I got a new cat. His name is Teddy. He is currently racing laps around the apartment with a catnip mouse in his mouth. There are some things he has in common with Oskar—they’re both weirdly into pastries and butter for alleged carnivores. But he’s definitely his own creature. Because a cat had been living here, I foolishly assumed this apartment had been cat-proofed, but what I forgot was that an old cat had been living here. Teddy is roughly two; he was surrendered to the shelter so they can’t be sure, but the vet who examined him thought that was accurate. It’s hard to imagine that he could be much older. From what I can tell, he needs roughly 20 minutes of sleep each day, after which point he needs to run laps nonstop and attack anything that moves. Here’s a short list of things I have had to stop him from doing:

• Going on the kitchen counter

• Scratching the furniture

• Eating the plant that makes him puke

• Going on the kitchen counter

• Going into the dishwasher and licking food off of the dishes

• Going into the kitchen sink and licking food off of the dishes

• Going into the trash and recycling bins

• Splashing the water from his dish all over the floor

• Eating plastic

• Going on the kitchen counter

• Biting the naan on someone’s plate as they were eating

• Drinking leftover cereal milk

He now gets locked in my bedroom every time I eat a meal because he’s such a pest about food. I’ve had to wash off parts of him twice, once because he got a mystery sauce on himself in the trash (the bins have since been replaced with cans that have lids) and once because he jumped into a plant I had just watered and got mud all over his feet. One time, while I was watching, he attacked the string on a curtain, then wrapped it around his neck and fell off the window sill. I’ve seen him run head on into furniture; he regularly plays so hard he starts panting and has to be forced to take a break. At least twice he landed from his own jumps so badly he limped dramatically for a few minutes, then immediately wanted to go back to playing.

My personal diagnosis is that his head is full of bees.

I’m not sure if any of you dear readers have adopted a pet recently, but it’s a real journey. Many of the smaller organizations around here had a lot of very probing questions about me and my life. One application asked if I was in good health. Another organization had a list of traumatic events that could occur and complicate my adoption of a cat, such as getting divorced (which would happen after I married someone who was allergic to cats and then had children my cat didn’t like). Cats can live up to twenty years, don’t you know? Imagine what a life you could have in that time, and consider reorienting all of it to center your potential cat.

The shelter where I got Teddy let me take him home the day I picked him out, possibly because they were trying to pass off a goblin as a cat. Despite this, I am permitted to pet him for roughly 45 seconds each day before the bees in his brain take flight again. Also, he has a cute face.

What I’m Reading in Print

I’m trucking right along with books for the year, although I predict I will read slightly fewer of them this year since I now have to spend 85% of my time at home chasing after an unhinged cat. But I do have a couple of recs for the new year.

Glassworks, by Olivia Wolfgang-Smith, is a series of interlinked narratives about a family and their connection to glassblowing. It starts with a wealthy woman who’s made a bad marriage and her friendship with an immigrant glassblower in Boston around the turn of the twentieth century and then stretches into the modern day. It tackles questions of family vs. found family, queerness and gender, and what it means to leave a legacy.

My sister recommended Carrie Soto Is Back, by Taylor Jenkins Reid, and it’s really fun. I had previously read The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, and this one has a similarly uncompromising female protagonist. Carrie is a retired tennis star who decides to return to the game at 37 to show she can still be the best in the world. She’s not particularly nice. But I find something really fascinating about the pursuit of athletic perfection, and Carrie read as a realistic depiction of what you have to be like to succeed.

I don’t read a ton of mysteries, but I liked The Gulf, by Rachel Cochran. It’s set in a small town in Texas in the ’70s, and traces the fallout after the mysterious death of a woman, Miss Kate, who had purchased and started fixing up an old mansion in town. Lou, the protagonist, has been scrambling to get by since the death of her brother in the Vietnam War, and she finds herself questioning the official narrative behind Kate’s death, especially after Kate’s estranged daughter comes back to town.

I’m hardly the first person to recommend this one, but if you haven’t read The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride yet, allow me to add to the chorus of people saying it’s great. In the beginning of the book, a body is unearthed in Pottstown, Pennsylvania in the early 1970s, and McBride slowly reveals who it is and how the person got there decades earlier, when the town itself was minimally integrated, and a Jewish immigrant ran both an integrated theater, and the titular grocery store. Black people and white Jews both occupy an unpleasant and often dangerous secondary status in the town, and McBride threads together stories about people from both communities, some of whom form deep bonds despite their differences.

Greta & Valdin by Rebecca K. Reilly is probably the book I will spend the rest of the year yelling at people to read. It’s so, so good and funny and weird. Multiple times throughout this book, I ended up rereading sentences because they were so odd and funny that I thought surely I had misread them. The two people in the title are siblings who live together in New Zealand, part of a blended Maori/Russian/Catalonian family. Greta is getting a master’s degree in Russian literature that she’s not totally sure she wants anymore, while Valdin is struggling to get over a breakup and hosts a gimmicky travel show. It’s got romance and intrigue and family secrets and some truly amazing family dinners where everyone is on their worst behavior. Do you like having fun? Then read this book.

What I’m Reading Online

Hey, the Oscars are this weekend! I’ve seen some of the movies, but not Killers of the Flower Moon. However, I did read this charming article about how Best Actress frontrunner Lily Gladstone’s yearbook superlative was “most likely to win an Oscar",” and they tracked down the other person who won the superlative with her. They’re still friends!

I try not to get too wrapped up in actual wins for award shows; it’s all very political and there are always masterpieces that are totally ignored by the Academy. But I like to read analysis about the Oscars sometimes—it all comes together in such specific ways. If you are the type of person who was wondering why the Zac Efron wrestling drama Iron Claw didn’t do better with nominations, this article is for you.

I have not read the Sarah J. Maas ACOTAR series, although I think I read one of the offshoot books back in 2020. But I’m always interested in pop culture phenomenons, and I enjoyed this deep dive into her appeal, and the broader trend of the romantasy genre. It’s warming my heart to see Anne McCaffrey’s Pern books get mentioned again in connection to this trend, since I loved those books when I was a tween.

Maurice Sendak was a fascinating person, and this is what his house looks like. It’s currently being maintained by two people who he befriended when they were children.

Speaking of obsessions of my youth, I got a real kick out of this interview with director Jean-Pierre Jeunet on the twenty year anniversary of Amelie coming out. He’s so charming.

If you’re into good old school celebrity profiles, might I recommend this one about Kate Winslet and this one about Jodie Foster. They have both been doing this a very long time, and both pieces are great examinations of what it’s like to be a woman in Hollywood and maintain a career through the decades.

I think Teddy went on the kitchen counters like three times while I was writing this, but he’s enjoying his twenty minutes of sleep right now. Hope everyone else’s households are not being destroyed by a hyperactive cat right now.