Although I am a slave to my gray tuxedo cat (see Mr. Felix below), I usually despise cat mysteries or any other kind of fiction involving felines, canines, or any other creature, great or small (with the exception of the classic and very rabbity Watership Down).

 

But as a former senior scribe of my high school’s Latin Club (also known as the Junior Classical League), I couldn’t resist when British mystery book blog, Euro Crime, posted a story (”All Hail Spartapuss!) about a new children’s series set in an ancient Rome ruled by cats.

  

The publisher Mogzilla say the books are ”based partly on historical events as recorded by the great classical writers Tacitus and Suetonius”. The first book, I am Spartapuss, tells the story of a slave from the Land of the Kitons who becomes a Roman gladiator (or is that cat-iator?). This is followed by Catigula and Die Clawdius. If only I had these in Latin class!

In other feline news, the New York Times reports today that Grand Central Publishing  (the former Warner Books) is paying $1.25 million for the rights to publish the life story of Dewey, a rescued cat who lived for 19 years in the public library in Spencer, Iowa. Wow! That would buy a lot of cat food and kitty litter.

Dewey’s biographer is librarian Vicki Myron who will co-write Dewey, a Small Town, a Library and the World’s Most Beloved Cat with Bret Witter, a former editorial director at Health Communications, the publisher of the “Chicken Soup for the Soulâ€? books.

And in a related NYT story, “Home Cooking for  Pets is Suddenly Not So Odd“, pet owners are starting to prepare home cooked meals for Fido and Fluffy in light of the recent Menu Foods tainted food crisis. As a result, sales of pet cookbooks like Real Food For Dogs and Home-Prepared Dog and Cat Diet are rising. If you have these and other pet culinary titles in your collection, you might do a special display for your  pet-loving patrons. 

 

In light of today’s rapid technological advances, the future of the printed book is constantly debated. But think about those poor medieval monks whose beloved illuminated scrolls were replaced by those new-fangled books. How did you open those damn things? Check out the hilarious results at http://youtube.com/watch?v=aX0-nqRmtos .  And anyone who has called their company’s IT department for assistance in turning on their new computer can relate.

At Heather’s impetus, I, too, will emerge from the depths of winter-holiday-season office decampment to wish for and wonder about a book. 

The tie between folklore and linguistics may seem flimsy to those not buried in a world of fricatives and syntax, vowel shifts and universal grammar. (I often worry over the difficulty of linguistics for lay readers and why the study hasn’t yet been very popularized.) But the Grimm brothers saw a very close tie, and I’ve been told (albeit by a biased linguistics professor) that they began their accumulation of fairy tales for language study purposes. Give me a good biography to prove it!

The Brothers Grimm by Jack Zipes got a good review from LJ at first publication in 1988 and after being updated in 2002, but its focus on the literariness of the tales is clear. 

I would love to see a linguistic biography of the brothers. Jacob is responsible for Grimm’s Law, which can be used to trace English words to their Indo-European predecessors, to find the links between English words and their German, Latin, and even Hindi counterparts, and to recreate ancient, extinct parent languages.

Now, if someone could find a way to explain this fascinating history in an accessible way (maybe via the Grimms’s lives and studies, nudge, nudge), I would be one very happy reader.

And please, by all means, any of you secret linguistics enthusiasts out there, let me know of any easy-to-read linguistics books that exist!  (I’ll check out my shelf of college linguistics textbooks, but something tells me I won’t come up with too much to recommend in the layperson’s linguistics category.)

Cider Mill Press, distributed by Sterling, is fllipping the script on the ever-growing collection of books on the history of hip-hop (see “The Hip-Hop Library” and a forthcoming review of Total Chaos, a new collection of hip-hop scholarship): out in January is Hip-Hop U.S. History, which includes a CD and lyrics of original raps for high school students on history “from Columbus to the Civil Rights Era.” 

With praise for this “Flocabulary” series from Cornel West, TIME OUT New York, and MTV News, a look at the educational lyrics is disappointing: “Thirty thousand years ago some dudes / came across the Bearing Strait wearing snowshoes. / Eskimos chasing woolly mammoth, / Ice Age white like dandruff.” And the actual beef of the information, the stuff on tests, is in ordinary text-book prose in the margins.

This idea may work on TV (a la School House Rock), but I have trouble imagining a teenager that would be seen carrying this book or letting the beat to ”It’s the U.S. (Bust the A)” seep out of iPod ear buds. Thanks for the option, but I’ll stick with the history of hip-hop over the hip-hop of history.