I feel as though my reading year is starting off very slowly. I have a couple books on hand from the library that I’m having trouble sinking into and should probably return and try again later, I have been waiting for other things to come off holds, and had to wait for a book I purchased to be replaced since pages were falling out of the binding. Plus, my attention span hasn’t really been great, either.
So, I decided to lean a bit into some of the short works I had selected for some of this year’s Read Harder tasks to see if I could jump start things a bit (results so far are mixed). Which brings me to Woe: A Housecat’s Story of Despair by Lucy Knisley. The task at hand was reading a non-fiction comic, and this was one of two already on my to read list (Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands is also there, but significantly longer than Woe). This is my fourth Knisley, and she works in memoir most often, but Woe is a slight tangent from that – telling us the tale of the life of her cat Linney as captured in comic form over the years.
These were previously published comics collected, but as I only interact with Knisley’s work in book form, they were new to me. For those of us who have shared our lives with cats so much of who Linney was, and how Knisley’s family interacted with her, will be familiar and relatable. In the intro Knisley points out how unique cat illustrations have been historically, and how her own images of Linney are in that vein – they capture her, but they are not especially accurate in a photo-realistic sort of way. This stuck with me the whole reading time, as various splotches of orange showed Linney in her variety of moods, and it all felt very right to me.
