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.
Book Serendipity, Mid-December 2024 to Mid-February 2025
I call it “Book Serendipity” when two or more books that I read at the same time or in quick succession have something in common – the more bizarre, the better. This is a regular feature of mine every couple of months. Because I usually have 20–30 books on the go at once, I suppose I’m more prone to such incidents. People frequently ask how I remember all of these coincidences. The answer is: I jot them down on scraps of paper or input them immediately into a file on my PC desktop; otherwise, they would flit away!
The following are in roughly chronological order.
- The angel Ariel appears in Through a Glass Darkly by Jostein Gaarder and Constructing a Witch by Helen Ivory.
- The protagonist’s surname is English in Wild Houses by Colin Barrett and The Cannibal Owl by Aaron Gwyn.
- I read scenes of grief over a tree being cut down / falling next to one’s house in Dispersals by Jessica J. Lee and Small Rain by Garth Greenwell, one right after the other.
- A mother who does kundalini yoga in All Fours by Miranda July and Unattached by Reannon Muth.
- The idea that happiness (unlike anxiety and sorrow) leaves no trace in writing or in life appeared for me on the same day in Memorial Days by Geraldine Brooks and Small Rain by Garth Greenwell.
- Someone considers suicide by falling but realizes that at the current height they would injure themself but not die in Wild Houses by Colin Barrett, The Snow Queen by Michael Cunningham, and The Courage Consort by Michel Faber.
- The homosexual “bear” stereotype appears in The Snow Queen by Michael Cunningham and Small Rain by Garth Greenwell.
- A William Blake epigraph in Open, Heaven by Seán Hewitt and one of the poems included in Poetry Unbound by Pádraig Ó Tuama.
- A group biography including nine pen portraits (plus the author): Nine Minds by Daniel Tammet, followed in quick succession by Uneven by Sam Mills. (Similar, but with just seven subjects, is a book I’m currently reading about women’s religious conversions, Godstruck by Kelsey Osgood.)
- A book–life serendipity moment: in All Fours by Miranda July there is mention of an elderly cat named Alfie who needs to be given medication several times a day. Snap!
- By chance, I started reading Myself and Other Animals, a posthumous collection of short autobiographical pieces by Gerald Durrell, on his centenary (7 January 2025).
- Guilt over destroying a bird’s nest in The Book of George by Kate Greathead and I’ll Come to You by Rebecca Kauffman.
- The main female character has a birthmark in The Book of George by Kate Greathead and The Blindfold by Siri Hustvedt.
- Reading two novels at the same time that open with a new family having to be found for a little boy because his mentally ill mother is presumed to have died by suicide: Unexpected Lessons in Love by Bernardine Bishop and Going Home by Tom Lamont.
The protagonist is mistaken for a two-year-old boy’s father in The Book of George by Kate Greathead and Going Home by Tom Lamont.
- The mother is named Ellen in The Book of George by Kate Greathead and I’ll Come to You by Rebecca Kauffman.
- An ailing elderly father named Vic in Going Home by Tom Lamont and The God of the Woods by Liz Moore.
- A mother is sent to a mental hospital after the loss of her young son in Invisible by Paul Auster and The God of the Woods by Liz Moore.
- A brother and sister share a New York City apartment in Invisible by Paul Auster and The Book of George by Kate Greathead.
- A mention of the Japanese artist Hokusai in While the Earth Holds Its Breath by Helen Moat and The Secret Life of Snow by Giles Whittell.
Adults dressing up for Halloween in The Blindfold by Siri Hustvedt and I’ll Come to You by Rebecca Kauffman.
- A second husband named Tim in Unexpected Lessons in Love by Bernardine Bishop and Because We Must by Tracy Youngblom.
- The idea that ‘queers find each other’ in Edge of the World: An Anthology of Queer Travel Writing edited by Alden Jones and My Autobiography of Carson McCullers by Jenn Shapland.
- Experiencing 9/11 as a freshman in college (just like me!) in Dirty Kitchen by Jill Damatac and The Book of George by Kate Greathead. (There is also a 9/11 section in Confessions by Catherine Airey.)
- An intense poker game in I’ll Come to You by Rebecca Kauffman and Going Home by Tom Lamont.
The main character is expelled on false drug possession charges in Invisible by Paul Auster and Alligator Tears by Edgar Gomez.
- Missing the chance to say goodbye before a father’s death, and a parent wondering aloud to their son whether they’ve been a good parent in The Book of George by Kate Greathead and The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro.
- Someone departs suddenly, leaving her clothes and books behind, in Invisible by Paul Auster and My Autobiography of Carson McCullers by Jenn Shapland.
- Mentions of DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, an Obama-era U.S. immigration policy) and “Two-Buck Chuck” (a nickname for the Charles Shaw bargain wine sold at Trader Joe’s) in Dirty Kitchen by Jill Damatac and Alligator Tears by Edgar Gomez.
- A City Hall wedding in New York City in Baumgartner by Paul Auster and Dirty Kitchen by Jill Damatac.
- Polish Jewish heritage and a parent who died of pancreatic cancer in Baumgartner by Paul Auster and The History of Love by Nicole Krauss.
- In Because We Must by Tracy Youngblom, she reads The Tale of Despereaux by Kate DiCamillo aloud to her son while he is recovering in hospital. I was reading Despereaux at the same time! (Also, in real-life serendipity, Youngblom and I both have a sister named Trish.)
- A code of 1–3 knocks is used in Confessions by Catherine Airey and The History of Love by Nicole Krauss.
A scene of a teacup breaking in Junction of Earth and Sky by Susan Buttenwieser and The Möbius Book by Catherine Lacey.
What’s the weirdest reading coincidence you’ve had lately?
Adventures in Rereading: The History of Love by Nicole Krauss for Valentine’s Day
Special Valentine’s edition. Every year I say I’m really not a Valentine’s Day person and yet manage a themed post featuring one or more books with “Love” or “Heart” in the title. This is the ninth year in a row, in fact – after 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024!
Leopold Gursky is an octogenarian Holocaust survivor, locksmith and writer manqué; Alma Singer is a misfit teenager grieving her father. What connects them? A philosophical novel called The History of Love, lost for years before being published in Spanish. Alma’s late father saw it in a bookshop window in Buenos Aires and bought it for his love. They adored it so much they named their daughter after the heroine. Now his widow is translating it into English on commission for a covert client. Leo and Alma’s distinctive voices, wry but earnest, really make this sparkle. Alma’s sections are numbered fragments from a diary and there are also excerpts from the book within the book. My only critique would be that she sounds young for her age; her precocity makes her seem closer to 10 than 15. But her little brother Bird, who thinks he may be the messiah, is a delight. The array of New York City locales includes a life drawing class, a record office, and a Central Park bench. A gentle air of mystery circulates as we work out who Leo’s son is and how Alma tracks down the author. It’s a bittersweet story that insists on love as an equivalent to loss. Complex but accessible, bookish and heartfelt, it’s one to recommend to my book club in the future. (Little Free Library) 
Finishing my reread during a coffee date in Hungerford this morning.
My original rating (2011):
When I first read this, I mostly considered it in comparison to Krauss’s former husband Jonathan Safran Foer’s work. (I’ve long since read everything by both of them.) I noted then that it
has a lot of elements in common with Everything is Illuminated, such as a preoccupation with Eastern European and Jewish ancestry, quirky methods of narration including multiple voices, and a sweet humour that lies alongside such heart-rending stories of family and loss that tears are never far from your eyes. Leo Gursky and Alma Singer are delightful and distinct characters. I wasn’t sure about the missing/plagiarized/mistaken The History of Love itself; the ruined copies, the different translations, the way the manuscript was constantly changing hands – all this was intriguing, but the book itself was a postmodern jumble of magic realism and pointless meanderings of thought.
Dang, I was harsh! But admirably pithy about the plot. It’s intriguing that I’ve successfully reread Krauss but failed with Foer when I attempted Everything is Illuminated again in 2020. Reading the first, 9/11-set section of Confessions by Catherine Airey, I’ve also been recalling his Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and thinking it probably wouldn’t stand up to a reread either. I suspect I’d find it mawkish, especially with its child narrator. Alma evades that trap, perhaps by being that little bit older, though she sounds young because of how geeky and sheltered she is.
Winter Reads, I: Michael Cunningham & Helen Moat
It’s been feeling springlike in southern England with plenty of birdsong and flowers, yet cold weather keeps making periodic returns. (For my next instalment of wintry reads, I’ll try to attract some snow to match the snowdrops by reading three “Snow” books.) Today I have a novel drawing on a melancholy Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale and a nature/travel book about learning to appreciate winter.
The Snow Queen by Michael Cunningham (2014)
It was among my favourite first lines encountered last year: “A celestial light appeared to Barrett Meeks in the sky over Central Park, four days after Barrett had been mauled, once again, by love.” Barrett is gay and shares an apartment with his brother, Tyler, and Tyler’s fiancée, Beth. Beth has cancer and, though none of them has dared to hope that she will live, Barrett’s epiphany brings a supernatural optimism that will fuel them through the next few years, from one presidential election autumn (2004) to the next (2008). Meanwhile, Tyler, a stalled musician, returns to drugs to try to find inspiration for his wedding song for Beth. The other characters in the orbit of this odd love triangle of sorts are Liz, Beth and Barrett’s boss at a vintage clothing store, and Andrew, Liz’s decades-younger boyfriend. It’s a peculiar family unit that expands and contracts over the years.
Of course, Cunningham takes inspiration, thematically and linguistically, from Hans Christian Andersen’s tale about love and conversion, most obviously in an early dreamlike passage about Tyler letting snow swirl into the apartment through the open windows:
He returns to the window. If that windblown ice crystal meant to weld itself to his eye, the transformation is already complete; he can see more clearly now with the aid of this minuscule magnifying mirror…
I was most captivated by the early chapters of the novel, picking it up late one night and racing to page 75, which is almost unheard of for me. The rest took me significantly longer to get through, and in the intervening five weeks or so much of the detail has evaporated. But I remember that I got Chris Adrian and Julia Glass vibes from the plot and loved the showy prose. (And several times while reading I remarked to people around me how ironic it was that these characters in a 2014 novel are so outraged about Dubya’s re-election. Just you all wait two years, and then another eight!)
I fancy going on a mini Cunningham binge this year. I plan to recommend The Hours for book club, which would be a reread for me. Otherwise, I’ve only read his travel book, Land’s End. I own a copy of Specimen Days and the library has Day, but I’d have to source all the rest secondhand. Simon of Stuck in a Book is a big fan and here are his rankings. I have some great stuff ahead! (Secondhand – Awesomebooks.com)
While the Earth Holds Its Breath: Embracing the Winter Season by Helen Moat (2024)
Like many of us, Moat struggles with mood and motivation during the darkest and coldest months of the year. Over the course of three recent winters overlapping with the pandemic, she strove to change her attitude. The book spins short autobiographical pieces out of wintry walks near her Derbyshire home or further afield. Paying closer attention to the natural spectacles of the season and indulging in cosy food and holiday rituals helped, as did trips to places where winters are either a welcome respite (Spain) or so much harsher as to put her own into perspective (Lapland and Japan). My favourite pieces of all were about sharing English Christmas traditions with new Ukrainian refugee friends.
There were many incidents and emotions I could relate to here – a walk on the canal towpath always makes me feel better, and the car-heavy lifestyle I resume on trips to America feels unnatural.
Days are where we must live, but it didn’t have to be a prison of house and walls. I needed the rush of air, the slap of wind on my cheeks. I needed to feel alive. Outdoors.
I’d never liked the rain, but if I were to grow to love winters on my island, I had to learn to love wet weather, go out in it.
What can there be but winter? It belongs to the circle of life. And I belonged to winter, whether I liked it or not. Indoors, or moving from house to vehicle and back to house again, I lost all sense of my place on this Earth. This world would be my home for just the smallest of moments in the vastness of time, in the turning of the seasons. It was a privilege, I realised.
However, the content is repetitive such that the three-year cycle doesn’t add a lot and the same sorts of pat sentences about learning to love winter recur. Were the timeline condensed, there might have been more of a focus on the more interesting travel segments, which also include France and Scotland. So many have jumped on the Wintering bandwagon, but Katherine May’s book felt fresh in a way the others haven’t.
With thanks to Saraband for the free copy for review.
Any wintry reading (or weather) for you lately?
Paul Auster Reading Week, II: Baumgartner & Travels in the Scriptorium (#AusterRW25 #ReadIndies)
It’s the final day of Annabel’s Paul Auster Reading Week and, after last week’s reviews of Invisible and Siri Hustvedt’s The Blindfold, I’m squeaking in with a short review of his final novel, Baumgartner, which Annabel chose as the buddy read and Cathy also wrote about. I paired it at random with another of his novellas and found that the two have a similar basic setup: an elderly man being let down by his body and struggling to memorialize what is important from his earlier life. They also happen to feature a character named Anna Blume, and other character names recur from his previous work. I wonder how fair it would be to say that most of Auster’s novels have the same autofiction-inspired protagonist, and are part of the same interlocking universe (à la David Mitchell and Elizabeth Strout)?
Baumgartner (2023)
Sy Baumgartner is a Princeton philosophy professor nearing retirement. The accidental death of his wife, Anna Blume, a decade ago, is still a raw loss he compares to a phantom limb. Only now can he bring himself to consider 1) proposing marriage to his younger colleague and longtime casual girlfriend, Judith Feuer, and 2) allowing a PhD student to sort through reams of Anna’s unpublished work, including poetry, translations and unfinished novels. The book includes a few of her autobiographical fragments, as well as excerpts from his writings, such as an account of a trip to Ukraine to explore his heritage (elsewhere we learn his mother’s name was Ruth Auster) and a précis of his book about car culture.
Baumgartner’s past is similar to Auster’s (and Adam Walker’s from Invisible – the two characters have a mutual friend in writer James Freeman), but not identical. His childhood memories and the passion and companionship he found with Anna are quite sweet. But I was somewhat thrown by the tone in sections that have this grumpy older man experiencing pseudo-comic incidents such as tumbling down the stairs while showing the meter reader the way. To my relief, the book doesn’t take the tragic turn the last pages seem to augur, instead leaving readers with a nicely open ending.
It’s not this that makes Baumgartner feel incomplete so much as the fact that any of its threads might have been expanded into a full-length novel. Maybe Auster had various projects on the go at the time of his final illness and combined them. That could explain the mishmash. I also had the odd sense that there were unconscious pastiches of other authors. Baumgartner reminds me a lot of James Darke, the curmudgeonly widower in Rick Gekoski’s pair of novels. When Baumgartner speaks to his dead wife on the telephone, I went hunting through my notes because I knew I’d encountered that specific plot before (the short story “The Telephone” by Mary Treadgold, collected in Fear, edited by Roald Dahl). The Ukraine passage might have come from Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer. So, for me, this was less distinctive as Auster works go. However, it’s gently readable and not formally challenging so it’s a pleasant valedictory volume if not the best representative of his oeuvre. (Public library)
Travels in the Scriptorium (2006)
This is very much in the vein of The Locked Room and Oracle Night and indeed makes reference to characters from those earlier books (Sophie Fanshawe and Peter Stillman from the former; John Trause from the latter). Mr. Blank lives in a sparse room containing manuscript pages and a stack of photographs. He is tended by a nurse named Anna Blume and given a rainbow of pharmaceuticals. Whether the pills help or keep him pacified is unclear. The haziness of his memory could be due to age or the drugs. He receives various visitors he feels he should recognize but can’t, and from the comments they make he fears he is being punished for dangerous missions he spearheaded. Even Anna, object of his pitiable sexual desires, is somehow his moral superior. Everyday self-care is struggle enough for him, but he does end up reading and adding to the partial stories on the table, including a dark Western set in an alternative 19th-century USA. Whatever he’s done in the past, he’s now an imprisoned writer and this is a day in his newly constrained life. The novella is a deliberate assemblage of typical Auster tropes and characters; there’s a puppet-master here, but no point. An indulgent minor work. But that’s okay as I still have plenty of appealing books from his back catalogue to read. [Interestingly, the American cover has a white horse in the centre of the room, an embodiment of Mr. Blank’s childhood memory of a white rocking-horse he called Whitey.] (Public library)
Faber, Auster’s longtime publisher, counts towards Reading Independent Publishers Month.
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
Bookish Beck 