by Italo Calvino

Connected short stories that grew on me. The title character is basically a schlemiel, but it’s not just about schlemielitude. Calvino surrealism is present. Marcovaldo is a poverty-stricken father of six in poverty-stricken northern Italy in the 1950s-1960s. First living in a basement room and then in a garret, he and his complaining wife and mischievous troublesome children make discoveries and get into pickles and end up on hospital cots or afoul of the law or the landlady. And life goes on to the next story.

by Isaac Bashevis Singer, illustrated by Maurice Sendak

A collection of very Jewish children’s stories with illustrations by Maurice Sendak. The title and final story was the best. Young Aaron must take the old family goat, Zlateh, to the butcher’s in the next town. They get caught in a blizzard and survive for 3 days inside a haystack. Aaron lives on the goat’s milk and the goat of course lives off the hay. They return home after the storm, and the life-saving goat is then forever after welcome in the house and treated like a sibling. “Maaaa,” is all she says. Yes, I loved her.

by Mary Roach

The unifying theme is supposed to be “when nature breaks the law.” This loose idea combines stories of investigating wild animal attacks, deterring birds from eating sunflower seed fields, controlling monkeys in India, controlling rodents in your own home, and myriad other digressions. Mary Roach is funny, so it’s all good.

“I have read the 1978 paper by researchers… who tried to warn away white-tailed deer by erecting roadside plywood cutouts of deer rear ends with tails a-flagging. On some… an actual deer tail had been nailed in place. Sadly, because who wouldn’t want to see our nation’s highways lined with plywood deer asses with decomposing tails, none of it worked.”

Then the story of “fecal bags” attached to goat butts (no, she’s not always scatological, but, well, she often is)… a harness was designed with no fewer than 19 leather straps that allowed goats to rear up on their hind legs. “In a minor setback, several of the nonharnessed goats, being goats, ate the leather straps off their pals.” I had to include that quote.

I’m pro-wildlife but I find a little tiresome heroic efforts to get vermin out of your home without actually harming any critters. I do not wish to inflict cruelty. When she says glue traps ought to be banned, because “a professional pest control person should be checking the traps daily and humanely killing any rodent that’s been caught… what homeowner is going to tackle that?” We do, actually. We use glue traps because they work, and my husband, bless him, humanely dispatches anything we catch, always within half a day. She admits herself that snap traps very often fail to kill immediately and humanely, so what’s the diff? But the complaints about have-a-heart style traps where you release the critters somewhere far away – well, then they don’t know the territory and they get eaten. OK, as if in their own territory, they live to a ripe old age enjoying Lawrence Welk and complaining their children never call. It’s a thing-kill-thing world out there, people!

I was pretty disgusted to hear how Big Sunflower kept trying to kill blackbirds that would feast in their sunflower fields. They said blackbirds were responsible for the loss of about 2% of their crop. 2%? You can’t give 2% for wildlife? You have to kill and bomb and poison and kill myriad other inoffensive birds too in the process? 2% of your crop, for a healthy blackbird population and all the other little tweeters too. Cmon!

Back about getting pests out of your home. (It’s a sore spot with me.) She had a rat in her walls. A rat! So instead of doing anything lethal, she so virtuously had the pest guy come over, figure out where he was getting in, and plug all the entrances with steel wool. Problem solved! Sure! Oh, it’s so simple! Sure, just go around putting a little steel wool here and there. I wish it were that easy to keep things out.

by Peggy Hickman

Some food-related quotes from Jane Austen’s correspondence and novels, interspersed with commentary about the housekeeping of the period, and copious recipes copied down by Jane’s close friend Martha Lloyd.

Were I ever transported to Jane Austen’s time and seated at her table, I am afraid I’d have to ask for a cup of weak tea and make do with that, as I might have a hard time finding among the many removes anything not stomach-turning. Between the calf-feet jelly, fricasee of turnips, mutton, cabbage pudding, and hashed calves’ head, I would not know what to make of the “brown soup” or “duck ragoo” or “walnut catchup.” Just the tea, please.

by Dodie Smith

I had been a fan of Dodie Smith’s novel for (sort-of) adults, I CAPTURE THE CASTLE. And in grade school I remember reading THE STARLIGHT BARKING, the sequel to the famous 101 DALMATIANS. I also loved the movie when I was a kid; I must have been 10, since I see in Wikipedia that 1979 was the year of one of the theater re-issues. I remember going through a bit of a ‘dog phase’ afterwards.

But I don’t believe I had ever read this, the original first book, till now. I was able to call out most of the changes that the movie made – such as getting rid of an entire dog (they upped the number of puppies to make 101). In the book the dog couple are named Pongo and Missis; and since Missis can’t nurse 15 puppies, another dog, Perdita, is brought in to take on seven of them. The whole wet-nursing thing was probably deemed too graphic for Disney. They named the couple Pongo and Perdita, with no third dog brought in, and didn’t go into how an animal with eight nipples could nurse 15 puppies. Which is all well enough! Anyway…

This book was written in 1956, by a woman, and I was startled by the sexism – yes, sexism, in Dogdom! Missis is kind of an airhead who literally can’t tell her left paw from her right. Pongo is the leader, who figures out everything and has all the great ideas. I was raised on 1970s Girl Power. Girls were always the clever ones in fiction by the time I came along. Once the censors get a hold of this one, it’s going to be Missis who is figuring everything out. Oh – also it’s the GIRL puppies who are too weak to make the journey without riding in a cart. Not the later-born or weaker puppies – the girls. Craziness.

Back to the clever Pongo. Male chauvinism aside, he’s a clever pooch, all right! When his 15 kids go missing, he knows what’s going down. “All through the long December night, he put two and two together and made four. Once or twice he almost made five.” For although he had little Latin beyond “Cave canem,” “he had, as a young dog, devoured Shakespeare (in a tasty leather binding).”

I was honestly riveted by the climax, as our hundred dalmatians (only 100 at this point – there’s a surprise twist at the end) are racing down a road with Cruella di Vil bearing down on them, with wire netting on either side of the road making escape impossible! Drat those humans and their fences!

All turns out well.