October 2023 - Dogear Diary

Fuku Fuku

Kitten Tales 1

by Konami Kanata

Picked up from the library sale. I didn’t know there were more cat mangas by the author of Chi’s Sweet Home, but I should have guessed! Although this one feels more the level of Chi’s Sweet Adventure series to me. It was fun, very cute, and quick to read through. I enjoyed it, but I didn’t feel the same level of attachment as with Chi. It just doesn’t have much storyline. Fuku Fuku is about a small kitten adopted by an elderly woman. It depicts the day-to-day antics of the kitten, how it adjusts to its new home and the older woman likewise, gets used to having a kitten. Fuku Fuku is a bit standoffish in the beginning, easily startled, doesn’t like to be touched or petted at first. She has to be taught to use her scratching post, tries new foods, roams around the house looking for a warm place to sleep when it gets colder, is frightened by cords (that look like snakes), gets upset when the woman watches someone’s puppy for a day (they end up playing in the end), makes messes and other minor trouble- but the woman simply can’t get mad at her, because she’s so cute. Eventually she goes outside a bit and meets another kitten and a few adult cats in the neighborhood, and has a brief encounter with a dog. Very everyday stuff, but just the thing if you love cats and want an adorable, easy light read!

There was one slightly strange episode that seemed out of place, where the kitten dreamed it was in an Alice in Wonderland scneario, changing sizes. I didn’t get that, but as it’s only a few pages, easy to gloss over. I’m off to look at my public library’s catalog now, see if they have more of this series, or any of the other one I just discovered, Sue and Tai-Chan.

Rating: 3/5

160 pages, 2016

More opinions: A Library Girl’s Familiar Diversions
anyone else?

Tags: 3/5- Good Read, Animals Fiction, Current Reads, Graphic Novels

Songbird Menagerie

made by Buffalo Games ~ artist Jamie Hautman ~ 300 pieces

I kind of needed a quick easy puzzle after the last difficult one. This one so breezy I completed it in just a day- pretty much one long sitting, with photos every time I got up to stretch. The birds were fairly easy. I did have to slow down in the last few stages, the grass stems and indistinct white flowers a bit harder to do.

I like the image, how it’s not just a bunch of pretty birds poised so calmly next to each other- well, the bottom row is. On the top it looks like the flicker is lunging at the bluebird, who just took off to get away, startling the goldfinch. And a woodpecker is avoiding the ruckus behind the fence post. Amusing.

There was a bit of picture layer worn off one corner piece.

I used colored pencils to repair, hardly noticeable now.

It did make my fingertips quite sore. I would have put gloves on, except I expected to be done with it so soon. But it was irritating enough that several times during the puzzling I had to go wash my hands.

Tags: puzzles

Flicka

Untamed Spirit

by Judy Katschke

This is what happens when you are very tired but have to stay up for something (which never ends up happening)- you read an awful book that your kid culled off their shelf (having never read it either). It’s a book based on a movie that was based on a book. That should tell you something! The dismal thing is that I loved the original book, My Friend Flicka, what it is to see it reduced like this. No depth, subtle nuance, descriptive language . . . However I suppose it does get the basics of the story in front of younger readers. I noticed years ago that there was this new film made of the novel, with a girl as the main character, and the horse a black wild mustang, not a golden range filly. I knew a lot more of the story was changed, so I had no interest in watching the film. I’m sure this little movie-to-book angle has left a lot out, and it rackets through the narrative pretty darn quick, but it was enough to let me know I was right.

What’s the same: it takes place on a Wyoming ranch, the main character is struggling in school and has a hard time pleasing her disciplinarian father. She sets her heart on catching and taming the young horse, which everyone else sees it as a dangerous undertaking. There’s a mountain lion encounter (way more dramatic and close-at-hand than I recall in the original, though I admit I don’t remember it so clearly) and a storm, and an illness, and that dramatic scene where she hears a gunshot from her sickbed and misinterprets the meaning . . .

Changes I noticed (beyond the main ones mentioned above): the original character (Ken) had admired a picture on the landing of a duck, not wild horses running (small detail, but it was significant in the first story). I don’t recall there being a wild horse race at a rodeo (maybe there was, but it sure didn’t include Flicka). I think this story blended some things about Flicka with another horse from the ranch in the original novel, the very fast black mare that someone bought hoping to turn her into a racehorse, that brained herself on the sign. The taming of Flicka happened over injury and lying in cold creek water, not being coaxed with apples in the dark of a corral.

There’s more I’m sure, but I’ve forgotten too much by now. However, it was enough unfamiliarity mixed with a beloved narrative, that I felt perplexed, irritated and bored throughout the slim fifty-odd pages. I’m probably being too harsh. Someone who’s never read the original, will probably find this a heartwarming story with a good message- including the bits about the main character rewriting her essay to keep her foothold in the private school (true to the original).

Edit add: this book was in my personal library catalog for the shortest time on record. I added it one day when my kid put in her cull pile, read it the very next day and promptly took it off again.

Rating: 1/5

57 pages, 2006

Tags: 1/5- Blah, Animals Fiction, Current Reads

A Kestrel for a Knave

by Barry Hines

This is the book I long wanted to read, fictional story by the brother of Robert Hines, with the details of hawking closely based on what the younger brother had experienced as a boy. It was a bit slow for me to get into (in spite of being a relatively slim book) but then some scenes started to really get me with the emotions, and when the passages describing Billy’s work with the kestrel appeared, I knew I would hold onto this book forever. I can well see why it’s considered a classic in the UK.

Story is about Billy Casper, a boy growing up in poverty in a mining town. His mother is hardly ever home, his older brother works in the pit -and bullies him when he isn’t down there- his father is an unknown entity, having disappeared early in his life. Billy isn’t a bad kid at heart, but he is thought of as a troublemaker, messing around as kids always do. Smaller than the others (I was surprised when finally learned from one small comment dropped by an adult that he was fifteen!) he gets picked on at school- a place that sounds dull and tedious, with exasperated teachers that often thump (literally) the kids. At home there’s hardly ever enough to eat, and it’s often cold and uncomfortable. But there’s one part of Billy’s life that shines and brings out a softer side of his nature- being out tramping around in the wild overgrown places on the edges of town, then later caring for and working with a kestrel fledgling that he steals from a nest. He teaches himself from a book, how to train and fly it to a lure. When the class has to share a real-life story, he tells about his hawk, and for once everyone listens in fascination. One of his teachers starts to take a particular interest in what he’s doing with the hawk. But sadly, when he’s interviewed for job possibilities, he never brings up his interest in and skills with animals- even though from some other dropped comments it’s apparent that long before the hawk he raised fox kits, magpies, crows, and more. He simply thinks nobody would value that at all. Two parts of this book really got to me emotionally- one where another kid in class tells about an incident collecting tadpoles with a friend, made me laugh so hard and then I had to read it aloud all over again to my twelve-year-old (who thought it was great). The other passage was about when Billy had to write his own short fiction for an assignment- a “tall tale”- some wild imaginative fantasy. He wrote simply about waking up in a warm house, having plenty of good food to eat, and a loving family around him. It practically made me cry. The ending is terribly sad too, when Billy’s rocky relationship with his older brother takes a disastrous turn- he fails to do something his brother asked, loosing him some money as a result, and the older brother strikes out at the only thing he knows Billy really cares about. The little falcon.

I’m so glad I read this. And also glad that I saw the closely related film not that long ago. For once I appreciated that the film already put images in my head- it was made in the same town where the author and his brother lived- and it was so faithfully depicted, following the story very closely (except I don’t remember the tadpole scene being in the film. Disappointing!) However I kind of wish I’d read the book first, as I recall struggling to understand and follow the dialog when I watched the film. I’m sure there were plenty of scenes where I really didn’t know what anybody said just vaguely followed what was happening- whereas in the book it was very clear, even with a lot of local vernacular that I just skipped over, reading in context. (When I re-read this one someday -which I’m sure I will- I want to note down all those unknown terms and look them up to see if my guesses were correct).

In tone and depiction, something about this book reminded me of Stephen Hero, by James Joyce. Which I haven’t read in so long it isn’t even on this blog- but now I want to again, to see where that glimmer of familiarity came from.

Rating: 4/5

153 pages, 1968

More opinions:
The Octagon
Arukiyomi
anyone else?

Tags: 4/5- Great Book, Animals Fiction, Current Reads, General Fiction

The Book of Eels

Our Enduring Fascination with the Most Mysterious Creature in the Natural World

by Patrik Svensson

The more I read about eels, the more fascinated I am. This book was published almost a decade after Eels by James Prosek, and yet it doesn’t add a whole lot to the eel’s story. Not to say there isn’t a lot of different information, and what was familiar was presented from different angles, so I found it intriguing all over again (plus I had forgotten plenty of details in the meantime). But in the end, the unanswered questions still remain. The eel’s birthplace remains at most a highly probably best guess, still nobody has seen two eels mating, or found adult sexually mature eels in the Sargasso Sea. If I read about this in the first book I had forgotten: that young Sigmund Freud spent a month dissecting hundreds of eels in search of one that had reproductive organs (eels don’t develop sexual organs until they’re on their final journey to the sea to mate). I read (probably again) about the man who tracked down the eels’ breeding ground, by following the leaflike eel larvae searching for smaller and smaller ones until he must be near their birthplace. Twenty years of searching. I read about how eels were among the foods that saved early colonists in New England from starving (even though nobody eats eel for Thanksgiving, they should!) About an eel that a kid tossed down a well, and apparently it survived there for a hundred and fifty years, alone in the dark, eating the occasional thing that fell in. Eels can have a very long lifespan. And what’s crazy is that they make their journey back to the sea, undergoing a final metamorphosis into an adult eel, at anywhere from four or five years to thirty, fifty, eighty . . . or more. So two eels that meet in the Sargasso Sea could be “all in the same developmental phase, the same relative age, if you will, and yet the oldest seven times older than the youngest.” There’s stories of eels caught in their young stages and kept in captivity, that stayed in that phase for years and years, never developing further.

There’s a lot of material in this book quoted from Rachel Carson’s Under the Sea Wind, which has a lengthy section about the life of an eel. And a passage reproduced and examined at length, from The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass, where the main character and his parents observed a man pull a dead horse’s head out of the water and extract eels from it. I found this passage very disturbing back then and disturbing now all over again! (In fact, a lot of that book was disturbing. It’s one I read in high school, the words captivated me and I was proud of reading a real dorstopper, but a lot of things in that book were rather repulsive, it’s one I kind of regret reading at all. However a lot of it also went way over my head, so not sure I can judge it fairly).

This book also has a lot of personal narrative, where the author describes fishing for eels with his father as a young boy, how their methods changed over the decades, and different details surrounding that. It was lovely, even though of course the eels die and get eaten. And the way they acquired a massive amount of worms to make a special kind of bait ball, was rather shocking!

Plus lots more facts and interesting stories and tidbits about the life and mystery of eels, of course. At the end, as is sadly the case with many books about wild animals that I read, is a chapter full of concern for indications that eel numbers are falling drastically, and it is likely this animal will go extinct before we even have understood it completely.

Borrowed from the public library.

Rating: 4/5

241 pages, 2019

Tags: 4/5- Great Book, Animals Nonfiction, Current Reads

Living with Wolves

by Jim and Jamie Dutcher

It’s a tad disappointing that this book was on my TBR list for eight years, and now that I finally got a chance to read it, I just wasn’t that awestruck. It’s another photograph-heavy coffee-table sized book, companion to The Hidden Life of Wolves. (I thought at first this one had been published later, but actually it came first). The project it was based on is described in Wolves At Our Door. Having already read those other two books, this one offers very little new or different info. It’s actually somewhat repetitive inside its own pages. There’s parts that describe (briefly) the filming project, the social structure of the wolf pack, their hunting skills and involved care of the young. There’s very little narrative of actual incidents- but two stand out to my mind in particular: the wolves’ reaction when a raven died, and how they were observed eating flowers (shooting stars) in a field, every spring (but nobody was sure why). Everything else was nice- but for me, not much more than that. The photographs really are beautiful and expressive, but also a bit grainy, not with the clarity of focus or printing as nowadays. For it’s time this is a gorgeous book, but I can’t help comparing it to other things I’ve read before that were written since, and it doesn’t stand up as excellent in that regard. All that said, I am holding onto it!

What I really want is to see the films these authors have produced- about wolves, and cougars. Haven’t been able to find them available anywhere (aside from buying my own dvd that is).

Rating: 3/5

176 pages, 2005

Tags: 3/5- Good Read, Animals Nonfiction, Current Reads

Coyote

Seeking the Hunter in Our Midst

by Catherine Reid

The author wanted to see a coyote. Not in a zoo or research center (though she did visit one where litters of coyote pups were being raised), but out free in the wild. Near her house. This book is about all sorts of things circling around the coyote. Sometimes it doesn’t sit well with me when a book purportedly about an animal, tends to be just as much about the author’s personal life. In this case, I didn’t mind- I found that part interesting and relevant, but I can see why another reviewer complained about it. She talks about the landscape, her reasons for moving away from the area and back home again, her fears of the family’s reactions to her partner (she’s lesbian), her trans friend visiting, how she attempts to thwart deer and other animals from eating her garden (I can relate!), looking for a fox den, the history of wildlife management where she lives (and all over the States, really), etc. The parts about coyotes range from how they’ve been persecuted to their interbreeding with wolves. There’s plenty of musings on how close coyotes are related to red wolves or Mexican wolves, and where do you draw the line to define a species. Because is the Eastern coyote a coyote/wolf hybrid, or a coyote evolving into a distinct species- larger than its western counterpart, with subtle but distinctive differences in how it hunts, how its pups play, and so on. A lot of those differences align more with the habits of wolves, so thus the confusion. There was a lot in here about coyotes and wolves and their interrelationship with man (in general) that I hadn’t thought on before. I knew that coyotes eat cats and small dogs, I didn’t know they would attempt to make off with a small child- many incidents of toddlers being accosted by coyotes in here. And in the end, the very last chapter, she does finally catch a fleeting glimpse of a coyote, out in the wild. Pervasive, persistent, elusive creature. Like so many other animals– they are surviving around and in spite of us because they’re successful.

Borrowed from the public library.

Rating: 3/5

179 pages, 2004

Tags: 3/5- Good Read, Animals Nonfiction, Current Reads

Library sale haul

Book sales is something where I let myself splurge. It’s supporting the library! Their prices have gone up in past years but gladly my husband’s income has kept pace so I’m allowed to indulge a bit. I pretty much just picked up everything that looked in any way interesting to me, and bought it. Came home with only three regrets- two books I forgot I already owned (not pictured here), and one that my kid owns and would have let me borrow. The blue one on bottom of righthand pile is George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin. I read all his books a very long time ago when young. Not sure if I’ll like them now, but I’m curious to try and see. The rest of these are all new to me, though quite a few are on my TBR, so I snapped ’em up.

I also got a few gardening books, and this abridged copy of Darwin’s Origin of Species. I have another full copy of that, but the illustrations in this one looked great so I couldn’t pass it up.

And this stack is from a week earlier, when I took myself to the used bookstore next town over. I spent almost the same amount of money as at the library sale, and got a fraction number of books. So the library sale is still a really good deal! And now my personal library tops 2,000 books wooo hooooo.

Tags: bookshelves

Flight of the Pixie

made by Sunsout ~ artist Don Maitz ~ 1,000 pieces

Have I really been doing this puzzle for a month? Sure feels like it- three and a half weeks, at least (I can’t recall if I started it right after finishing the savannah one, or if there was a gap). I like the picture and I love the crazy piece shapes, but this one was so hard. The butterflies and the little fairy babe himself were just the right level of challenge and fun. That patch of grass and the brown mulchy ground and all the dark background indistinguishable as individual pieces, was frustrating to madness. Near the end I started working it upside down, since visualizing the picture didn’t make any difference, I was mostly matching by shape. Delightfully wild and wonky shapes, though! There were plenty of sittings I only got a few pieces in, so some of these assembly pics include several days’ work. Phew! I’m ready to move on to something easier now.

Tags: puzzles

Shaman

a novel of the ice age

by Kim Stanley Robinson

I picked this book up before The Jaguar Princess and kept trying a chapter here and there during the next read, too. It’s a hefty book that looked enticing but then wasn’t drawing me in, so I decided best to put aside and maybe come back to it someday in the future. Though I soon realized it’s written by the same author as Years of Rice and Salt, which I attempted before and gave up on as well, who knows how many years ago now. So probably this author is not really for me. Very dense historical fiction. This one set during the ice age. It opens with a young man away from his tribal group on a “wander”- an initiation into manhood where he has to live alone for a month proving he can use his skills to survive. It’s brutal. He almost freezes, almost gets caught by the Others (I’m guessing Neanderthals), has to flee predators. Doesn’t starve, but isn’t exactly eating well either. I thought a survival story of living close to the land and among the wild animals, would be exactly my thing, but while the details are intriguing, something about the way they were told simply wasn’t. I read a little over fifty pages, and found myself more and more disinclined to pick it up again. Pushed through to the point where he returns to the tribe and is interacting with people, thinking that would spark more interest, but nope. Only got a glimpse of the story: protagonist is reluctant apprentice to the group’s elderly shaman, he’s not at all sure he wants to follow in those footsteps. I have to say, his incessant interest in sex got old very quickly, and the magical realism wasn’t really working for me (it usually doesn’t, no matter the writing style). Though I might just not be in the right mindset for it, I really suspect this book isn’t my type.

Borrowed from the public library.

Rating: Abandoned

458 pages, 2013

More opinions:
Resolute Reader
Val’s Random Comments
anyone else?

Tags: 0/5- Abandoned, Historical Fiction

Month: October 2023

Kitten Tales 1

made by Buffalo Games ~ artist Jamie Hautman ~ 300 pieces

Untamed Spirit

Our Enduring Fascination with the Most Mysterious Creature in the Natural World

Seeking the Hunter in Our Midst

made by Sunsout ~ artist Don Maitz ~ 1,000 pieces

a novel of the ice age

RATINGS / SUBJECTS: