November 22

On Almanac Day we here at the Cat Lovers Almanac are self indulgent in using our OWN stories, always true, always feline. In this manner: these two cat descriptions seem very similar.

Claude, the crucial cat  in Something in Disguise (1969) by Elizabeth Jane Howard, introduced like this:

He was an uneasy combination of black and white; on his face this gave him an asymmetircal and almost treasonable appearance.

Joe Cat, the feline hero of Cat Under Fire (1996) by Shirley Rousseau Murphy is thusly described:

He was a big cat, and powerful, his short gray coat sleek as velvet over his lean muscles; but he was not a pretty cat. The white triangular marking down his nose made his eyes seem too close together, as if he viewed the world with a permanent frown. To observers he would always seem to be scowling.

These descriptions are similar and that struck me. Now here is the funny thing.though I got both these books at a library sale on Wednesday December 5, 2012.

The Howard novel I pulled out of the shelf because 1-- it was free, and 2. I recognized the name of the wife of Kingsley Amis. Never read her, as I actually rarely read fiction.. Yes the dust jacket featured a lovely drawing of a cat by Janet Halverson.. The other book, a paperback by an author I never heard of, had a picture of a cat on the cover, so I thought, since it is .50, I might be able to research the author and get a blog post out of it.

So lucky me, two blog posts, and now, on almanac day, a third, all because I wanted to park someplace I could later make a turn out of, with a traffic light. Okay, too much info maybe.