Today is Easter Sunday, so Happy Easter to all who celebrate. If you’re still chasing Easter Eggs, then a Hoppy Easter to you as well.
Reading-wise, this was certainly a good week, with A++ rated A Drop of Corruption edging out the merely A+ rated Who Will Remember for book of the week. The one and only negative thing about either book is that there is not any currently available word on the next book in either series. Inquiring minds desperately need to know!
I think I’m sure about what’s coming this week, even though that statement feels a bit like, “I think I can, I think I can.” I’ve faffed around with two of the slots, and re-faffed, and fluffed a bit, and I think this is it. The order is absolutely subject to change, however.
Turning to other orders, or at least to someone looking like they are giving orders, today’s cat picture had to be split in two to fit, but I promise that this began its life as one single picture. We call this one, “Three cats working, one cat supervising.” Somebody found a bug. Everyone had to watch the bug and stare at the bug and poke at the poor, frightened, tiny little bug. Except Hecate. Her job is not to catch the bug. Her job is clearly to supervise the other cats because they might be doing it wrong.
Today marks the ending of this year’s Blogo-Birthday Celebration Week here at Reading Reality. The giveaways are all still in progress until the end of the week, so there’s plenty of time to get in on any that you’ve missed. Please do! I’d love for all of you to celebrate with me.
Today is also the opening day for National Library Week. At a time when the freedom to read and libraries and library funding are under threat from all sides, it’s more important than ever to show your support and demonstrate why so many people are still drawn to their libraries, this year and every year. And that’s the theme of this year’s National Library Week, “Drawn to the Library” I was so drawn to my local libraries that I made a career out of it. If you have similar fond memories, and especially if you are drawn to your local libraries now because your kids need them or simply because local libraries are economic engines for their neighborhoods wherever they exist, libraries need your support so they can continue to do what they do best – support their communities with books and programs and help for those who need it!
And no Sunday Post at Reading Reality would be complete without a cat picture. This week’s picture is of Luna, clearly doing the yoga ‘child pose’ as she’s such a good example of stretching before and after exercise. Or naps – something she’s also very good at!
When it comes to giveaways, it’s been a bit of a long, cold, lonely winter here at Chez Reading Reality, hasn’t it? But things are finally getting back to normal on the giveaway front, as the January/Winter giveaway hops are coming to an end and the Spring hops are springing back into the calendar. YAY!
(Howsomever, please be advised that the links to the new giveaways on the sidebar will not be “live” until the dates those hops actually begin, which is 3/13 for the Spring, March Madness, etc., event and 3/20 for the Spring 2025 Seasons of Books.)
Speaking of spring, the cold from hell finally sprung its way outtahere, and I can’t say that I miss it AT ALL. The cats are also finding me much better company during the night as I’ve stopped waking up to cough on an irregular and annoying basis. They do love me, but they love sleeping through the night more. Come to think of it, I feel the same way about them!
Turning to one of my favorite topics, cats, and cats taking over the whole, entire bed, this week’s cat picture is of Miss Luna showing off the way her colors change on her underside. On top, she’s gray and white, mostly gray with white feets. She’s also mostly solid gray and not very tabby except at the extremities. This picture shows that she’s more tabby than she usually looks, and has a lot more cream/beige than generally appears.
No matter what colors she’s displaying in any particular moment, she is always a very pretty kitty!
This was an excellent reading week. Having TWO A+ books certainly helped! If you haven’t had a chance to get into Kingfisher, I can’t recommend her work highly enough. She’s just plain awesome, and she’s fun! And Molly O’Neill’s Greenteeth was just lovely and magical and lyrical and OMG it’s her debut. So if you’re looking for excellent reads, there are two right there! The Girl from Greenwich Street was marvelously compelling – which is hard to do when it’s easy to look up how the story ends. Even the two that weren’t quite up to the others were still fun for this reader because they were part of series(es) that I’m faithfully following.
It’s fortunate for me that the books were good, because that cold is STILL lingering and I haven’t stopped coughing even yet. On that front it’s been a DAMN long week but the books have certainly helped. The cats are starting to give me the evil eye because I’m incapable of sitting still and being QUIET for them to take care of me.
Today’s cat picture is of a combo we haven’t seen a lot of since Tuna and George started buddying up. That’s Tuna in the top ‘bunk’, but it’s Luna in the bottom bunk. The top is usually for checking out the ‘kitty television’ in the backyard but this time it seems as if the humans were more interesting than whatever was going on outside!
Today is Groundhog Day! When did that happen? Not literally, just that it seems like January passed by in the blink of an eye. Maybe half a blink. I’d say something about time flying when you’re having fun, but this month has been a bit more of “Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana,” than it has been fun. Although some of the books have been good and thank goodness for that!
Although, speaking of time flying, I saw when I selected the winner for the Winter Wishes Giveaway Hop that a) I don’t have any more giveaways until early April because both the 1st and the 16th of the months of February and March occur on the weekend AND b) that my FOURTEENTH Annual Blogo-Birthday Celebration is coming up fast! April 4 is just two months away. Time really does also fly when you’re having fun, and I certainly have been having fun with Reading Reality for these past fourteen years!
Howsomever, this week’s cat picture makes it look like Luna isn’t having all that much fun. This is definitely Luna’s serious face. Do you think she knows that she hasn’t been featured since last year? It sure looks like she does and that she is NOT AMUSED by the fact. Not at all.
In 1903, the early Dickens scholar F.G. Kitton (no relation to Luna) published an essay titled “The Man Who ‘Invented’ Christmas”. The thesis was that Charles Dickens not only wrote a timeless tale with A Christmas Carol but managed to reinvent the entire holiday. That may be a bit of stretch. Per David Parker in Christmas and Charles Dickens, Kitton may have been making a bit of a joke, and no less an authority than the The Dickens Project at UC Santa Cruz suggests that you will be very smart indeed to dispute the idea.
As is usually the case, the real story is more complicated. As Adam Lusher wrote in the Independent in 2018,
It is true that industrialisation meant fewer people were exposed to the rural squirearchy’s habit of opening their doors to the lower orders and staging grand Christmas celebrations – of the kind seen at Crewe Hall in Cheshire, where Dickens’ grandfather had been the butler, or in the pages of A Christmas Carol, where The Ghost of Christmas Past reminds Scrooge of how much he had enjoyed the dances organised by old Fezziwig.
But in 1843, outside the ranks of the aristocracy and aspirant upper middle-class imitators, Christmas was alive and well. Previous attempts to kill it had, after all, foundered on the stubborn resistance of “Merrie England”.
…
What Dickens did do, though, was give Christmas one heck of a PR push. “He was showing what was going on,” says Ms Hawksley, “And making it even more so. After A Christmas Carol, people become obsessed with celebrating Christmas.
“Before, there were people who were, like Scrooge’s nephew, doing their own family Christmases, but after, suddenly everyone is thinking: ‘We should be doing that. Why haven’t we got people coming round and playing blind man’s buff?’
“It all starts to get much bigger.”
Invention remains a key word, though: Christmas is not my holiday, nor is it Marlene’s, but it can be and is celebrated as a cultural holiday by many who have no connection to Christianity whatsoever. (Or not celebrated at all, of course.)
Speaking of invention and Christmas, let’s consider this fearsome feline:
This is the Jólakötturinn, the Yule Cat of Iceland, a monster who traditionally will eat you if you don’t manage to get new clothes by Christmas Eve. Or maybe not:
Árni Björnsson is one of the best known folklorists living in Iceland today. His meticulous research into the Icelandic ritual calendar, including the origins of traditions connected with festivities and celebrations, was first published in two best-selling books in 1980 and 1981. His 800 page opus magnum, Saga daganna (“The History of Days”), was published in 2000. It is a vital resource for folklorists in Iceland. Like many folklorists of his generation, Björnsson has been a proponent of healthy skepticism when confronting folktales, folk beliefs and supposedly old customs. In a famous article in Skírnir published in 1996 he suggested that many elements of folk belief were simply folk fiction, stories meant to entertain rather than expressions of genuine belief.
In the case of the Yule cat, Björnsson notes the limited 19th century source material, which is almost entirely based on a paragraph in Jón Árnason’s collection of folktales. There it is called an “evil beast” (óvættur) that would either eat those who got no new clothes for Christmas, or steal their “Christmas bit” (jólarefur; an extra portion of food given to the residents of the farm). In a footnote Árnason mentions the figure of speech “to dress the cat” or “dress the Yule cat” which happened to those who didn’t get new clothes for Christmas. This footnote is based on one of his major sources, Jón Norðmann, while it is unclear where he gets the idea of the “evil beast”. The meaning may be simply that cats never change clothes. Sometimes the unfortunate ones were said to “do the cat” or be “taken by the cat” which leads Björnsson to conclude that the Yule cat was a figure of speech that Árnason may have misinterpreted as a monster. Björnsson was for many years the head of the folklife collection of the National University of Iceland and he used the questionnaires extensively in the History of Days. Many respondents in the collection were aware of this figure of speech, but were unsure as to its origin.
Watch out! Both for the Jólakötturinn and how words and stories can shift in the telling!
From Marlene and me and Hecate, George, Luna, and Tuna, may you have peace and plenty this Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, or Solstice – or simply as easy a time of it as possible if you are working today.
Oh, and if you’re a librarian in possession of of the run of V. C. magazine (London, 1903-1904), could you digitize Kitton’s essay? That would be a lovely Christmas present! It turns out that there are a lot of references to the notion that Kitton stated that Dickens invented Christmas, but no online copies of his essay that I could find.
Welcome to the final month of 2024! Or OMG the holiday season is here. Or both. DEFINITELY both.
I hope that all who celebrated had a wonderful and filling Turkey Day this week. I also hope that, unless it’s your thing, you’ve managed to escape the Black Friday shopping madness. I’m just happy that internet shopping is a thing because the Black Friday crowds are NOT!
Even though tomorrow is the last day of the Readathon, and you still have all day to post your bingo lines here or on Insta, Reading Reality will be posting the Holiday Giveaway Event! including an Event-Wide Amazon/PayPal Prize plus my own $10 Gift Card or Book giveaway. The first day of the Holiday Giveaway Event! is technically today, but today is Sunday and we’re still in recovery mode from yesterday’s All-Star Cat Wrestling Event!
Everybody needed something at the vet yesterday, so EVERYBODY went. Two humans, four cats, a whole lot of growling and hissing and nobody was happy at all. Except possibly the vet. Although a tech did have to pretty much sit on George to get his part of the circus taken care of. None of them like TRIPS to the vet – although Hecate likes BEING at the vet because they tell her how pretty and well-behaved she is. George, however, is the only one who fights the process, literally tooth and nail, all the way.
But George has been featured quite a bit recently. Also, he wasn’t cooperative AT ALL. Luna, very much on the other hand, although obviously quite peeved in this picture – she’s willing to own it and let her resting bitch face be preserved for posterity. (Not that she has any. That was fixed before she came to us.)
Seasons Greetings and Merry Meetings and Happy Holidays!
I’m not sure whether this picture of a sleepy Luna represents a cat not wanting to have their nap disturbed, or a cat looking to dig a hole and pull it in after her. This is one of her common sleeping positions, folded up into a surprisingly small kittybundle and getting as many limbs as possible to cover her pretty face. She clearly likes to make the world GO AWAY when she sleeps.
I fully admit I’ve been tempted to join her this week. If dear old Acme – the folks who supplied Wile E. Coyote – were still in business I think there would be a lot of folks looking to buy their patented ‘portable holes’ this week. Alas, Acme isn’t available, so I’ve had to content myself with comfort reads. Possibly for a while.
If you’re looking for a comfort read, I highly recommend the cozy fantasy of The Teller of Small Fortunes, as well as the slightly rueful, thoroughly witchy, laugh out loud snark and sarcasm of Crazy as a Loon – as you’ll see in this coming week’s reviews.
This week’s schedule went just a bit awry at the end, because I finished Kevin Hearne’s Candle & Crow AGAIN, (that story is in the review – HINT), this time in audio, and just had to write it up because awesomesauce. Not that the new Gamache book, The Grey Wolf, the book I intended to review on Friday isn’t also terrific, just that I wasn’t quite done with it yet and I had entirely too much to say about Candle & Crow and the whole Ink & Sigil series.
My review of The Grey Wolf will be coming this week, the day before Halloween. Because in it’s own way, it’s MORE than scary enough. You’ll see.
As far as this week’s cat pictures, I sometimes have to remind myself that Luna is NOT a small cat. She is only small in comparison to her brother Tuna, who is HUGE. Last week’s picture was of Tuna, sprawling in the same bed that Luna has primly posed in in this picture. Notice that Tuna filled the whole thing and lopped over the sides. Luna, as I said, is primly POSED. She has space all around herself – the better to look adorable with.
Welcome to the Scaredy Cat Giveaway Hop, hosted by Mama the Fox!
At Chez Reading Reality, the poster child for this year’s spooky season is Luna. Which would be a bit more appropriate if it were “spooked” season instead of spooky. As you can see from the picture, she’s not at all spooky, but during last week’s storm she was very, very spooked. Clearly, now that all the sturm und drang is over, she doesn’t have a care in the world – but that certainly wasn’t true just last week!
Luna is very fortunate that Halloween is NOT intended to be a fireworks holiday, but clearly we’ll be keeping a concerned eye on her at New Year’s – which absolutely is one around here. I’d say maybe she’ll be lucky and it will rain but that won’t actually help the poor little thing.
Hurricane season – even just the tail end of it that we generally get, isn’t something that Miss Luna is looking forward to this or any other year. Of course, neither are her humans, but we have a slightly better grasp of what’s actually going on. I’m not sure about getting her a thundershirt – or to be more accurate I’m not sure about getting her INTO a thundershirt – but we may try it the next time we can get enough warning of a big storm.
I am, however, definitely looking forward to the Halloween decorations. Someone in the neighborhood has a ghost on their lawn that looks like it already got ‘busted’. What are you most looking forward to – or least – this Halloween season? Answer in the rafflecopter for a chance at one of Reading Reality’s usual prizes, the winner’s choice of a $10 Amazon Gift Card or $10 in books.