Where Cats Meditate

This book, edited by David Baird, is basically a purrfect (get it, perfect but with cat noises haha) little gift for someone who fulfills the following categories:

1. Buys into the whole mindfulness thing
2. But doesn't take it too seriously
3. Loves cats, obviously

   So basically it's one of those books that you would either read once and think "yeh okay" or retain upon a coffee-table or somewhere in the bathroom and you'd whip it out whenever you needed a dose of meditative feline wisdoms. It's literally just pictures of cats looking contemplative, counterposed against a pretty well-curated selection of lines of poetry, haiku, quotes from philosophers or profound thinkers, deep little apothegms - all in the kind of cat-like spirit of their sort of shambolic happy-go-lucky individualistic zen. It was neither as weirdly satirically-slanted nor as vacuously feline-cuteness-centric as other similar books about cats that I've read* - in fact, I feel it matched up to the brilliant depth of the feline spirit as presented and explored most wondrously in Sóseki Natsume's classic novel I Am A Cat; if you know what I mean, you know what I mean, regarding the nature of cats.

   "Letting the world be: I'm a monk, having an afternoon nap."

   Anyway, this would never have been something I would have typically gone out of my way to acquire - it was in a 20p bargain box at the Socialist Worker's stall at the Sharrow Festival on Saturday and in hindsight it was worth every penny. Chiefly because it's nice to have been able to read something entirely pointless - because now, until more or less the end of summer, it's hardcore dissertation time, so I'm going to be plunging my way through bits of dozens of books and finishing quite a few as well** - all non-fiction, all pretty heavy, and I am thoroughly excited by the prospect. You don't care about this, you probably didn't even read this paragraph when you noticed I'd stopped talking about the funny inner-peace-aid that is this cat book.
   That's okay.

the waves sound sometimes
close and sometimes far away
how much more of life

* There does seem to be a disproportionate numbers of books I end up blogging about that largely concern cats.

** I've had a handful of books out of the university library for literally months (years in a couple of cases) and obviously once I finish my dissertation I'll have to return them whether I've read them or not - so alongside actual research reading, I've got a short stack of dench political-economic bookage to practice my speed-reading on...