Doris Lessing: On Cats

Category: DNF

Nobel laureate Doris Lessing's book On Cats (affiliate link) is marketed as suitable for cat lovers, but it's not. It's really rare for me to leave a book unfinished, but this one had no other choice.

Already in the first pages, Doris tells how she shot a cat, and how her family systematically killed cats.

Those who read the book to the end have said that Doris probably felt like a cat lover, but she wasn't. Killing cats and kittens, and opposing cat sterilization made her a cat torturer.

I know times were different back then. I know my own grandmother drowned kittens. But I still can't or don't want to read about this topic.

Literally sickening work.

 

 

Margaret Mitchell: Gone with the Wind

Is Margaret Mitchell's classic novel Gone with the Wind (affiliate link) a "love letter to racism and slavery"?

I watched my favorite movie, Gone with the Wind, at Easter 2025, and then I was struck by the idea of ​​rereading the book. I can't remember how many times I've read it before.

Scarlett O'Hara is a Southern beauty whose secure life is upended by the American Civil War. Scarlett is a selfish and hard-hearted woman, some might even describe her as cruel. 16-year-old Scarlett's life falls apart when the man she loves, Ashley, marries his cousin Melanie. In revenge for this, Scarlett marries Melanie's brother Charles.

Modern readers find Gone with the Wind's depictions of racism terrible. I personally don't understand why people should lie and sweep history under the rug. It would be worse if they pretended that certain things never happened. That's what is done a lot these days, for example with covid vaccinations.

 

 

Miranda Cowley Heller: The Paper Palace

I picked up Miranda Cowley Heller's The Paper Palace (affiliate link) from the library's free book section with the idea of ​​giving it to my mother to read. Luckily, I immediately went to Goodreads to read the reviews for this book. They said that The Paper Palace is full of child rape and incest.

Elle has a handsome British husband, Peter, and three children. Yet she yearns for her childhood sweetheart, Jonas. Which one will she choose? Definitely the wrong one.

Elle really started to make me sick because of her hatred of cats. White cats in particular make her sick. Well, Elle, you make me sick. Because of that hatred of cats, I hoped that something bad would happen to Elle. It was a vain hope, of course.

How many similar books have I read recently? One where a cheating woman draws lots between two men? What if the gender roles were reversed? Would the book get as much praise?

 

 

Book review: Stephen King's Holly

"The Best of King" - New York Times

"The Worst of King" - some random person online

I had already removed Holly (affiliate link) from my reading list, but I still borrowed it from the library in a panic. The supporting character Holly was first seen in King's Mr Mercedes-trilogy.

After Bill Hodges' death, Holly Gibney works as a private investigator. The mother of a missing young woman hires her to find her daughter. But there are more missing people. Is there a serial killer on the loose?

Holly is full of vomit-inducing propaganda. Of course, a Trump supporter and an opponent of covid vaccines must die, because that person is an evil and stupid person in every way. I hate it when covid is stuffed into fictional works anyway. Hey, hello, fiction is supposed to be an escape from reality.

The book is also literally vomit-inducing. If you can't stand cannibalism, don't read Holly.

I should like Holly as a character because I am a so-called different person myself. But I don't.

Does King write about old people as serial killers because he himself is old?

A completely disgusting work.

 

 

Dan Simmons: Song of Kali

I wanted to read Dan Simmons' book Song of Kali (affiliate link) only because one of my cats was named Kali.

In the book an author goes to India to retrieve a manuscript of a poet who has been presumed dead. Easier said than done. Of course, the family has to be dragged along to get some nice plot twists.

The evil Kali has her own, deadly cult. Kali demands, and Kali takes.

A rather racist book, even in my opinion. India is a dirty and disgusting place, the next step from hell.

This book accompanied me on a train ride. I skipped a lot of the text. I don't recommend Song of Kali to anyone.

 

 

Lisa Jewell: Invisible Girl

I hadn't read anything by Lisa Jewell before. Invisible Girl (affiliate link) is about 17-year-old Saffyre, who had a terrible experience as a child. When her long-time therapist ends the relationship, she feels left with nothing. Then Saffyre disappears. Who is to blame?

The book started off pretty slow, but it kept me in its grip after that.

 

 

Beware of spoilers!!

 

There are surprisinglt many men who mistreat women in the same neighborhood.

The ending of the incel man is unbelievable. Yes, he now realizes what he has done and thought wrong, and everything is forgiven.

 

 

Book Review: Broken Country by Clare Leslie Hall

Clare Leslie Hall's Broken Country (affiliate link) has been a bestseller and phenomenon, as has the similar book Where the Crawdads Sing.

Family drama on a farm

Beth runs a farm with her husband Frank. In her past, she had a first love with Gabriel, a boy from the same village who became a successful playboy writer. When Gabriel returns to the village with his son, old wounds open up. Then something terrible happens. Who is to blame?

Once again, much ado about nothing. This is supposed to be a thriller, but I don't think it is.

Watch out for some SPOILERS below the picture.

 

 

Are there really people like Frank? Who happily let people shit on them, over and over again?

And what's the point of humanity forcing itself into monogamy? If it's not inherently so, why let yourself be brainwashed and forced into it? I always wonder the same thing in soap operas, for example.

Right at the beginning of the book, lambs and a dog are killed. If you can't stand animals dying, don't read this book.

 

Gu Byeong-Mo: The Old Woman with the Knife

The Old Woman with the Knife (affiliate link) is about a 65-year-old female assassin. The book is promised to be a "stunningly exciting action thriller".

Yeah, no. The book focuses on the boring everyday life of an assassin working under the pseudonym Hornclaw and the ailments of old age. The idea of ​​the book is better than its execution.

That there is supposedly an entire industry and numerous offices in Korea for assassins, who have lots of assignments. How many people do they kill in Korea every day without the murderers getting caught? Quite a lot, I see.

And the fact that the 65-year-old is supposedly so old and frail that she doesn't even remember to feed her dog? Yeah, no.

 

 

Freida McFadden: The Housemaid Is Watching

The Housemaid Is Watching (affiliate link) is the third book in Freida McFadden's The Housemaid series.

Millie and Enzo move with their children to a house that is too expensive for their budget. The new neighbors are of course suspicious and unpleasant. Then something shocking happens.

There is a fair amount of consensus among readers about this book, that it is a completely pointless effort. Many have been disappointed, and hope that the series will end. Like many others, I did not recognize these characters. Nothing really exciting happened or was happening.

Personally, I never like it when "thrillers" focus only on boring everyday life and home life.

The Housemaid Is Watching takes place 11 years after the previous book. Quite a leap in time. And of course, everyone always wants that idyllic family life in the suburbs. Even those who have previously lived a slightly more unconventional life.

 

 

Colette: The cat

Colette's The Cat (La Chatte) tells the story of a love triangle, where one of the involved is of course a cat. In the end, everything culminates in a terrible act.

Even now, the cat smelled of mint and geranium and hedgerow. Alain kept it there, a trusting and fragile creature who had perhaps been promised ten years of life. And he suffered thinking about the brevity of such a great love.

I learned about the existence of this book from the book "Famous Cats and Their People", which I believe hasn't been translated into English. I was also lucky, The Cat was first published in Finnish in 2025.

But I was cursed with The Cat. When I wanted to reserve it from the library, I couldn't do it because it was on the shelf, but when I went to the library, it wasn't there. When I left the library, it wasn't on the shelf, but when I returned home from the library, the book had appeared on the shelf. It even happened that once the book was in the library, but not on its own shelf and I couldn't find it anywhere else, even though I went through all the display tables and shelves.

And for some reason this paperback novella is really expensive in stores, ranging from 38.20 euros to 47.95! The book is hard to find in English, it's not even on Amazon.

Considering how obsessed I was with this book for half a year, I was disappointed (of course). Colette's narration is long-winded and too descriptive.

The Finnish print of this book is absolutely full of typos. Apparently the publisher can't afford a proofreader.

 

 

PLOT SPOILERS BELOW

One reviewer wrote: "How could you not love a book where a woman asks a man to choose between herself and her cat, and the cat wins?" Except that what woman would want to win over that misogynist?
 

A small, innocent creature, blue as the most beautiful dreams. A small soul. Faithful, capable of dying quietly, gracefully if what she has chosen betrays her. You held it in your hands, empty... And you opened your hands. You are a monster. I don't want to live with a monster.

 

Book Review: Chill Factor by Sandra Brown

In Sandra Brown's book Chill Factor (affiliate link), a serial killer is rampaging in a small town. Suspicion falls on Ben Tierney, a writer of articles about outdoors life. Tierney and Lilly, who has just divorced the town's police chief, end up trapped in a mountain cabin in the middle of a blizzard. A struggle for life and death begins.

Numerous parties try to get to the cabin. Some to save Lilly, some to lynch Tierney. But is he guilty of the murders?

And what other immoral things are going on in the small town?

My biggest problem with this book was the cold. Just when the weather was getting colder, I didn't feel inspired to read about the blizzard and its effects. I guess it would have been better to read this book in the summer heat.

 

 

 

PLOT SPOILERS BELOW, BEWARE!

It was clear from the beginning that Tierney couldn't be guilty because he was the romantic hero of the story. I wanted to get to the end of the book to see how all the evidence against him was explained. And it was explained well.

The culprit is of course an incel. An ugly man who can't stand not being good enough for good-looking women. An ugly man who can't stand it when an ugly woman tries to hit him. Surely an ugly woman should be killed if she dares to try to hit a man?

 

Robin Cook: Blindsight

Robin Cook's Blindsight (affiliate link) is the first Cook book to feature Laurie Montgomery, but Jack Stapleton has yet to appear.

Forensic pathologist Laurie is courted by two men, homicide detective Lou and high-income eye surgeon Jordan (cough cough Robin Cook himself). Young and successful people are dying of cocaine overdoses, and Laurie begins to suspect that something is wrong. At the same time, seemingly random people are being executed mafia-style. Does the mafia boss under the eye surgeon's care have something to do with it?

As always, Robin Cook's older hospital thrillers keep me entertained. I don't like his newer work, though.

 

 

Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter

Why did the local rural library acquire the English-language The Scarlet Letter (affiliate link) in 1959? The book is in surprisingly good condition considering its age, so it probably hasn't been borrowed much.

I had not read this classic of world literature, although I refer to it in one of my stories. So it was about time I read it.

What is The Scarlet Letter about? Hester Prynne is a fallen woman who, as punishment for her crime, has to wear a red letter A embroidered on her clothes for the rest of her life. She refuses to reveal who she committed adultery with.

I thought I would be able to get by with a little since the book was so small, but the pages were full of text and the English was not the easiest. There were too many (landscape) descriptions for my taste, and I skipped most of the text.

All in all, a book that was too fine for me. But I'm not the only one, many modern readers don't know how to appreciate this level of word art.

 

 

Ana Huang: King of Wrath

Ana Huang is one of the cult writers of our time. I had never heard of her before I saw an article about her visit to Finland by chance, her fans were excited.

It was difficult to get her books from the library, especially since she writes series and you should start reading from the first part.

King of Wrath (affiliate link) is about a forced marriage. Dante is a billionaire who is forced into an engagement with Vivian. This is the classic from enemies to lovers story.

For some reason, I didn't progress reading this book as quickly as I expected. That doesn't say anything about the book being bad, it's about me.

 

 

Anxiety-provoking reading experiences

 This post contains affiliate links.

 

I started watching the horror anthology series Creepshow on Viaplay, and the second episode was already unsettling to me because of its subject matter. In that episode, a girl had a dollhouse, and in her absence, its inhabitants began to move to different places on their own.

Then I started thinking about my memorable unsettling reading experiences.

They all seem to have something in common, namely something evil that keeps getting closer.

 

Stephen King's The Sun Dog (from the collection Four Past Midnight)

A boy receives a Polaroid camera as a gift. In every picture he takes, a dog appears. At first, just as a small dot in the background, but it gets closer and more threatening as it goes. What happens when the menacing dog crosses the line between photographs and reality?

 

 

 

The Moving Finger by Stephen King (from the collection Nightmares and Dreamscapes)

A man notices a finger in the opening of the bathroom sink. An epic battle ensues between him and the surprisingly long finger.

I had no idea that this story was reportedly made into an episode of the TV series Monsters.

I think it was while I was reading this collection of short stories that a scary thing happened to me. When I returned to my room after being away, I thought the book was in a different place than where I had left it. It scared me.

 

The Road Virus Heads North by Stephen King (from the collection Everything's Eventual)

A man buys a painting from a yard sale. The artist of the painting was said to have been mentally disturbed and killed himself. As the man travels home, the painting changes to reflect the place he has just been. And people start dying in those places. When the man gets home, the road virus also arrives...

There are of course many other disturbing reading experiences, but these were the first ones that came to mind without thinking.

 

Book Review: The Gwendy Trilogy by Stephen King & Richard Chizmar

There are other worlds than these. 

The Gwendy Trilogy (affiliate link) is a collection of three short stories by Stephen King and Richard Chizmar.

In the first, Gwendy's Button Box, Gwendy comes into possession of a mysterious box as a child. It contains a power that could destroy the entire world.

In the second part, written by Chizmar alone, Gwendy is a young, successful politician when the box returns to her life.

The real jackpot for King fans, however, is the final part of the trilogy, Gwendy's Final Task. It is full of references to other works by King, such as It, Pennywise, and The Dark Tower.

I always hate it when covid is included in fictional works, especially knowing King's stance on corona vaccinations. Fortunately, there was no forced vaccination in this collection.

 

 

Stephen King: The Long Walk

One hundred teenage boys participate in a walking race. Only one survives to the finish line. The winner gets everything he wants for the rest of his life.

I had been waiting for decades for Stephen King's The Long Walk (affiliate link) to be made into a movie. This book is one of my favorites in King's work. It had been a long time since I last read it.

After seeing the movie, I started to be bothered by the fact that I remembered so little about the plot of the book. I immediately had to rush online to get it for my computer, since the library doesn't have it (or so I thought). I only succeeded from a third source. Libgen required a login, there was no version to borrow from the Internet Archive. I first downloaded the mobi from Anna's Archive, but Adobe Digital Editions doesn't support it. So I had to download the epub version, and that's when it started working.

It was only afterwards that I discovered that a new Finnish edition/version of The Long March had been published. When I last checked, there wasn't one yet. The book wasn't in the library at all then, but it is now. And it would have been on the shelf when I went to the library just the day before. Damn.

 

This time I paid the most attention to the differences between the book and the movie, and there are plenty of them. The biggest one, of course, is the completely changed ending. As well as the changed personalities and motivations of the characters. Many characters from the book are not in the movie at all, and these characteristics of the deleted characters have been given to other characters. One example of this is Stebbins, who has been given the characteristics of the deleted Scramm: good fitness/muscularity and disease.

Racism. Homophobia. Misogyny. The death of a dog. All of this can be found in The Long Walk.

Even when threatened with death, teenage boys have sex on their minds. And surely that's worth dying for?

VERDICT:

 

 

Terry Hayes: The Year of the Locust

Terry Hayes' The Year of the Locust (affiliate link) is 900 pages long. Literally a really heavy book.

I waited a long time for this book. It was postponed for several years.

And all this time I thought that The Year of the Locust is a sequel to I Am Pilgrim. But it's not. If I had known this, I wouldn't have wanted to read it. I wouldn't have been waiting for it. I wouldn't have bothered dragging this heavy load home from the library.

Reading the book was slow only because I didn't want to pick it up because of its massive size. Too heavy, especially in the summer heat.

So what happens in the book? Again, some CIA agent does some dangerous work, wandering through remote areas and deserts.

But once again I ended up getting interested, and the book and the plot took me with it.

Towards the end, The Year of the Locust changes its genre to something completely different, sci-fi and dystopian. This sudden change in plot and style has angered readers, to say the least.

 

 

Stephen King: You Like It Darker

I'm no longer keeping up with Stephen King's works. It's bad if the translation comes out before I have read the book.

You Like It Darker (affiliate link) is a collection of short stories. King has produced numerous wonderful short story collections, so my expectations were high.

King just can't win. I think it's embarrassing if he tries to write about today's youth. And if he writes about himself, or about old writers, that's not good enough for me either.

 

Two Talented Bastids

Yet another story about a writer, boring. And how is this different from The Tommyknockers (affiliate link)? 

 

The Fifth Step

Nice short story with a good twist.

 

Willie the Wierdo

This reminds me of the distressing movie The Skeleton Key (affiliate link), which I would want to dare to watch again, but I don't think I can.

 

Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream

Long, boring and useless story about a man who sees in a dream where a body is hidden, and ends up being the main suspect of the murder. 

 

Finn

Man of bad luck is mistaken for another man and kidnapped as innocent. 

 

On Slide Inn Road

An old man saves the day, what else?

 

Red Screen

Help, my wife is an alien? 

 

The Turbulence Expert

This story is not suitable for those who have fear of flying. I happen to have it too, but it doesn't matter one bit because I have never been on a plane. There's no reason to go there.

 

Laurie

Laurie is a dog who encounters a crocodile. Or an alligator, what's the difference?

 

Rattlesnakes

This is a "sequel" to Cujo (affiliate link). Perhaps I don't want to know how certain characters are doing decades later.

 

The Dreamers

For me this was perhaps the most interesting story in this collection. This could make a person to be afraid of sleeping.

 

The Answer Man

This was also an intriguing story. If you could get answers about your life beforehand, what would you ask? And would you be able to handle the answers?

 

 

 

Robin Cook: Night Shift

Night Shift (affiliate link) is the 13th book in Robin Cook's Jack Stapleton & Laurie Montgomery series

 

Laurie's good friend, Dr. Susan Passero, is killed, although only the reader knows this. Jack tries to find out the cause of death, which seems mysterious. Sue suspected that a serial killer was rampaging in the hospital. Soon, other lives will be in danger.

Some of the things about the main couple in the series were new and strange to me, and I only realized afterwards that I had not read the previous book in the series, Genesis, because it is not in the library.

 

Cons of the book

-constant forcing of the Covid vaccination

-crap dialogue, especially the constantly repeated same and corny "swear" words

 

Has Robin Cook always been such a bad writer? No, I recently read my favorite by him, Mutation.