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The new Hobbit Limited Edition Moleskine.

Essential for unexpected journeys, adventures, encounters with treasure-hoarding dragons. Php1140 at National Bookstores.

Inside: 11 illustrations from the first edition of The Hobbit.

When you unwrap your notebook, you will find a message from Bilbo.

Drogon’s full name is a compendium of dragon names (from A Song of Ice and Fire, the Arthurian tales and The X-Men). For his human father, we have selected two: one plays Loki, the other Smaug. See the resemblance? Hence Drogon Lockheed Pendragon Targaryen-Targaryen Hiddleston-Cumberbatch.

Drogon looks thin, but he’s heavy. And extremely cheerful. (“What’s this? It’s water! Wow! I love it!”)

Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Let me out of this carrier!

I would like a caffe latte, please. Hold the coffee, double the milk.

You must be my human cousins. Hello, I’m Drogon. Yes, my right eyeball is smaller than my left and it’s not a complete circle. It looks like the Death Star under construction.

Your name is Daenerys? That’s hysterical! We should hang out and, like, reconquer Westeros. Say “Dracarys”. Come on.

No, Ma’am, I am not Siamese. I don’t know about my breed, I used to be a street cat.

Barely had we posted our 100 favorite books when we began revising it: if we have to choose between a book we admire or a book we love, we pick love. This is not a completely rational list.

We forgot e.e. cummings! Whose poems lurk in our memory banks, emerging at the oddest moments.

Here’s Tom Hiddleston reading May I Feel Said He. Thank you to the lovely Hiddleston fan who posted it.

If someone has the complete works, could you send us the full and correct text of the poem that goes: “The king and queen alighting from their limousine inhabit the Hotel Meurice while I live in a garret and eat aspirine?”

* * * * *

Thanks to sunflowii and richie yap for sending in the complete piece, Poem XVI “?”. The exact quote is:

why are these pipples taking their hets off?
the king & queen alighting from their limousine
inhabit the Hotel Meurice(whereas
i live in a garret and eat aspirine)

Thanks to Juan, who lugged this doorstop home from a trip. Read What can W.H. Auden do for you? in Prospect.

In no particular order. Several series are listed as one book. Aaargh we just remembered a bunch of other books. This list changes constantly.

The Once and Future King, T.H. White
The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton
The Stories of John Cheever
Dune, Frank Herbert
The Collected Stories of W. Somerset Maugham
The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
Nine Stories, J.D. Salinger
The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger
The Outsider, Albert Camus
Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
Without Feathers, Woody Allen
A Handful of Dust, Evelyn Waugh
A Boy and His Dog, Harlan Ellison
The Collected Stories of Paul Bowles
Kim, Rudyard Kipling
The Man Who Watched the Trains Go By, Georges Simenon
First Love, Last Rites, Ian McEwan
A Sport and A Pastime, James Salter
Motherless Brooklyn, Jonathan Lethem
Wittgenstein’s Mistress, David Markson
Rogue Male, Geoffrey Household
The Unrest-Cure and Other Stories by Saki, H.H. Munro
The Jeeves stories, P.G. Wodehouse
Persuasion, Jane Austen
The Gambler, Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Stories of Anton Chekhov
The Angel Esmeralda, Don DeLillo
The Smiley novels, John LeCarre
The Little Drummer Girl, John LeCarre
Watchmen, Alan Moore
Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell
The Patrick Melrose novels, Edward St. Aubyn
Another Marvelous Thing, Laurie Colwin
Miss Garnet’s Angel, Salley Vickers
Our Story Begins, New and Selected Stories, Tobias Wolff
Waiting for Sunrise, William Boyd
The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien
From Hell, Alan Moore
Love In A Cold Climate, Nancy Mitford
The Separation, Christopher Priest
The End of the Affair, Graham Greene
The Lottery and Other Stories, Shirley Jackson
Possession, A.S. Byatt
The Collected Poems of W.H. Auden
The Decameron, Boccacio
Jesus’s Son, Denis Johnson
The Book of J, David Rosenberg and Harold Bloom
Plays, Tom Stoppard
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Michael Chabon
The Ogre, Michel Tournier
Burning Your Boats, The Collected Short Stories, Angela Carter
Don’t Look Now, Daphne Du Maurier
Light Years, James Salter
Seven Gothic Tales, Isak Dinesen
The Mayor of Casterbridge, Thomas Hardy
Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
100 Selected Poems, e.e. cummings
The Complete Works of William Shakespeare
The Leopard, Giuseppe di Lampedusa
The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz
The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis
Amphigorey (series), Edward Gorey
Night Soldiers, Alan Furst
History of the Kelly Gang, Peter Carey
Perfume, Patrick Susskind
The Iliad, Homer
The Odyssey, Homer
The Oresteia, Aeschylus
Complete Poems of T.S. Eliot
The Most Beautiful Woman in Town, Charles Bukowski
The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje
Ripley’s Game, Patricia Highsmith
The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton
The Go-Between, L.P. Hartley
The Sense of An Ending, Julian Barnes
Zeno’s Conscience, Italo Svevo
Double Fault, Lionel Shriver
Numbers in the Dark, Italo Calvino
Cyrano de Bergerac, Edmond Rostand
The Good Soldier, Ford Madox Ford
The Idiot, Fyodor Dostoevsky
A Time of Gifts, Patrick Leigh Fermor
Between the Woods and the Water, Patrick Leigh Fermor
The Hare With Amber Eyes, Edmund De Waal
For Keeps, 30 Years at the Movies, Pauline Kael
Memoirs of An Anti-Semite, Gregor von Rezzori
Stalingrad, Antony Beevor
The Stones of Florence, Mary McCarthy
Into the Heart of Borneo, Redmond O’Hanlon
America’s Boy, James Hamilton Paterson
Longitude, Dava Sobel
Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere, Jan Morris
In Patagonia, Bruce Chatwin
Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, Peter Biskind
We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families, Philip Gourevitch
The Drunkard’s Walk, Leonard Mlodinow
Einstein’s Dreams, Alan Lightman
The Forger’s Spell, Edward Dolnick
War is a force that gives us meaning, Chris Hedges
The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, Oliver Sacks

The other day on our way to lunch we stopped by the stray cats’ hangout to give them some food. Along with the cranky white and orange cat Merry and the friendly ginger there was a scraggly black and white tuxedo kitten we’d never seen before. There seemed to be a large round lump on its face, and then we realized that the lump was its eye. Dangling out of its socket. We figured it was a goner and gave it some kibble for its last meal. It jumped up and ate. For someone with an eyeball dangling out of its socket, it was pretty energetic.

When we got home that night it was still there, and yesterday it turned up for a late lunch. The guards said that when the kitten turned up it was already in that state. It has a good appetite and seems fine but for the obvious fact.

We got the number of PAWS, the Philippine Animal Welfare Society, and asked if they could pick up the kitten at our building in Makati. PAWS could fetch the kitten the following morning. However, since it was an urgent case, PAWS contacted PETA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, whose office is in Makati, so they could retrieve the kitten that same day.

Scarcely an hour later, a lady from PETA arrived with a pet carrier to pick up the injured kitten. The kitten allowed itself to be placed in the carrier and taken to the shelter for medical aid. They’ll let us know how the treatment goes. We can’t adopt a cat, our household is still adjusting to Drogon, but we can find some other way to help.

To find out more about PAWS and PETA and to make a donation or volunteer, visit the PAWS and PETA facebook pages.

“…staring at the place where it had stood.”

For the last couple of weeks we’ve been waking up to two cats flanking our pillow like library lions: Saffy on our right, Mat on our left. (Drogon is sprawled at our feet.) This reminded us of something that happened some years ago. Or didn’t happen—we’re not sure we saw what we saw, and anyway we’ve always had bad eyesight and an overactive imagination. Luckily we remembered which notebook we’d recorded it in, though locating that particular notebook took an hour.

The journal entry matches our recollection, except for one bit. We only saw the lower part of the figure, and it looked like the Winged Victory of Samothrace. Which is a massive ancient sculpture that wouldn’t fit in our doorway, and even if it did, it would probably fall right through the floor.

No, we weren’t under the influence at the time, but we had been in a black mood all week. Then that thing happened, or didn’t happen, and for some reason it cheered us up immensely. We told just a couple of people because it was bizarre, even for us.

Us: We saw an apparition.
Them: What did it look like?
Us: The Winged Victory of Samothrace.