the boring life
Mar. 9th, 2006 04:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunrabNo entry yesterday, because nothing worth mentioning, other than the joy of naps.
However, there is, as always,
Cat People by Michael and Margaret Korda. The sub-title is "A Hilariously Entertaining Look at the World of Cat Lovers and Their Obsessive Devotion to Their Pets" and that's a bit misleading, as we are not looking at the world of cat lovers, really - we are looking at one family of cat lovers, with a few pages devoted to some of their cat-loving friends. It's really all about the Kordas. So if you hoped for anecdotes about numerous cat owners, you'd be disappointed. However, it is an amusing book nonetheless (perhaps not hilariously entertaining, but amusing) about how one couple goes from being "well, OK, one cat" to "four indoor cats, 3 outdoor cats, not counting the strays we feed" and from "no cats allowed on the furniture" to "cats sleeping in the humans' bed right on top of the humans." There are several really cute drawings of the authors' cats. And there is, at the end, the authors' self-justification that "we're not so bad, only 4 indoor cats, our neighbors down the street have twenty-seven!" One of the things I really like is one of the cat-related quotes right at the beginning:
Grave Sight by Charlaine Harris. Harris is known both for her straightforward murder mystery series featuring Lily Bard, set in the fictional town of Shakespeare, Arkansas, and for her humorous-vampire-fantasy mystery series featuring Sookie Stackhouse, telepath and acquaintance of far more vampires, shape-shifters, and weres than she ever planned on being. The vampire series is set in Louisiana. It's mostly humorous though there are dark moments and of course murders. The Lily Bard series is rather darker - for a "cozy" series, quite dark indeed. This book is not part of either series, and it's in between the two in tone. This is mostly the straightforward real world we know, except for our heroine and her peculiar talent, with only a small hint that there may be other similar strange talents held by a few people; there are no other fantasy elements, no supernatural beings. Except for Harper's ability to find the dead, the rest of the book is a regular mystery. Although there are no supernatural beings, we nonetheless can see some resemblance to early Anita Blake, in that many people in the bible-belt areas of southern states feel that a talent like Harper's must be due to witchcraft or the devil. Harper copes with a mixture of anxiety and sarcasm. The murder motive is a bit contorted, and the plot resolution a bit too fast and killer-blurts-it-all-out-during-final-fight, but it's not awful, just a bit too pat. The cops in the book are a mixture of good, bad, and indifferent, not all bumbling or all bad, but not all competent either. Overall, a good book, though not her best; if these characters continue as a series, I'll read the next one.
However, there is, as always,
Cat People by Michael and Margaret Korda. The sub-title is "A Hilariously Entertaining Look at the World of Cat Lovers and Their Obsessive Devotion to Their Pets" and that's a bit misleading, as we are not looking at the world of cat lovers, really - we are looking at one family of cat lovers, with a few pages devoted to some of their cat-loving friends. It's really all about the Kordas. So if you hoped for anecdotes about numerous cat owners, you'd be disappointed. However, it is an amusing book nonetheless (perhaps not hilariously entertaining, but amusing) about how one couple goes from being "well, OK, one cat" to "four indoor cats, 3 outdoor cats, not counting the strays we feed" and from "no cats allowed on the furniture" to "cats sleeping in the humans' bed right on top of the humans." There are several really cute drawings of the authors' cats. And there is, at the end, the authors' self-justification that "we're not so bad, only 4 indoor cats, our neighbors down the street have twenty-seven!" One of the things I really like is one of the cat-related quotes right at the beginning:
We who choose to surround ourselves with lives even more temporary than our own live within a fragile circle, easily and often breached. Unable to accept its awful gaps, we would still live no other way.
--Irving Townshend, Separate Lives
Grave Sight by Charlaine Harris. Harris is known both for her straightforward murder mystery series featuring Lily Bard, set in the fictional town of Shakespeare, Arkansas, and for her humorous-vampire-fantasy mystery series featuring Sookie Stackhouse, telepath and acquaintance of far more vampires, shape-shifters, and weres than she ever planned on being. The vampire series is set in Louisiana. It's mostly humorous though there are dark moments and of course murders. The Lily Bard series is rather darker - for a "cozy" series, quite dark indeed. This book is not part of either series, and it's in between the two in tone. This is mostly the straightforward real world we know, except for our heroine and her peculiar talent, with only a small hint that there may be other similar strange talents held by a few people; there are no other fantasy elements, no supernatural beings. Except for Harper's ability to find the dead, the rest of the book is a regular mystery. Although there are no supernatural beings, we nonetheless can see some resemblance to early Anita Blake, in that many people in the bible-belt areas of southern states feel that a talent like Harper's must be due to witchcraft or the devil. Harper copes with a mixture of anxiety and sarcasm. The murder motive is a bit contorted, and the plot resolution a bit too fast and killer-blurts-it-all-out-during-final-fight, but it's not awful, just a bit too pat. The cops in the book are a mixture of good, bad, and indifferent, not all bumbling or all bad, but not all competent either. Overall, a good book, though not her best; if these characters continue as a series, I'll read the next one.
