To Read & To Write

A picture of my lady cat (but always my baby cat), Grigio, and my library copy of "The Guest Cat" "The Guest Cat" (published 2001), is a book about a cat named Chibi. At first a stray wandering around in Japan, she is taken in by a little boy and his mother who live next to a sweet middle aged couple. Takashi Hiraide, the author, explains this very particular corner of Japan with wondrous detail. The couple has named this corner of town "Lightning Alley" for the way the streets curve and turn sharply and for the elements of uphill and downhill. For these geographical reasons in their quiet district, the two neighbors cannot see or even interact with one another on a regular basis. But, the cat Chibi wanders and strolls back and forth between their two houses, spending an equal amount of time in each home.  The couple, with no child of their own (the reasons remain somewhat ambiguous), develop a deep affection for Chibi. Without even picking her ...

This edition of "Aesop's Fables" - published on the 2500th anniversary of Aesop's death (1941) - is dated. Therein lies its value. The introduction is very informative, letting readers know the myth behind the collector and storyteller Aesop who was a slave to the Greeks, circa 600 years B.C. However, despite the value of the stories in this collection (from my personal bookshelf), this isn't a book I'd recommend to someone who isn't an academic, scholar, or intellectually inclined... the stories are very reductive, always ending with "The Point --->" followed by a quick summary of the short story's moral, which is one or two pages length at the most. I found most of the stories hilarious, as the "points" were either entirely obvious or so far-fetched as to almost seem like jokes. The general theme of the fables seems to say: in a world where every man is for himself (although every "man" is in fact an animal withi...

I found an Advanced Reader's Copy of this book at the library where I work, so I was able to read this before the public gets to it this April. None of the other librarians had taken it, and I usually don't end up reading ARCs, but after looking at the cover a couple times, I found myself genuinely intrigued. As I finished the first chapter, I knew that I was going to read the entire thing. I am personally in a state of constant love and hate as well as inspiration and anxiety in terms of my relationship to social media (particularly Instagram), and this book spoke volumes to me about a term that is curiously not found anywhere  within these pages: mindfulness.  Odell probably omitted that word intentionally, as her goal in her personal and business life does not want to seduce readers into "hot" and "trending" terminology, as we know mindfulness has become over the past few years. Instead, she clearly explains her goals with the book right away, de...

As this is the only book by Virginia Woolf that I've read thus far (I'm a bit ashamed of that; but I'll catch up!) I'm not sure how I can compare this work to her oeuvre. But I can say that "Kew Gardens" is a gorgeously strange book that is the length of a children's picture book. It takes place in England's real Kew Gardens: a botanical garden that holds the most diverse plant life in the world and which still stands today.  Woolf writes in prose, using her eyes to describe flower beds, leaves, stalks, snails, and the people who walk amongst them. Her words are written in exquisite imaginative detail, as if she were looking through an enchanted magnifying glass, allowing her to hear the desires of the flowers and other plant-life and the inner thoughts of their visitors. Woolf records fictional conversations of the inhabitants, such as inner ruminations of their past in tandem with their almost paranoiac response to the garden that surrounds ...

Now this - this is a good old-fashioned fairy-tale. Perhaps somewhat predictable, at least for me, this by no means ruins the tightly bound suspense Juliet Marillier builds in her perfectly crafted novel "Dreamer's Pool", the first in a series. The story focuses not on the lady elucidated on the cover, but another, Blackthorn, an ex-healer, or wise woman as they used to call them, who is wrongfully imprisoned by an unjust ruler of treacherous lands. Who knows when the story takes place exactly, but it can be deduced that it was a pre-industrial and extremely rural time, a time of forests, kingdoms, peasants, princes, and princesses, good and evil kings, a time seething with enchantment as well as the inevitable fey, a time physically and mentally harsh, a time when people swam through confusion to find what it is we call *value*. While in prison, Blackthorn becomes an aquaintence of the husky, burly Grim, more like a beast than a man, brutal and monstrous yet gentle ...