I have a cat. Actually, this is my daughter‘s cat, Alice.

Anyone who has ever read “Pete the Cat” to a kindergarten classroom knows that all hands pop up before you are finished, with a chorus of “I have a cat!” And once we unleash children to tell about their pets, we have totally lost their attention. Poor old Pete will just have to wait.

By college, we hope a story that includes a cat will provoke a discussion about symbolism, character development, even plot—but not the student’s own cat. (Witness Apollo, the great dane in Sigrid Nunez’s “The Friend.” Apollo is a character, although not as much as Six-Thirty, the talking dog in “Lessons in Chemistry” by Bonnie Garmus.)

Students who only want to talk about their own cat get sidetracked and bore everyone else in the room. A colleague at the University of Hartford gave a lecture on student engagement and used the “I have a cat” slogan to explain what kind of engagement we are not looking for.

I realize many times in my book group when other participants start talking about their metaphorical cat (some life story that seems unrelated to the book) , I chime in with “can we get back to the book,” insistent that the purpose of a book group discussion is to discuss the book. Of course, as someone who has taught literature for many years. I would love to keep the conversation about the book (theme, symbols, narrative structure, character development), but I recognize that many members of my book group want to talk about how their lives relate to the book, and pedantry can be just as boring as “I have a cat.”

Sometimes, the stories are interesting and elucidate some point in the book. And we are good enough friends after twenty years that we can be good-natured if a story seems to meander too far afield from the book.

A novel can get caught in “I have a cat” narratives as well. We will be discussing “There are Rivers in the Sky,” by Elif Shafak this week. I’ve written about how much I enjoyed this book in the past. (christinebeck.substack.com/p/does-water-hold-memory)

In preparing for our discussion, I read a review by Andrew Blackman (andrewblackman.net/2024/09/there-are-rivers-in-the-sky-by-elif-shafak/). Blackman acknowledged the accolades the book had received but argued that the novel missed the mark for him. In particular, he felt the theme of a drop of water moving through the centuries and changing form as it touched each character was contrived. (I agree, but I just ignored it—see my earlier essay.)

Blackman also felt the characters (there are three main characters in different time frames and locations) were not in balance. Actually, I agree with him there too, although this did not affect my appreciation of the book as much as it did his. I agreed that the character who had the most chapter time was Arthur, nicknamed King Arthur of the Sewers and Swamps. Arthur is raised in abject poverty yet rises to decode cuneiform at the British Museum, eventually addressing politicians on his discovery of the flood narrative in the epic of Gilgamesh. But I was so fascinated by how cuneiform was decoded, by the epic of Gilgamesh, and the controversy over the flood narrative that I would have been happy if the novel had been about the Arthur narrative alone.

The other characters were less compelling to me. Blackman said that Narin, a Yazidi girl living in 2014 in Iraq was his favorite. Narin is the great-great-granddaughter of Leila, whom Arthur meets when he travels to Nineveh to excavate more cuneiform tablets. In 2014, ISIS attacks the Yazidi, killing, raping and selling into slavery hundreds of them. Shafak, in an interview, stated there are still 3,000 Yazidi women unaccounted for after the 2014 genocide. From the interview, I gathered that the Narin narrative holds great power for Shafak.

If I had to nominate one character to eliminate from the novel, it would be Zaleeka, a hydrologist (hence the connection with the water theories) who lives on a houseboat on the Thames. She gets involved with a tattoo artist, which introduces the tattoo of a raindrop, a connection between Narin’s grandmother who wore it on her forehead and Zaleeka.

Zaleeka ultimately gets involved in a plot point involving Narin that is a bit far-fetched. Perhaps Shafak’s desire to tie all the characters together was unwise.

I’ll pose these questions to my book group this week. One thing is for sure: I doubt anyone will have a cuneiform story or has been to Iraq.

My book group recently read “Every Valley,” by Charles King, the story of Handel’s writing of the Messiah.

We discussed whether the book digressed into stories that were tangential, distracting or bogged down the action. Did it really need the discussion of Gulliver’s Travels or Ayuba Diallo, an African Muslim mistakenly kidnapped as a slave?

The author of Gullliver’s Travels, Johnathan Swift, returned in an important plot point at the end. As a church cleric in Dublin, he refused to allow his chorus members to sing in Handel’s Messiah because he decided it was blasphemous to mix scripture and stagecraft. (Ultimately, he relented). So maybe that justified mentioning him earlier, but we didn’t need the plot of Gulliver’s Travels to understand anything about Handel.

Diallo was apparently put into the story to show the impact of slavery in England. But did this have anything to do with Handel or his music? We concluded it was extraneous. These digressions were the equivalent of “I have a cat.”

Then two book group members sang snippets of the Messiah from their days in choirs. One woman told us she had sung with Seiji Ozawa‘s Boston Pops Orchestra for many years, including a one-week stint at what felt like camp when the chorus sang the Messiah at a summer venue called Tanglewood. They both brought their multiple scores of the Messiah and sang a few bars for us. It was just the right amount of “I have a cat!”

In this newsletter, I usually begin with a book I’ve read, examining it the way I might do in my book group, perhaps comparing it to other books on the same topic or written by the same author. But I also weave in some of my own experiences or my creative writing. For example, last week in discussing “Heartwood,” by Amity Gaige, (christinebeck.substack.com/p/looking-for-a-way-out), I ended with a piece I’d written about getting lost as a Girl School leader on a hike. Sometimes I’ll incorporate a poem or a personal insight. I realize that this writing style is perilously close to “I have a cat.” So if you don’t like cats, you can stop reading.

But please don’t! I so appreciate your comments, even if you want to tell me about your cat.