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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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The Night Birds

The Night Birds

by Thomas Maltman
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The year is 1876, and Asa Senger lives on his family’s farm in Minnesota. Asa’s parents generally avoid talking about family history, but Asa learns far more than he expected when Aunt Hazel comes home from an asylum where she was held for many years.

The Sengers are unwilling to talk about the past because their family has been right in the middle of some really ugly events. They had to flee Missouri because of an argument about the abolition of slavery. Life in Minnesota was very challenging: nature was not nice to settlers, but then, settlers weren’t really nice to nature, either. The Senger family, especially Hazel, made connections with the local Dakota Sioux tribe, and they were involved with the Dakota uprising of 1862. All of this is news to poor Asa, who has never thought about his family like this before.

The story bounces back and forth between Hazel’s past and Asa and Hazel’s present. Part of it is family history, part is Asa’s life in 1876, and part is Asa’s coming to terms with his family’s turbulent past.

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Where to Find It

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Read Books, Win Prizes?

The Contra Costa Library system has several summer reading programs from June 8 to August 17. You can join online and compete to win prizes.

If you’re at least 18 or have graduated from high school, you can join the adult summer reading program. The county-wide prizes include a one-night stay at the Renaissance ClubSport Hotel Walnut Creek for one winner and a dinner for two at Stanford’s Restaurant and Bar Walnut Creek for another winner. Each library and the website will give another winner “a book lover’s bag filled with goodies.”

If you’re in 6th-12th grade, you can sign up for the Teens Read summer program. It sounds like some prizes are available starting at just 20 hours, and you can use just 6 words to tell them about the books you’ve read. Prizes include pizza coupons, paperbacks, and a grand prize drawing for a Wii.

By the way, audio books count too!

If you have kids or younger brothers and sisters, check out the programs for kids ages two-5th grade and even birth-24 months.

If you live or work in another county, there are lots of other programs–for example, the Alameda County system has several programs this summer, including a weekly drawing for adults who read books related to the Bay Area or by Bay Area authors. You might as well try to win a prize!