I don't know whether to sell this book...

Cafe Society
1

or burn it.

The book is “Treasury of Great Cat Stories: A Collection of Tales That Celebrates the Mystique and Charm of Cats”

My review on Amazon:
If you really love cats, for Pete’s sake do NOT read this book
By B. Hammack on April 29, 2014
Format: Paperback
I’ll start with the most significant reason - there are a couple of stories that involve unpleasant things happening to cats. I found these stories upsetting and I recommend that cat lovers avoid this collection for that reason alone.

If it hadn’t been for those stories, I might have not been too down on this book, although some of the stories fail in the editor’s desire to showcase our relationship with cats - they could have as easily had dogs, fish, or in some stories a tchotcke and would not have been any different.

I also found the first story to be about as amusing as an accounting ledger, and some of the others nearly as boring, but I expect that with anthologies.

********** Spoiler, don’t read if you like cats *********

Specific to my first point, there is one story where the cat is slowly starved to death out of sheer stupidity. I could have lived without ever reading that sort of story. That is the worst offender, but there are others that also bothered me.

It almost seems wrong to me to try to get some money by exposing some other person to this.

2

By coincidence, I recently met the editor of “Mysterious Cat Stories,” an anthology of creepy and eerie cat yarns. Some of the stories involve bad things happening to cats. The stories are, however, properly indicated, and readers are warned.

Anthologies, by their nature, will have a variety of tones, touches, motifs, and dramatic ambiances. Some will be horrifying, and some will be humorous. Some will be heavily ironic, and others will be cathartic.

Seek for what you like, but don’t be too hasty to condemn what you don’t. Sell the book, or donate it to a library, or give it to a friend.

With appropriate warnings.