A cat poop mystery

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Well, this is new.

I was attempting to do some review work with my third hour class (they have a test tomorrow) when a bunch of my boys abruptly and simultaneously lost their minds. Turns out they had located a piece of what appeared to be cat shit on the floor near one of their desks. While I’m fairly sure this isn’t the first time that there has been poop on the floor in my classroom– I feel like there was some sort of post-recess insanity at some point or another– it was probably the first time for that particular species. At any rate, I got my broom and cleaned it up and went about my day, chuckling at the ridiculousness of it all.

A quick warning: this story will not end neatly. But prepare yourself for Part II anyway.

PART II! I had finished my lunch and was walking to the office to complete a couple of small tasks, including but not limited to a human shit, when I discovered, to my great surprise and mild amusement, what was definitely a second piece of cat shit, this time in the hallway, about halfway between my room and the office. Why the certainty? It had litter embedded in it, implying that it had traveled to be in our hallway and not that we had a rogue cat shitting up our building. (There are a lot of strays in our neighborhood, so this isn’t as insane an idea as it might sound.). I left it there for a few minutes, taking care of business in the office, then cleaned it up the same way and waited outside my room, a giant grin on my face, waiting for my assistant principal to finish up with his lunch duty and walk back to his office, as he always does. I have never been looking forward to a facial expression more in my entire life, and prefaced the story as “the most middle school story of all time.”

I told him that I didn’t have any idea what he should do with the information I had just given him, or even if he should or could do anything with the information that I had just given him, but that I couldn’t in good conscience find two pieces of non-human excrement in two different places in the building, especially when one appeared to be imported, and not let someone know about it.

“You make more money than me,” I said. “This is why.” Then I patted him on the shoulder, turned around, and went into my classroom, hopefully to enjoy the rest of my day poop-free.

On the Booker Prize

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading2 Comments

This isn’t a review. I read M. John Harrison’s The End of Everything over tonight and last night; it’s a novella, under 200 pages, so it’s going to be a quick read no matter what.(*) My copy says “Longlisted” on the cover, this image says “Shortlisted,” and, well, the latest editions are going to read “Winner.” Despite that, of the currently 1750 books I have read on Goodreads, it has the fifth-lowest average rating.(**) One of the books worse than it was written by Steven Seagal. I gave it three stars and I feel like I’m being generous. I don’t have a lot to say about it, really; it’s just not a good book, and the notion that it was the best book written in the English language this year is ludicrous. It’s certainly not as good as John of John, which was also shortlisted, and while I haven’t read Marlon James’ The Disappearers yet, it’s on my shelf and I’m willing to say I’m going to like it more just based on what I know of James’ work. I’ve also got my eye on Black Bag, just based on the cover.

This got me curious about how many of the winners of this award I knew anything about at all. You all know how I feel about Litratcher, but this wasn’t even one of those books that made me feel like I wasn’t smart enough to appreciate it. Hell, The Rouse was approximately four hundred times as cryptic and obscure as this book was. If you wanted to give the Booker Prize to a science fiction book published in 2026, it should have been that.

Anyway, of the Booker Prize winners since 1969:

Read, Enjoyed: A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James (2015); Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie (1981);

Read, Did Not Enjoy: The End of Everything by M. John Harrison (2026);

Have Heard Of But Have Never Read: Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart (2020; it’s on my Unread Shelf, so I’ll get to it); The Testaments by Margaret Atwood (2019); Life of Pi by Yann Martel (2002, and tbh I’m surprised I never read this); The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood (2000); Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee (1999); Amsterdam by Ian McEwan (1998); The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy (1997); The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje (1992); The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro (1989, another “wait, really?);

Have Heard of the Book or the Author, but Not Both: Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders (2017); The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton (2013); Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel (2012); Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel (2009); The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai (2006); The Sea by John Banville (2005); The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje (1992); The Old Devils by Kingsley Amis (1986); Life and Times of Michael K by J. M. Coetzee (1983); Rites of Passage by William Golding (1980); The Sea, the Sea by Iris Murdoch (1978); In a Free State by V. S. Naipaul (1971);

Absolutely No Clue: Flesh by David Szalay (2025); Orbital  by Samantha Harvey (2024); Prophet Song by Paul Lynch (2023); The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka (2022); The Promise by Damon Galgut (2021); Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo (2019); Milkman by Anna Burns (2018); The Sellout by Paul Beatty (2016); The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan (2014); The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes (2011); The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson (2010); The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga (2008); The Gathering by Anne Enright (2007); The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst (2004); Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre (2003); True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey (2001); Last Orders by Graham Swift (1996); The Ghost Road by Pat Barker (1995); How late it was, how late by James Kelman (1994); Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha by Roddy Doyle (1993); Sacred Hunger by Barry Unsworth (1992); The Famished Road by Ben Okri (1991); Possession by A. S. Byatt (1990); Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey (1988); Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively (1987); The Bone People by Keri Hulme (1985); Hotel du Lac by Anita Brookner (1984); Schindler’s Ark by Thomas Keneally (1982); Offshore by Penelope Fitzgerald (1979); Staying On by Paul Scott (1977); Saville by David Storey (1976); Heat and Dust by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (1975); The Conservationist by Nadine Gordimer (1974); Holiday by Stanley Middleton (1974); The Siege of Krishnapur by J. G. Farrell (1973); G. by John Berger (1972); The Elected Member by Bernice Rubens (1970); Something to Answer For by P. H. Newby (1969) and Troubles by J.G Farrell, which is “The Lost Man Booker Prize,” and I do not intend to investigate what that means.

That’s … uh, not great! I’ve read three of them, fully intend to read one more, and maybe might pick up a couple of others at some point or another, but for an award that purports to be for the best book written in English that year, I feel like I should have heard of more than a third of them. Granted, I like me some genre, but I pay attention to books. I should be familiar with more of these.

How about you? Are you shaking your head at what an uncultured swine I am right now?

(*) I also own Harrison’s Viriconium; I’m phrasing it that way because I believe it was a DNF.

(**) In fact, all of my books are rated higher than all of Harrison’s books on Goodreads. That’s … amazing.

In which I’m pretty sure I’m not dead

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I very much had a “God, they’re all so stupid” sort of day, and I spent most of the day feeling like I was getting my ass kicked, but I left work with my assignments set up and ready to go for all of my classes tomorrow, so it couldn’t have been that bad, could it? Surely not. But this was very much a “come home and look at want ads” day. I didn’t do that; I came home and sat in my chair and finished a book instead, a book that I very much need to think about some more before I write about it.

Wolf Jesus. That book was about Wolf Jesus. I was not expecting Wolf Jesus when I picked that book up, but that’s what I got.

Anyway, there might be a post about it in the next couple of days. We’ll see how capable of coherent thought I am. Today was the last day of state testing for a while; the last couple of weeks, between Fall Break, state testing, including one day that had to be rescheduled, a field trip, and half a dozen other things, has been pure chaos, and both the kids’ behavior and my mood has suffered as a result. The boss literally ended the day with “let’s all calm down and enjoy the rest of our week” during the announcements at the end of the day, and after the kids were out of the building I sat down at my desk and just went away for half an hour. I blinked and I’d been sitting there for long enough that, had I gone out and gotten in my car, I’d have been home.

I wanted to do some video gamery tonight– I have been enjoying the hell out of Mortal Shell II— but fuck it, it’s 8:30 and pitch black outside. That’s bedtime somewhere, right?

Anybody want some art?

On By Luther M. SilerIn art2 Comments

I tried this on Bluesky and didn’t get any takers, so let’s try here: I ordered this print from Smallwhitemonster, an artist whose work I discovered through TikTok and am terribly fond of, and by a combination of shipping screw-ups and some really generous customer service I ended up with two of them. The first one is hanging on the wall right there; the second (no frame, for the record) is still in its original packaging and has been hanging out in my dining room for a couple of weeks. I wrote customer service when the second one showed up and offered to send it back to them, and they told me that wasn’t necessary, but I don’t like the idea of just throwing it away, so I’m hoping I can find someone who wants it. No charge other than shipping, as I don’t like the idea of making any money off of someone else’s art that I got for free.

The print is called “Please Stop Feeding Our Cat” and is 16″ x 20″. Drop me a comment if you’re interested and we’ll work out the details.

#REVIEW: Scion, by James Islington

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, ReviewsLeave a comment

For your edification: a brief review of a brief book.

James Islington is becoming one of those authors where I preface every mention of him with a disclaimer; he has written six books, I have bought seven of them, read roughly four and 1/4, and liked … two. Honestly, I only picked Scion up because, as a science fiction novella unrelated to any of his previous work, it promised to be different, and I figure that if I gave the guy a chance in a whole different genre and still wasn’t able to fully endorse his work, it would be okay to put him down.(*)

And … well, damn it, I would like to request to Islington that he stick to short-format science fiction for a while. He’s good at it. You can get away with a lot of shit in a standalone novella that you can’t get away with in a novel or especially a trilogy, and the kind of stuff you can get away with is exactly the kind of stuff that has historically bothered me about his work. You just need enough world building for everything to hang together, y’know? The book is 226 pages and I read it in about two and a half hours. There’s no time to explain everything! It’s no problem!

I am also a sucker for hazily futuristic worlds involving genetically and possibly mechanically augmented assassins(**), which seems like a very specific thing to be a sucker for but somehow isn’t. I like the main character’s voice, I like the overall tone of the book, I like that it’s gritty without being entirely nihilistic and twisty-turny without feeling like a puzzle box. I really enjoyed my time with this book, and in a way that was very different from the rest of Islington’s work. There are a lot of things, positive and negative, you can say about his work, but I think even his biggest fans would not describe either Licanius or Hierarchy as “fun.” This book is fun! It may not surprise you to learn that I like reading books I think are fun.

Now, that said: this is, again, a novella, and while I didn’t personally pay this much for it, the MSRP on the hardcover edition is thirty-two dollars, rather steep for a book that didn’t even last me three hours. I’m pretty sure I used cash back from my Amazon Prime card to buy this, or at least heavily subsidize it, and of course it was discounted already. But if you’re the type to want to buy this in a store that isn’t able to offer the kinds of discounts that Amazon does, maybe wait for paperback, if any such thing is coming. Or maybe not! Money’s not real, and I have a job mostly to support my book habit anyway.

(*) After buying Hierarchy 3, apparently called The Justice of One, of course. I may not read it! But I’m gonna buy it.

(**) Actual assassins, who start the book with an assassination. Lots of main character assassins don’t do nearly as much assassinating as you might expect them to.

In which I am a bad blogperson

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

I’m tired, kinda crabby, and not feeling especially well, and at 8:00 I just finished my first meal of the day.

Not really thinking especially clearly, either. Y’all be good. I’ll see you tomorrow.

One left

On By Luther M. SilerIn ReadingLeave a comment

I finished Towers of Midnight last night, which after a promising start to Sanderson’s concluding trilogy spent most of its length spinning its wheels. I’ve been doing a book a month pretty religiously since I started this, but I may go ahead and knock out A Memory of Light soon just to be finished. There’s a new John Gwynne book to get to first, though, and that’s much more important. I will almost certainly do a wrap-up post once I’m finished, but nobody wants to read that and you all know what it’s going to say by now.

One of my high school teachers passed away in the last few days at the ripe old age of 95, and while I’m not certain I’m going to write about her, I may attend the service on Monday and I’m a little twisted about it at the moment. I’d looked her up a few times over the past several years and just assumed that either there was no obituary to be found or it was eluding my Google-fu; no, turns out she was just nearly immortal, and I suspect she’d been running mostly on spite for the last couple of decades. I say that with deep affection, of course.

For now, though, the last week has been emotionally exhausting on a whole lot of levels, and I came home and immediately fell asleep in my chair for an hour or so, and I think the proper method of recovering from my week is to go hit a bunch of monsters with a giant fuck-off hammer. So I’m off to do that. I’ll see y’all tomorrow.

Can’t blog, reading

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Bound and determined to finish the penultimate Wheel of Time book tonight. Less than 150 pages.