It is a a writerly thing. Some of us have dogs, to be sure, but the classic writerish badge of belonging to the scribe tribe is…a cat.
In some ways it’s inevitable. Dogs worship us, and although that can be invaluable in a world which otherwise largely doesn’t care, it is the cat who serves the ultimate purpose in writers lives, keeping us grounded, and keeping us humble.
In the throes of epic inspiration, wrapped in the arms of your Muse? Forget it. The food bowl is empty, the litter box needs cleaning, and those things need attention now. Screw the Muse. there is first and forever and always CAT. And Cat must be obeyed.
Cats go perfectly with books and cups of tea or coffee, in homes, in libraries, in bookstores, so many bookstores.
I well remember the somewhat disconcerting gaze of the Borderlands Sphynx – the naked hairless ubercat who came to perch on my lectern when I did a reading there and stared at me with those ageless eyes, at the same time giving approval and waiting for me to stumble on a word so that it could have its little snicker of schadenfreude.
There’s Dewey, the library cat whom I knew only from a book but still wept oceans of tears over. There are multifarious fictional cats, whose roles range from window-dressing to full-on characters. And real-life cats named after them.
A friend of mine named one of his own after Pixel, the Cat Who Walked Through Walls. My own heart’s-beloved, Boboko, was named after a fabulous feline in Charles de LInt’s “Mulengro”, and he apparently knew about his bookish origin. He hung around books in my library, as the photo attests.
Make today a read-a-book-and-hug-your-cat day. I do it every day.
Mashable takes note of the bookstore-owning felines of Instagram and offers us some delightful pictures.
e.g.
“Right this way to the picture book section.”
See more photos HERE
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From a review of ‘Shifter, the third book in The Were Chronicles, by Angela Cabezas at her blog, Angela’s Library:
“Alexander’s writing is gorgeous and insightful, and she uses it to full advantage. I’m always sad when I finish a great story, but as I wrote to Alma in a Facebook message while in the throes of book withdrawal, ‘I just finished Shifter and now I have to cancel my plans for the day to eat chocolate and cry!’ The best books leave a hole in you when they’re over, and Shifter certainly left a gaping void in me.
“The experience is worth it, though. And look at it this way – once you’re finished you can always go back and re-read the book’s perfect last line over and over again to bring yourself comfort, as I’ve been doing. So what are you waiting for? Go get some chocolate and start reading this book!”
Read the whole review HERE
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HOW many pages? The 10 longest books ever written
Look, I am no slouch in the word-count department. Several of my books – “The Secrets of Jin-shei”, “Embers of Heaven’, the forthcoming “Empress” — even the “Changer of Days” duology, written as a single novel but published in two parts because that’s the only way the skittish publishers would tackle a quarter-million-word epic — all fall in the 200,000 words plus category. That’s a million published words right there.
And I haven’t even counted the epic I wrote in my teens which is just as many words but as yet only exists on 500+ handwritten – in pencil – pages in three hardcover A4 sized notebooks.
Even my YA books are pushing the envelope. Three of the four Worldweavers books are longer than 100,000 words. I managed to contain myself a little more with the Were Chronicles books because they all fall in roughly at 95-99K words apiece.
But the books here put together by Short List, are in a class beyond that – way beyond that!
Perhaps the headline ought to read ‘The 10 longest stories ever written‘ because the Short List collection includes novels told over several volumes.
But we are talking about long – very long – coherent stories, ranging from near a million words to 2.1 million words.
The number of words is the way most writers judge length, but most readers probably think more in terms of pages. So how many pages are we talking about here?
Well, the shortest book here, the piker, is only 2,400 pages, while the longest is…
drum roll, please
… 13,095 pages.
I suspect you won’t finish it in a day, or maybe a lifetime.
A lot of the books you may never have heard of – OK, probably never heard of. But every reader in the western word has heard of Proust and his ‘In Search of Lost Time’. It might even be on the bottom of their to-read pile – the very bottom.
Short List tells that it is 1,267,069 words in 3,031 pages.
There’s no doubt that Proust’s masterpiece could quite easily double as a mightily effective doorstop, with 13 volumes clocking up nearly 1.3 million words. Its theme of involuntary memory is repeated through the course of following the narrator’s life, from childhood to adulthood. Published between 1913 and 1927, it had a profound influence on many works that were to follow in the 20th Century; it’s considered the definitive modern novel by many leading scholars. So, to summarize: really long, but really good.
But the undisputed winner in this list is basically a romance, ‘Artamène ou le Grand Cyrus’, 2.1 million word, 13,095 page romance. In 10 volumes.
This 17th century novel obliterates the opposition. The work is credited on the page to Geroges de Scudéry, but is usually attributed to his sister Madeleine. The ultimate example of the roman héroïque form, it is, essentially, a romantic novel, with endless twists to keep the suspense, and the action, going. Despite its gargantuan length, at the time it was hugely popular.
However, it was not subsequently published again until an academic project was launched to make it available to read on the Internet.
Yes, you can read it ON THE INTERNET HERE
So what are you waiting for? Those 13,095 pages aren’t going to read themselves, Short List chides..
See the other books HERE
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Quote of the Day
Your choice but I know which I opt for.
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Alma Alexander My books Email me
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