Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs?

Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs? Big Questions from Tiny Mortals about Death by Caitlin Doughty  222 pp.

I admit I enjoyed this book a little too much. Mortician Caitlin Doughty answers questions asked by children about death. She provides facts and humor to answer questions about keeping bones and skulls, if you swallowed unpopped popcorn before you die would it pop when you are cremated, why dead bodies get wrapped in plastic, and much more. This book answered one question I had wondered about for years (yes, I'm weird): how many calories are in the human body? (125,822 for an average sized male.) If you are really really squeamish I would pass this one by, otherwise it's worth reading.

Will my cat eat my eyeballs?

Will my cat eat my eyeballs?: big questions from tiny mortals about death / Caitlin Doughty, 222 pgs.

Funeral director Doughty compiled questions from kids relating to death and the immediate after.  Here she answers them with facts and humor.  Kids ask the funniest things...but we are all thinking them.  In the titular essay, your cat may well eat your eyeballs but will probably start with softer skin first.  So goodbye lips!

Lots of fun to read even though you might get squeamish a few times.

A Clue to the Exit / Edward St. Aubyn 185 pp.

It seems lately the only fiction that holds my interest is the stuff I can't understand. So this was very interesting! Charlie Fairburn has six months to live, and he decides to spend it writing a novel about the meaning of consciousness while supporting the Monaco gambling habit of Angelique, his luscious girlfriend. The characters in Charlie's novel, Patrick, Crystal and Jean-Paul, sit on a train stalled in fog and discuss metaphysics, neuroscience and the mind/brain split as Charlie approaches his fevered end. Apparently some (or all) of these characters have appeared in St. Aubyn's The Complete Patrick Melrose Novels.

Full of deep meaning or perhaps not much meaning at all - hard for me to say. But worth it for the rich store of lovely, witty, delicately-balanced sentences such as: "Eccentricity was the natural and in itself cliched protest of slaughtered individuals" and "...if you jump out a window, you can always tell when you've reached the ground."