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The Cat Who Covered the World

The Cat Who Covered the World: The Adventures of Henrietta and her Foreign Correspondent

by Christopher S. Wren
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Christopher Wren did not have good luck with pets when he was young, so he wasn’t exactly eager when one of his friends asked if he would be willing to adopt a kitten. However, she apparently knew Christopher well enough to know how to bribe him – she offered him a bottle of Scotch to take the kitten. I’m not really into cats or Scotch, but I really enjoyed this book anyway.

The Cat Who Covered the World is the story of this cat, named Henrietta by Christopher’s children. She’s an ordinary tabby cat, but since Christopher Wren is a foreign correspondent for the New York Times, she gets to travel the world and be a cat around all kinds of interesting people. She disappears in Egypt for a while. She makes friends with Nobel Peace Prize winner Andrei Sakharov, who was also the guy who helped the Soviet Union develop the nuclear bomb. She kills a mouse and gives it to the ambassador of Pakistan.

This is sort of like a story about an ordinary person who gets caught up in extraordinary events, but in this case, the ordinary person is a cat. Usually. Sometimes it’s the author, like when he has to help his friend Kif sneak in to rescue a cat in the middle of the Iran hostage crisis.

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Where to Find It

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Algernon Blackwood (Author)

Algernon Blackwood has been called the master of the English ghost story. He is often listed in the horror section, although he didn’t write what you probably consider horror. Blackwood’s stories are about the supernatural – ghosts, magic, and other strange creatures. Sometimes bad things happen, but some times they don’t. His stories aren’t terrifying in the blood and gore and monsters everywhere sense, but they are usually eerie or strange. He was a master of atmosphere and buildup,

Blackwood wrote a lot of short stories, and his themes ranged from reincarnation to romance to encounters with strange, unexplained creatures. However, almost every one of his stories has some weird element to it.
He also created John Silence, one of the earliest supernatural investigators.

Algernon Blackwood isn’t that famous among people who read modern horror, but he had a strong influence on H. P. Lovecraft and probably many modern horror writers, too.

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Where to Find His Books

You can read a lot of his books and stories online at the Penn State Online Books page.

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The Dog is Not a Toy

The Dog is Not a Toy: House Rule #4

by Darby Conley
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Get Fuzzy is a comic strip about a fairly ordinary guy named Rob, his slightly evil cat Bucky, and his lovable but stupid dog Satchel. Bucky is usually rude, insulting, and destructive, although every once in a while he’ll do something nice for Rob or Bucky. He is constantly coming up with crazy schemes that never work. For example, he has tried designing tee shirts, writing books, and making music, but he isn’t really smart enough to do any of it well. Satchel, on the other hand, is almost always in a good mood and likes nearly everybody. The only way he can live with Bucky and still be in a good happy all the time is to be a little simple, but we love him anyway.

One of the really impressive things about Get Fuzzy is that almost every panel is funny. A lot of cartoons use the first panel or two is used to set up the one joke in the strip, but Darby Conley usually manages to make the setup funny, too. Even when nobody says anything, you can probably find something funny in the picture. Bucky’s facial expressions are priceless – they combine arrogance, hostility, and total cluelessness. Rob has a very good “WTF? Why did I even get up this morning?” expression that he has to use a lot around Bucky and Satchel.

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Where to Find It

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Emily the Strange: The Lost Issue

Emily the Strange: The Lost Issue

by Jessica Gruner and Buzz Parker
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Emily the Strange is kind of like Wednesday Addams. She’s got black hair, pale skin, a fondness for dark clothes, and a gloomy, gothic, warped outlook on life. Plus, she’s strange. And funny.

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Where to Find It

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What’s Michael?

What’s Michael?

by Makoto Kobayashi

Early volumes may be out of print, but each volume stands alone. This is one of the few American-comic-strip-like, purely comedic manga to be translated into English. It’s well-translated and hysterically funny series, examining the lives of housecats and making fun of both cats and humans. You might like it if you like really strange comedy–it’s a lot weirder than Garfield, and being Japanese, doesn’t feel the need for a punchline at the end of a joke. Sometimes weird things (like cats dancing to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”) just kind of happen, and then stop happening, and then the story is over.

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Where to Find It

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