Animals

I pondered for quite a while as to how to approach May’s Love Blippin’ Books theme of ‘Animals’ (#LBB17).

My shelves are well stocked with books that are straightforwardly about animals, perhaps a re-read of Peter Mathiessen’s classic, The Snow Leopard?  Or books with animals on the cover? 

I half-started with the idea of detective fiction with animals in the title, hence Ross MacDonald’s The Zebra-Striped Hearse (perhaps to be followed with re-reads of Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon or Allingham’s The Tiger in the Smoke) but I remembered that if you cram too many P.I.s together their characters tend to blend, and I’d end up with some sort of Lew Archer/Sam Spade/Albert Campion hybrid. Plus the MacDonald had so many twists within twists that my brain couldn’t deal with any more.

Finally, Tim Cahill’s A Wolverine is Eating My Leg fell into my lap while I continue cataloging my books on LibraryThing (2700 and counting). I feel obliged to point out that this is a different Tim Cahill to Everton and Australia footballing legend, instead this one is an American journalist and feature writer who has a series of books which collect his writings, and with titles that typically feature comic lines involving animals. This is the first book of his that I’ve read, and there was indeed a lot of engaging animal content: mountain gorillas in Rwanda, sea snakes in the Philippines, pike in Wisconsin, sharks and sea lions in California, and even Bigfoot in Oregon. However, there were also long essays reporting on the scene in the immediate aftermath of the Jim Jones horrors in Guyana, and infiltrating Christian cults in California. A collection of this nature therefore  takes you to many places, geographically and emotionally, and some of them you might not want to go to. One slight gripe was that the date that the essays were first published wasn’t included, but they ranged from the early 70s to the late 80s. Apart from the jarring shifts in subject matter, I did enjoy Cahill’s writing and will probably pick up other collections should they appear in my charity shop browsing.

Thanks to @lizzie_birkett for this month’s theme, and as always to @squatbetty for founding and convening the whole Love Blippin’ Books experience :-)

The Nanoblock shark was a handy prop, which I will use to tenuously link the two books. There may not be sharks in the MacDonald book, but the zebra-striped hearse of the title is a vehicle converted by a group of young Californian surfers, and I’m sure they’ll have had the odd shark encounter.