliad and Odyssey; elsewhere, he retells the story of Baucis and Philemon and other characters from Ovid. The Orient and the erotic are also major influences; references to Hokusai bookend poems about Chinese artefacts. Poppies link vignettes of the First and Second World Wars. Longley’s poetry is earthy in its emphasis on material objects and sex. Alliteration and slant rhymes are common techniques and the vocabulary is always precise. This was the third collection I’ve read by the late Belfast poet, and with its disparate topics it didn’t all cohere for me. My two favourite poems are naughty indeed:
(Secondhand – Green Ink Booksellers, Hay-on-Wye)
Long Island by Colm Tóibín (2024)
{SPOILERS in this one}
I read Brooklyn when it first came out and didn’t revisit it (via book or film) before reading this. While recent knowledge of the first book isn’t necessary, it probably would make you better able to relate to Eilis, who is something of an emotional blank here. She’s been married for 20 years to Tony, a plumber, and is a mother to two teenagers. His tight-knit Italian American family might be considered nurturing, but for her it is more imprisoning: their four houses form an enclave and she’s secretly relieved when her mother-in-law tells her she needn’t feel obliged to join in the Sunday lunch tradition anymore.
When news comes that Tony has impregnated a married woman and the cuckolded husband plans to leave the baby on the Fiorellos’ doorstep when the time arrives, Eilis checks out of the marriage. She uses her mother’s upcoming 80th birthday as an excuse to go back to Ireland for the summer. Here Eilis gets caught up in a love triangle with publican Jim Farrell, who was infatuated with her 20 years ago and still hasn’t forgotten her, and Nancy Sheridan, a widow who runs a fish and chip shop and has been Jim’s secret lover for a couple of years. Nancy has a vision of her future and won’t let Eilis stand in her way.
I felt for all three in their predicaments but most admired Nancy’s pluck. Ironically given the title, the novel spends more of its time in Ireland and only really comes alive there. There’s also a reference to Nora Webster – cute that Tóibín is trying out the Elizabeth Strout trick of bringing multiple characters together in the same fictional community. But, all told, this was just a so-so book. I’ve read 10 or so works by Tóibín now, in all sorts of genres, and with its plain writing this didn’t stand out at all. It got an average score from my book club, with one person loving it, a couple hating it, and most fairly indifferent. (Public library)
Another batch will be coming up before the end of the month!
10th Blogging Anniversary! & Thoughts on the Women’s Prize and Carol Shields Prize Longlists
I can hardly believe I’ve been blogging for a decade. It seems like no time ago that I started this site on a whim early in my freelance career, soon after my main online publication folded and my brother-in-law died. This is now my 1,486th blog post (so close to that 1,500 milestone!), which means I average 12 posts a month. Between reviews, challenges, memes, book lists, and prize reactions, I maintain a very active blog. I’ve long since stopped caring about numbers of views and likes; I’ll never be a top influencer but I offer quality, thoughtful content for those who are similarly serious about books. The blog has also become a place where I can write about personal things in response to losses and other life changes.
I’m pleased that my blog anniversary happens to coincide with International Women’s Day, around when the Women’s Prize and Carol Shields Prize longlists are announced. I don’t plan to shadow either prize in a concerted way, partly because I’m too busy with reading debut novels in my role as a McKitterick Prize judge, but there are some books that appeal.
Women’s Prize Longlist
Read
- The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley
- Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout
- The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden
Reading
Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie- All Fours by Miranda July
Already Wanted to Read
- Birding by Rose Ruane – For the cover if nothing else (it made my Cover Love post last year)
- The Artist by Lucy Steeds – Susan of A life in books rates it highly: see her review.
Unsure
- A Little Trickerie by Rosanna Pike – The premise is reasonably appealing (an orphan who pretends to be an angel) but I am very much not keen on medieval settings. I’ll wait and see if it’s shortlisted.
Decided Against
- Crooked Seeds by Karen Jennings – I read the Booker-longlisted An Island and it was fine but I don’t need to try anything else by her.
- Nesting by Roisín O’Donnell – 400 pages on an Irish domestic violence situation sounds like A Lot. Reviews have been very favourable, saying it’s as pacey as a thriller. Again, I’ll wait to see if it’s shortlisted.
Not Interested (for now)
- Good Girl by Aria Aber
- Somewhere Else by Jenni Daiches
- Amma by Saraid de Silva (but well done to Weatherglass Books!)
- The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami
- The Persians by Sanam Mahloudji
- Fundamentally by Nussaibah Younis
The blurbs for these don’t attract me, but I’d be willing to change my mind if I see an enthusiastic review or two.
[Shortlist: 2 April; winner: 12 June]
Stab-in-the-dark shortlist predictions: Good Girl, Dream Count, The Dream Hotel, Nesting, The Artist, Tell Me Everything
Carol Shields Prize Longlist
Read
- Liars by Sarah Manguso
DNF
- Cicada Summer by Erica McKeen – I read the first 15% last summer. In 2020, Husha has recently lost her mother and is locked down with her grandfather at his Ontario lake house. I recall that the prose was vague and somewhat obnoxiously poetic.
Reading
- All Fours by Miranda July – The only overlap with the WP. I don’t think that, as happened last year, the repeated title will be the winner. It’s too offbeat and divisive.
Want to Read
- The Hearing Test by Eliza Barry Callahan – Novella-length autofiction about adapting to disability.
- Curiosities by Anne Fleming – A historian becomes obsessed with the story told by five 17th-century manuscripts. Sounds like a queer Possession with a dash of North Woods.
- Pale Shadows by Dominique Fortier, translated by Rhonda Mullins – A Québécois author takes on the legacy of Emily Dickinson via the three women who first brought her poetry into print.
- Obligations to the Wounded by Mubanga Kalimamukwento – Linked short stories about Zambians and Zambian émigrés.
Unsure
- Bear by Julia Phillips – After reading Bear by Marian Engel, I don’t think I need any more bear legend-inspired romances in my life. (I already discounted Eowyn Ivey’s latest.)
- Kin: Practically True Stories by V Efua Prince – I’ve had good luck with other books from Wayne State University Press’ Made in Michigan series but can’t quite work out what this would be like.
- Everything Flirts: Philosophical Romances by Sharon Wahl – Could be intriguing; could be pretentious. At least it’s only novella length. All I can do is try an excerpt.
Not Interested (for now)
- Naniki by Oonya Kempadoo – Someone on Goodreads described this as being like spoken word at a sci-fi convention.
- Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner – I wasn’t keen when it was shortlisted for the Booker, and I haven’t changed my mind.
- River East, River West by Aube Rey Lescure – Ditto but from last year’s WP list.
- Code Noir by Canisia Lubrin – Normally I like linked short stories but a 400+ page count and the heavy subject matter of slavery regulations sound overwhelming.
- Masquerade by O.O. Sangoyomi – I struggle with fantasy at the best of times.
[Shortlist: 3 April; winner: 1 May]
Last year Laura T. and I covered most of the longlist between us and really enjoyed the project. (Marcie of Buried in Print also reviewed a lot of the longlist later in the year.) This year we’ll reassess at the shortlist stage and maybe request a few review copies from the publicist. See Laura’s prize longlist reactions here.
Stab-in-the-dark shortlist predictions: Curiosities, Obligations to the Wounded, Creation Lake, Code Noir, Masquerade
What have you read, or might you read, from these longlists?
Making Plans for a Return to Hay-on-Wye & A Book “Overhaul”
I was last in Hay-on-Wye for my 40th birthday (write-up here). We’ve decided 18 months is a decent length between visits such that we can go back and find enough turnover in the bookshops and changes around the town. The plan is to spend four nights there in early April, in a holiday cottage we’ve not stayed in before. It’s in Cusop, just back over the border into England, which means a pleasant (if not pouring with rain) walk over the fields into the town. Normally we go for just a night or two, so this longer ninth trip to Hay will allow us time to do more local exploring besides thoroughly trawling all the bookshops and rediscovering the best eateries on offer.
An Overhaul of Last Trip’s Book Purchases
Simon of Stuck in a Book has a regular blog feature he calls “The Overhaul,” where he revisits a book haul from some time ago and takes stock of what he’s read, what he still owns, etc. (here’s the most recent one). With his permission, I occasionally borrow the title and format to look back at what I’ve bought. Previous overhaul posts have covered pre-2020 Hay-on-Wye purchases, birthdays, the much-lamented Bookbarn International, and Northumberland. It’s been a good way of holding myself accountable for what I’ve purchased and reminding myself to read more from my shelves.
So, earlier this week I took a look back at the 16 new and secondhand books I acquired in Hay in October 2023. I was quickly dismayed: 18 months might seem like a long time, but as far as my shelves go it is more like the blink of an eye.
Read: Only 1 – Uh oh…
- Learning to Drive by Katha Pollitt
But also:
Partially read: 4
- A God at the Door by Tishani Doshi – Doshi is awesome. This is only my second of her poetry collections. I’ll finish it this month for Dewithon.
- Looking in the Distance by Richard Holloway – The problem with Holloway is that all of his books of recent decades are about the same – a mixture of mediations and long quotations from poetry – and I have one from last year on the review catch-up pile already. But I’m sure I’ll finish this at some point.
- The Ghost Orchid by Michael Longley – No idea why I set this one aside, but I’ve put it back on a current stack.
- The Enduring Melody by Michael Mayne – I have this journal of his approaching death as one of my bedside books and read a tiny bit of it at a time. (Memento mori?)
Skimmed: 1
- Love, Remember: 40 Poems of Loss, Lament and Hope by Malcolm Guite – I enjoyed the poetry selection well enough but didn’t find that the author’s essays added value, so I’m donating this to my church’s theological library.
That left 10 still to read. Eager to make some progress, I picked up a quick win, Comic & Curious Cats, illustrated in an instantly recognizable blocky folk art style by Martin Leman (I also have his Twelve Cats for Christmas, a stocking present I gave my husband this past year) and with words by Angela Carter. Yes, that Angela Carter! It’s picture book size but not really, or not just, for children. Each spread of this modified abecedarian includes a nonsense poem that uses the letter as much as possible: the cat’s name, where they live, what they eat, and a few choice adjectives. I had to laugh at the E cat being labelled “Elephantine.” Who knows, there might be some good future cat names in here: Basil and Clarissa? Francesca and Gordon? Wilberforce? “I love my cat with an XYZ [zed] … There is really nothing more to be said.” Charming. (Secondhand purchase – Hay-on-Wye Booksellers)
Total still unread: 9
Luckily, I’m still keen to read all of them. I’ll start with the two I purchased new, So Happy for You by Celia Laskey, a light LGBTQ thriller about a wedding (from Gay on Wye with birthday money from friends, a sweet older lesbian couple – so it felt appropriate to use their voucher there!), and Past Mortems by Carla Valentine, a memoir set at a mortuary (remainder copy from Addymans); as well as a secondhand novel, The Tie that Binds by Kent Haruf (Hay-on-Wye Booksellers) and the foodie essays of The Man Who Ate Everything by Jeffrey Steingarten (Cinema).
Then, if I still haven’t read them before the trip (who am I kidding…), I’ll pack for the car a few small volumes that will fit neatly into my handbag: Apple of My Eye by Helene Hanff, How to Make an American Quilt by Whitney Otto, and one of the poetry collections.
Literary Wives Club: Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus (2022)
Like pretty much every other woman over 30 on the planet, I read Lessons in Chemistry when it first came out. I was happy for my book club to select it for a later month when I was away; it made a decent selection but I had no need to revisit it, then or now. I think it still holds the record for the longest reservation queue in my library system. I enjoyed this feel-good feminist story well enough but found certain elements hokey, such as Six-Thirty the dog’s preternatural intelligence and Elizabeth Zott’s neurodivergent-like bluntness and lack of sentimentality.
My original review: Elizabeth Zott is a scientist through and through, applying a chemist’s mindset to her every venture, including cooking, rowing and single motherhood in the 1950s. When she is fired from her job in a chemistry lab and gets a gig as a TV cooking show host instead, she sees it as her mission to treat housewives as men’s intellectual equals, but there are plenty of people who don’t care for her unusual methods and free thinking. I was reminded strongly of The Atomic Weight of Love and The Rosie Project, as well as novels by Katherine Heiny and especially John Irving with the deep dive into backstory and particular pet subjects, and the orphan history for Zott’s love interest. This was an enjoyable tragicomedy. You have to cheer for the triumphs she and other female characters win against the system of the time. However, the very precocious child (and dog) stretch belief, and the ending was too pat for me. (Public library)
The main question we ask about the books we read for Literary Wives is:
What does this book say about wives or about the experience of being a wife?
Elizabeth is deeply in love with Calvin Evans yet refuses to be his wife. She spurns marriage because she correctly intuits that it will limit her prospects, this being the 1960s. “I’m going to be a scientist. Successful women scientists don’t marry,” she tells her mother. Forasmuch as she assumes her television audience to be traditional housewives, she rejects their situation for herself. A single mother, a minor celebrity, a scientific researcher: none of these roles would be compatible with marriage. (Though there’s another ultimate reason why she stays unmarried.)
A supporting character, her neighbour Harriet, offers a counterpoint or cautionary tale. She’s trapped in a marriage to an odious man she despises. “Because while she was stuck forever being Mrs. Sloane—she was a Catholic—she never wanted to turn into a Mr. Sloane.”
Almost all of the books we read for the club, whether contemporary or historical, present marriage in at least a somewhat negative light, or warn that there are many things that can go wrong…
See Kate’s, Kay’s and Naomi’s reviews, too!
Coming up next, in June: The Constant Wife by W. Somerset Maugham. This is the first play we’ve done and my first Maugham in a while, so I’m looking forward to it.
#ReadIndies Wrap-Up: February Releases (Jukes, Spence) & Review Catch-Up (Buttery, Foust)
Good riddance to February, which added insult to injury on its final day when my in-laws’ neighbour reversed into the car we were borrowing from a book club friend and smashed the driver’s-side window. The blue skies and crocuses of recent days have been most welcome. The best I can say for the month just departed is that I managed to review 15 books for Kaggsy and Lizzy Siddal’s Reading Independent Publishers Month challenge. These came from 10 splendid publishers: Atlantic Books, Backbone Press, Carcanet Press, Counterpoint, Elliott & Thompson, The Emma Press, Faber, Icon Books, Saraband and Sort Of Books.
Mother Animal by Helen Jukes
When she found out she was pregnant, Jukes (author of A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings) lost herself in research, looking for parallels in the natural world. A friend had told her that “childbirth puts you more in touch with your animal side.” Her daughter was born at the start of the pandemic and so early motherhood was perhaps more than usually isolated and emotionally challenging for her. She had an unexpected C-section after the placenta failed to nourish her daughter sufficiently, and then struggled to breastfeed. “I was, I realised, a little afraid of the baby. I’d expected to feel a sense of recognition – to see in her face some sign of familiarity,” but that wasn’t the case. “She was so … other.”
The long thematic chapters present Jukes’s experiences in parallel to those of other mothering creatures with pregnancy, birth, lactation, making a home (nesting) and enlisting the help of the community. Peppered throughout are trivia she shares with boyfriend, baby and readers. Such as that burying beetles lay eggs on a carcass so their babies feed on carrion from day one. That bonobo females attend births, acting as midwives for each other. That Madrid’s storks have started eating and lining their nests with what they find in landfill instead of migrating to Africa. The “Did you know?” litany quickly becomes precious. The details are not that interesting in themselves, and not sufficiently synthesized to be meaningful. The same factoid about leopard tree iguanas is repeated seven pages apart. A significant amount of information comes from Bitch by Lucy Cooke, which I would recommend instead.
As hybrid scientific memoirs of motherhood go, Lucy Jones’s Matrescence can’t be beat. For its social and political engagement, Jennifer Case’s We Are Animals is a valuable companion. Jukes’s offering pales by comparison because her story – not having the delivery she wanted, struggling to connect with her baby, her relationship with the father falling apart – is all too common, and she doesn’t have the scientific bona fides for readers to accept her as a valid source of zoological facts.
I would make an exception, though, for the central chapter, “Forever Milk,” which might be condensed and published in a big-name newspaper as a Rachel Carson-like exposé about endocrine disruptors and forever chemicals. Like any mother, Jukes wants nothing more than to protect her daughter, but how can she when household products (waterproof clothing, non-stick pans, cleaning sprays) contain toxic chemicals and her breastmilk is sure to be contaminated? Add in microplastics and the situation is bleak. We don’t know singly, let alone collectively, what these pollutants are doing to species in the long term, but most likely they interfere with reproduction and alter behaviour. The central message of this chapter, and the book as a whole, is that animals are amazing but vulnerable. “What is this world if nowhere is separate – nowhere safe?” If you think about this stuff much, you can’t bear it. Yet it’s a truth we all have to live with. It’s a brave author who dares sit with the unthinkable.
With thanks to Elliott & Thompson for the free copy for review.
Daughter of the Sun by Rachel Spence
The Emma Press has published poetry pamphlets before, but this is their inaugural full-length work. Rachel Spence’s second collection is in two parts: first is “Call & Response,” a sonnet sequence structured as a play and considering her relationship with her mother. Act 1 starts in 1976 and zooms forward to key moments when they fell out and then reversed their estrangement. The next section finds them in the new roles of patient and carer. “Your final check-up. August. Nimbus clouds / prised open by Delft blue. Waiting is hard.” In Act 3, death is near; “in that quantum hinge, we made / an alphabet from love’s ungrammared stutter.” The poems of the last act are dated precisely, not just to a month and year as earlier but down to the very day, hour and minute. Whether in Ludlow or Venice, Spence crystallizes moments from the ongoingness of grief, drawing images from the natural world.
The second part of the book, “Medea’s Song,” is looser in style and more dispersed across the page. It’s a feminist reinterpretation that refuses to make of Medea a simple murderess, instead redeeming her as a wise woman. “Do not call them seers or sisters // They are the owls of history // nightfliers outliers”. I’m not drawn to Greek myth updates but I expect this would be rewarding for fans of similar projects by Fiona Benson and Anne Carson. Some of the specific vocabulary from the first section recurs, linking the two in a satisfying way.
With thanks to The Emma Press for the free copy for review.
I’m also catching up on two 2024 releases from indie publishers that I was sent for review:
Knead to Know: A History of Baking by Neil Buttery
Not only the pun-tastic title, but also the excellent nominative determinism of chef and food historian Dr Neil Buttery’s name, earned this a place in my 2024 Superlatives post. In not quite 240 pages, it achieves the improbable, producing an exhaustive history of baked goods through miniature essays about every conceivable subcategory. Although the focus is on British baking, the story begins in ancient times with the first grains and the earliest cooking technique of making griddlecakes on a hearthstone. (Speaking of which, make sure you’re prepared for Pancake Day, aka Shrove Tuesday, this week!) Across multi-part chapters about bread, biscuits and cakes, pies and puddings, and patisserie, Buttery spotlights regional specialties, many of them familiar (Cornish pasties and Eccles cakes); a few have fallen into obscurity (Gloucester pancakes and Yorkshire Christmas pyes). Some dishes’ origin stories are apocryphal, while others can be traced back to historical cookbooks.
I was fascinated by the evolution of traditional holiday bakes. “The long tapering shape of the stollen is supposed to represent the infant Christ wrapped in His swaddling.” In general, there is just the right amount of chemistry, and while in places the writing is shaky or at least poorly edited (“populous” instead of populace!), there are good quips, too: “dried fruit haters do have a miserable time at Christmas to be fair.” I read the book in bites across a number of months, which felt appropriate because it’s more a reference text for the kitchen shelf than a narrative to read straight through. Good for picking up now and then over a cup of tea.
With thanks to Icon Books for the free copy for review.
You Are Leaving the American Sector: Love Poems by Rebecca Foust
Foust’s fifth collection – at 41 pages, the length of a long chapbook – is in conversation with the language and storyline of 1984. George Orwell’s classic took on new prescience for her during Donald Trump’s first presidential term, a period marked by a pandemic as well as by corruption, doublespeak and violence. “Rally Insurrection” is a clever erasure poem illustrating how a propagandist might rebrand the storming of the Capitol on 6 January 2021: instead of “a mob came to Washington to / disrupt the peaceful transfer of power,” the Ministry of Truth bulletin would read “a crowd came to Washington to fight / for their country”. “Language Matters” insists that “language / is the most dangerous weapon in any totalitarian arsenal” and warns “A dictator / might do these things, but surely not // a president.” How much more strongly does this resonate in 2025.
The second and third sections engage directly with the story of Julia and Winston – the collection takes its seemingly inapt subtitle from Foust’s appreciation of 1984’s “idea of love as a subversive act affirming free will, expression, and personal privacy”. Her bold verse also confronts the repeal of abortion rights (“Breaking News”) and toxic masculinity (“Consent: A Primer”). There are some internal rhymes and slant rhymes, as well as a few end rhymes all the more striking for their rarity. I only wish this had been published a few years sooner, when its message might have seemed timelier – though, unfortunately, it is still apropos.
Some favorite lines:
“How can a future exist if we can erase or revise the past?”
“2016, dark year / of the ascension / of our Lord the Mad Clown”
“It’s happening now, / somewhere. Not here, // not yet. But so long as Big Brother is out there— / & he will always be out there—it could, // & one day, maybe it will.”
Published by Backbone Press in the USA. With thanks to the author for the e-copy for review.
Which of these appeal to you? What indie publishers have you read from recently?
The Moomins and the Great Flood (#Moomins80) & Poetry (#ReadIndies)
To mark the 80th anniversary of Tove Jansson’s Moomins books, Kaggsy, Liz et al. are doing a readalong of the whole series, starting with The Moomins and the Great Flood. I received a copy of Sort Of Books’ 2024 reissue edition for Christmas, so I was unknowingly all set to take part. I also give quick responses to a couple of collections I read recently from two favourite indie poetry publishers in the UK, The Emma Press and Carcanet Press. These are reads 9–11 for Kaggsy and Lizzy Siddal’s Reading Independent Publishers Month challenge.
The Moomins and the Great Flood by Tove Jansson (1945; 1991)
[Translated from the Swedish by David McDuff]
Moomintroll and Moominmamma are the only two Moomins who appear here. They’re nomads, looking for a place to call home and searching for Moominpappa, who has disappeared. With them are “the creature” (later known as Sniff) and Tulippa, a beautiful flower-girl. They encounter a Serpent and a sea-troll and make a stormy journey in a boat piloted by the Hattifatteners. My favourite scene has Moominmamma rescuing a cat and her kittens from rising floodwaters. The book ends with the central pair making their way to the idyllic valley that will be the base for all their future adventures. Sort Of and Frank Cottrell Boyce, who wrote an introduction, emphasize how (climate) refugees link Jansson’s writing in 1939 to today, but it’s a subtle theme. Still, one always worth drawing attention to.
I read my first Moomins tale in 2011 and have been reading them out of order and at random ever since; only one remains unread. Unfortunately, I did not find it rewarding to go right back to the beginning. At barely 50 pages (padded out by the Cottrell-Boyce introduction and an appendix of Jansson’s who’s-who notes), this story feels scant, offering little more than a hint of the delightful recurring characters and themes to come. Jansson had not yet given the Moomins their trademark rounded hippo-like snouts; they’re more alien and less cute here. It’s like seeing early Jim Henson drawings of Garfield before he was a fat cat. That just ain’t right. I don’t know why I’d assumed the Moomins are human-size. When you see one next to a marabou stork you realize how tiny they are; Jansson’s notes specify 20 cm tall. (Gift)
The Emma Press Anthology of Homesickness and Exile, ed. by Rachel Piercey and Emma Wright (2014)
This early anthology chimes with the review above, as well as more generally with the Moomins series’ frequent tone of melancholy and nostalgia. A couple of excerpts from Stephen Sexton’s “Skype” reveal a typical viewpoint: “That it’s strange to miss home / and be in it” and “How strange home / does not stay as it’s left.” (Such wonderfully off-kilter enjambment in the latter!) People are always changing, just as much as places – ‘You can’t go home again’; ‘You never set foot in the same river twice’ and so on. Zeina Hashem Beck captures these ideas in the first stanza of “Ten Years Later in a Different Bar”: “The city has changed like cities do; / the bar where we sang has closed. / We have changed like cities do.”
Departures, arrivals; longing, regret: these are classic themes from Ovid (the inspiration for this volume) onward. Holly Hopkins and Rachel Long were additional familiar names for me to see in the table of contents. My two favourite poems were “The Restaurant at One Thousand Feet” (about the CN Tower in Toronto) by John McCullough, whose collections I’ve enjoyed before; and “The Town” by Alex Bell, which personifies a closed-minded Dorset community – “The town wraps me tight as swaddling … When I came to the town I brought things with me / from outside, and the town took them / for my own good.” Home is complicated – something one might spend an entire life searching for, or trying to escape. (New purchase from publisher)
Gold by Elaine Feinstein (2000)
I’d enjoyed Feinstein’s poetry before. The long title poem, which opens the collection, is a monologue by Lorenzo da Ponte, a collaborator of Mozart. Though I was not particularly enraptured with his story, there were some great lines here:
I wanted to live with a bit of flash and brio,
rather than huddle behind ghetto gates.
The last two stanzas are especially memorable:
Poor Mozart was so much less fortunate.
My only sadness is to think of him, a pauper,
lying in his grave, while I became
Professor of Italian literature.
Nobody living can predict their fate.
I moved across the cusp of a new age,
to reach this present hour of privilege.
On this earth, luck is worth more than gold.
Politics, manners, morals all evolve
uncertainly. Best then to be bold.
Best then to be bold!
Of the discrete “Lyrics” that follow, I most liked “Options,” about a former fiancé (“who can tell how long we would have / burned together, before turning to ash?”) and “Snowdonia,” in which she’s surprised when a memory of her father resurfaces through a photograph. Talking to the Dead was more consistently engaging. (Secondhand purchase – Bridport Old Books, 2023)
Love Your Library, February 2025
Thanks, as always, to Elle for posting about her recent library reading!
Libraries are havens, whatever the circumstances. Coinciding with me on my volunteering days are an unhoused man who sits outside using the wifi on a laptop until opening time, a blind flower arranger, bus drivers on loo breaks, and an intellectually disabled man who repeats excellent catch phrases, all to do with Christmas. It’s a space available to all.
My library use over the last month:
(links to books not already reviewed on the blog)
READ
- Travels in the Scriptorium by Paul Auster
- Baumgartner by Paul Auster
- The Tale of Despereaux by Kate DiCamillo
- Myself & Other Animals by Gerald Durrell
- Maurice and Maralyn: An Extraordinary True Story of Shipwreck, Survival and Love by Sophie Elmhirst
- The God of the Woods by Liz Moore
(& the children’s books pictured below)
CURRENTLY READING
- The Black Bird Oracle by Deborah Harkness
- Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems to Open Your World by Pádraig Ó Tuama
- Long Island by Colm Tóibín (for book club)
CHECKED OUT, TO BE READ
- Keep Love: 21 Truths for a Long-Lasting Relationship by Paul Brunson
- Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus (to skim back through for Literary Wives)
- The Forgotten Sense: The Nose and the Perception of Smell by Jonas Olofsson
IN THE RESERVATION QUEUE
- Deep Cuts by Holly Brickley
- Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton
- I Want to Talk to You: And Other Conversations by Diana Evans
- We Do Not Part by Han Kang
- I Am Not a Tourist by Daisy J. Hung
- Bookish: How Reading Shapes Our Lives by Lucy Mangan
- When the Stammer Came to Stay by Maggie O’Farrell
- The Leopard in My House: One Man’s Adventures in Cancerland by Mark Steel
- Three Days in June by Anne Tyler
- Time of the Child by Niall Williams
ON HOLD, TO BE PICKED UP
- Autocracy, Inc. by Anne Applebaum
- Old Soul by Susan Barker
- Day by Michael Cunningham
- The Meteorites: Encounters with Outer Space and Deep Time by Helen Gordon
- Rebel Bodies: A Guide to the Gender Health Gap Revolution by Sarah Graham
- Period Power by Maisie Hill
- The Alternatives by Caoilinn Hughes
RETURNED UNFINISHED
- Confessions by Catherine Airey – I actually read the first 160 pages and enjoyed the first section about Cora in New York City in the wake of 9/11, but once the focus moved to her aunts in Ireland in the 1970s I failed to see a point.
- Unearthing: A Story of Tangled Love and Family Secrets by Kyo Maclear – I made it 50 or so pages into this last year but found it repetitive and elliptical. Dani Shapiro’s Inheritance, which tells quite a similar story (of finding out that the person the author always considered her father was not genetically related to her and that she was conceived by a sperm donor instead), was more engaging.
RETURNED UNREAD
- Newborn: Running Away, Breaking from the Past, Building a New Family by Kerry Hudson – I’m not sure why I requested this given I wasn’t impressed with Lowborn.
- Black Woods, Blue Sky by Eowyn Ivey – Requested off me; will try another time.
- The Coast Road by Alan Murrin – I don’t have time to focus on it now but might get it back out later in the year.
- No Filters: A Mother and Teenage Daughter Love Story by Christie Watson – The premise appealed to me but when I actually opened it up it looked scattered and lite.
What have you been reading or reviewing from the library recently?
Share a link to your own post in the comments. Feel free to use the above image. The hashtag is #LoveYourLibrary.
There Should Be a Cat There
My world was knocked askew earlier this week. Since then I’ve been wandering around the house remarking on the sensation that something is missing. I turned around in my chair at the breakfast table one morning to gaze at the sofa corner behind me and said to my husband C, “There should be a cat there.” Alfie was a constant presence in our lives for 10 years and 8 months; my husband’s first pet ever, and my first as an independent adult. Wherever we went for a decade-plus, he was there when we got home (probably grumbling that his bowl was empty). We adopted him 10 months into my freelance career and he was a faithful work-from-home buddy. He has been with us our whole time in Newbury; I associate him inextricably with home and work life. Even if he spent most of a day sleeping or doing his own thing, just the knowledge that there was another creature in the house was all the company I needed. He was an expert at getting in the way, and just a matter of days ago I was still admonishing “Watch out for the cat” and hearing C trip over his food bowl and litter tray.
Both of our phones’ photo libraries are full of ridiculous and repetitive pictures of the cat asleep. Now I’ve been going around taking photographs of absences. Everything in our house was tailored to an older cat’s needs. His food and water bowls were raised on a fleet of Tupperware to make standing postures more comfortable for him. He used steps all through his mobility-challenged last years. We inherited a proper set of pet steps from a neighbour, but elsewhere rigged up makeshift ones from boxes, document files, crates and stools. In the final weeks, when his claws either slipped or got stuck on everything, I covered the steps in towels so he had something to grip onto and put a strip of carpet in front of his kitchen bowls.
I’ve taken away the food stations, dumped and washed the three litter trays, and laundered the blankets he used the most. It’s the steps I can’t bring myself to take away. I think it’s because I look at them and feel so proud of how he adapted to his limitations. He was by no means the sharpest crayon in the box – he regularly forgot how to use his cat flap to go outside and would ineffectually scrape at it or cry at the back door to come back in – but in the lounge he worked out how to climb the steps plus a pouffe to get to any of the seats. If he got to the top step and looked perplexed, I’d tap out a route for him and he’d follow it. While I would often accuse him of stealing my seat, I knew better. All of the seats were his.
Tuesday was the day. The next day’s sun and birdsong made it feel more like mid-autumn or early spring. The handyman came back to lay floor tiles in the bathroom. I iced my swollen eyes, went for a long walk by the canal, and then faced a day of bustle and noise. It was fine.
Since then it has been worse. Drizzle has set in, C has been away at work or networking events, and the house is too quiet. I half expect to hear, any moment, the pock-pock of the cat climbing the carpeted stairs one by one, claws catching threads on each; his final triumphant heave to the landing accompanied by a huff of effort. I’ll wheel around in my office chair to lock eyes and call, “Hi, buddy! Where you gonna go? Whatcha gonna do?” When I’m downstairs, I expect the opposite: the thump of him getting down from the bed and the steady plop of him gingerly lowering himself one stair at a time and landing at the bottom with a muffled jingle of his collar bell. I’ve found myself doing peculiar things: sniffing an empty Felix beef soup pouch (had I known it was his last meal, I’d have given him his favourite, lamb, instead) and sifting through the kitchen bin and lounge fluff for an empty claw casing to keep. No luck, alas.
I’m comfortable with the terms “cat lady” and “fur baby” despite the stereotypes surrounding them. I don’t apologize about the shape my life has taken. The combination of the unconditional love and weight of responsibility that I felt and the intimate physical care that I performed for him – especially in the few months between his seizures in late October and the day we knew a goodbye had been forced on us – is absolutely akin to what parents feel for their children or what it’s like to undertake the care of an elderly relative.
For 116 days I was a full-time kitty hospice nurse – just like my sister is a hospice nurse for humans in Frederick County, Maryland. Every day curved around his needs. My first tasks on getting up were to check his litter trays, top up kibble and water upstairs and down, add a blood pressure pill to the dry food, and set out a wet food breakfast. Twice a day, around 11, I’d prepare the other medications. The easiest way to get anti-seizure and steroid pills down him was to crush them in a ramekin and mix the powder with a yoghurt-like cat junk food and a dash of water. Then it was time to ambush him with Lick-e-Lix. I’d find him asleep in his basket or on a couch and gently wake him. Like a recalcitrant infant in a highchair, he’d turn his face this way and that, mouth firmly closed. Increasingly, I had to coax him by smearing a bit onto his nose or chin. I’d persist until he deigned to lick the spoon clean.
Early in January, a kind neighbour who could correctly be called a cat-a-holic came to check on Alfie one evening and morning so we could visit our friends in Exeter for an overnight. She brought with her a magical substance she called “cat putty” and, for a while, it was a game changer for pill-giving. Our next-door neighbour and the cat-sitter found it a cinch to get him to eat pills wrapped in putty when they looked in on him once each in early February so we could visit another set of friends in Bristol for a partial weekend. Still I kept going with the Lick-e-Lix. There was something so sweet about spoon-feeding him, regardless of the smelly goo that got all over his face and sometimes dripped on the couch.
The day of the seizures had been a dress rehearsal. We were forced to face his mortality in a more than theoretical way. Once his system adjusted to the phenobarbital, though, we all quickly found a new normal. For those 116 days he plodded along – if not quite as before, not in a significantly diminished way either. They were good days; we are grateful. But they could never be enough. We were greedy. We wanted more. I talked with the vet about the flexibility of medication timings so we could book holidays for the summer. We dreamed up a 17th birthday party for 9 May. I could have kept up this routine indefinitely. Alfie couldn’t.
In my review of Seven Cats I Have Loved by Anat Levit, I complained that too much space was given to each pet’s physical decline. “On the threshold of my cats’ demise, it prescribed the kind of suffering that seemed to have erased the sweetness of all their previous years at once,” she writes. We’re lucky that wasn’t the case. Alfie had quality of life right up until the day or two before the end. I want to remember every phase of his life, not just this final one of more docility and quietness than we’d ever have believed years ago. I would prefer not to focus on the suffering, yet I need to acknowledge that it happened and that it mattered.
I’ve always been interested in medical matters and, detective-like, have been running the sequence of events back through my mind. We never subjected him to expensive imaging or invasive procedures, so we can’t know what precisely was going on, but the vets had some educated guesses: that his weight loss was caused by lymphoma and his seizures by a brain tumour. This was in addition to early-stage kidney disease, high blood pressure and arthritis. So there were serious medical issues there. A cancer was always going to get him, but I’ve still been second-guessing how his last weeks went and whether there was more that I could have done. When did X first happen? When did we first notice Y? Why didn’t I start Z sooner? I can’t quite bear to think of it, but there were probably signs of pain that we didn’t recognize out of ignorance, assuming they were just old cat behaviours or him being weird. Towards the end, there must have been pain that went unmanaged. I will have to forgive myself.
Ultimately, I think we made the best decisions possible with the knowledge we had, as well as the guidance of vets who saw him three times in his last six days. Everything was shutting down and he had had enough. Still, guilt is clearly chasing me. I had a symbolic dream the following night set at one of my childhood homes. The back door opened onto a stairwell with a drain and concrete steps leading up to the backyard. When it rained an exceptional amount, the stairwell filled and the basement sometimes flooded. In the dream, the steps were so wide that Max – the Shetland sheepdog we had when I was ages 7 to 19, and the only other creature at whose death I have been present – and Alfie were side by side on the middle one, while Chewy, my sister’s mutt who lived with us and Max for a time, sat above them. As the water rose right up to their bellies, they remained calm and looked at me. But instead of rushing to help them, I thought that I had to go grab my phone to take pictures.
I had it after my mother’s 2022 death, too: a build-up of futile what-ifs, even though, likewise, a stroke was always going to get her. There was also an urgency to archive everything about her: every quirk, every maddening habit, every key incident. It’s different in that I treasure her own words in letters, cards, e-mails, and her 150 journals; it’s the same in that hundreds of photos can never bring back a presence. I don’t want to forget anything.
It was only Monday evening that Alfie napped on the bed while I took a Zoom call in the chair across from him. Monday night that he slurped up a little dish of gravy and spent hours on C’s lap. Tuesday morning (when he’d stopped eating and drinking) that I, in desperation, shoved an anti-seizure pill down his throat. Weak as he was, he fought me off as stubbornly as ever; I have the network of scratches on the knuckles of my left hand to prove it.
While the cuts are still fresh, while they still sting, I want to get the whole story down. I won’t think about how indulgent it is to post something this long. I won’t tell myself no one could possibly care. I’m writing mostly for myself, after all. As I narrate what happened, I seek to make sense. When I do write more personal material, I cherish the details years down the line. Have you loved another being with your whole heart and had them leave? However the circumstances differ, then, you know my pain. He was my most precious thing.
I’m in the middle of dozens of books, but my heart isn’t in any of my reading. Apart from those with deadlines for paid reviews and library due dates, I will only resume reading when I feel ready. If I miss pub. dates and challenges, so be it. I’m not sure yet whether I’ll be drawn to cat books later this year (“Reading the Meow” has run the past two Junes) or whether it will hurt too much. A couple of years ago I decided that A Cat in the Window by Derek Tangye was the perfect chronicle of life with a cat. Maybe I’ll pick it up to reread and imitate.
I know from my mom’s death that, after some time and cycles of depression and anger have passed, I will be able to take joy in everyday life again. Good memories will overtake those of the last day, and lingering regrets. Meanwhile, I’ll try to be gentle with myself and not run away from the loneliness and emptiness but sit with them. I don’t feel like much of a cat lady without a cat, but I won’t let a petty identity crisis rush me into anything. We may well adopt another cat or two in the future, but not right away. No one can ever replace Alfie anyway.
Some fun stuff:
- Alfie’s nicknames spreadsheet, introduced here, has been updated and categorized. There are 250+! (Some only applied to his heavy years and others to his old age.)
- He also had four theme tunes based on snippets from “Asleep on a Sunbeam” by Belle and Sebastian, “Don’t Bother Me” & “Old Enough” (“whatcha gonna do now?”) by the Raconteurs, and “I Just Don’t Know What to Do with Myself” by the White Stripes. (Jack White has the best hooks.) The last two captured his Foster-like indecision.
- I made a bloopers album of some of the more ridiculous photos of him.
- I’ve reviewed loads of cat books over the years. He made it into this post and this one.
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
Bookish Beck 