{"id":33889,"date":"2025-06-06T12:56:20","date_gmt":"2025-06-06T17:56:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/?p=33889"},"modified":"2025-06-06T09:56:47","modified_gmt":"2025-06-06T14:56:47","slug":"book-report-a-dickens-of-a-cat-and-other-stories-of-cats-we-love-edited-by-callie-smith-grant-2007","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2025\/06\/06\/book-report-a-dickens-of-a-cat-and-other-stories-of-cats-we-love-edited-by-callie-smith-grant-2007\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Report: <i>A Dickens of a Cat and Other Stories of Cats We Love<\/i> edited by Callie Smith Grant (2007)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/bsgfx\/adickensofacat.jpg\" width=\"200\" alt=\"Book cover\" align=\"right\" hspace=\"4\">I <a href=\"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2025\/06\/02\/she-called-my-bluff-and-i-folded\/\" target=\"_new\">mentioned<\/a>, gentle reader, that I&#8217;d started reading a book about cats on the aborted vacation last month, and this is that book.  Apparently, I got it at Redeemed Books over on Republic Road <a href=\"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2021\/11\/05\/good-book-hunting-november-4-2021-redeemed-books\/\" target=\"_new\">in 2021<\/a>, and that might have been the last time I was in that store.  I&#8217;ve even been not going to ABC Books that much these days, which is definitely atypical.  But I am getting pretty topped up on books with nowhere to go with new arrivals but the floor or the tops of the shelves in my office where they&#8217;re already blocking the cool bladed weapons and are getting a little precarious, where an exploring cat will likely knock a stack of them to the floor.  So maybe I should be building the stacks on the floor so that the books atop the have less far to fall.  But that is neither here nor there.<\/p>\n<p>At any rate, this is a collection of stories about people adopting or finding cats.  Given that it&#8217;s from Revell Publishing, it has just a blush of Christianity to it, with several of the writers mentioning God (but not Jesus).  All of the stories have happy endings, especially the kittens-gone-missing stories.  And most of them are anachronistic&#8211;although they don&#8217;t all talk about the eras in which the stories occurred, those that do mention it having been in the mid-20th century.<\/p>\n<p>So: Well, you&#8217;re not going to get the &#8220;couple paragraphs of analysis&#8221; twee insights that I reserve for, say, <a href=\"\" target=\"_new\">Thoreau<\/a>.  But it was a pleasant read and almost led me to adopting a couple other rescue kittens.  If you like cats and reading about cats, you&#8217;ll like the book.  But it&#8217;s not as deep as <a href=\"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2021\/07\/02\/book-report-my-cat-spit-mcgee-by-willie-morris-1999\/\" target=\"_new\">Willie Morris<\/a> or (probably) Cleveland Amory might try to be.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I mentioned, gentle reader, that I&#8217;d started reading a book about cats on the aborted vacation last month, and this is that book. Apparently, I got it at Redeemed Books over on Republic Road in 2021, and that might have been the last time I was in that store. I&#8217;ve even been not going to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3334,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33889","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-report","category-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33889","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3334"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33889"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33889\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33890,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33889\/revisions\/33890"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33889"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33889"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33889"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}