How to Live with a Calculating Cat

by Eric Gurney

Looking for something to use my excess of points on a book-swapping site, I picked this one at whim. It's a cute, funny book about how difficult cats can be to live with. It has a very brief history of the domestic cat, pointing out how they were worshiped in ancient Egypt and then persecuted in the Middle Ages. The rest is tidbits about how frustrating cats can be: having litters nonstop (this was the sixties) after lots of backyard caterwauling, ruining your furniture (selectively), demanding fine food, sleeping in odd places, getting stuck up trees, despising dogs, gravitating to visitors who hate cats, etc. Rather stereotypical and all to be expected, if you've ever had a cat in the house. Really, the charm of this book for me was in the illustrations- I recognized the style but it took me a while to realize where I'd seen it before. It's the same artist who made the children's books The Digging-est Dog and The King, the Mice and the Cheese, which I remember very well from my childhood. This was a fun read (but not a keeper).

Rating: 2/5             141 pages, 1962