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"I have a friend who loves cats and dogs. I&amp;#039;d like to surprise her with a book that deals with them in imaginative ways. Can you offer a few suggestions? Ellen responds: For some reason, cats have become a fixture for those who write civilized mysteries \u2011- okay, cozies, if we must use that quaint term. To name just two of the many authors for whom cats figure prominently, there&amp;#039;s Marian Babson, whose latest is Please Do Feed the Cat, and Lilian Jackson Braun, whose 27th &amp;quot;Cat Who&amp;quot; book is called The Cat Who Went Bananas. In Please Do Feed, Lorinda Lucas returns home to her colony of mystery writers and beloved furry friends, Had-I and But-Known, to find the neighbor cat, Roscoe, in bad shape. Exactly why is a mystery to be solved. In Bananas, writer James Qwilleran depends on his Siamese, Koko, to sniff out the danger.  But just as cats are more prominent in the mystery world, lately dogs have played a more pronounced role in literary fiction. I&amp;#039;m thinking of two popular novels, Mark Haddon&amp;#039;s The Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and Carolyn Parkhurst&amp;#039;s The Dogs of Babel. Haddon&amp;#039;s book is amazing because of the way the author maintains the voice and point of view of his autistic young narrator. Although the dog plays a peripheral role \u2011- as the victim that gets the plot going \u2011- Haddon brackets his demise neatly when the narrator, a teenage boy buffeted by his parent&amp;#039;s divorce, receives a puppy near the story&amp;#039;s end. In Babel, Parkhurst makes a Rhodesian ridgeback one of her central characters. Lorelei is the only witness to what appears to be an accidental death, and the victim&amp;#039;s husband, a linguistics professor, decides he will teach the dog to talk in order to find out what happened. As a dog owner myself, I&amp;#039;m attracted to first-person accounts about people and their dog. A contemporary classic is Willie Morris&amp;#039;s My Dog Skip. But a more recent entry that made me laugh out loud is Dog World: And the Humans Who Live There, by Alfred Gingold. Reluctant to own a dog, Gingold relents for the sake of his teenage son. But in short order he, too, has succumbed to the charms of his family&amp;#039;s Norfolk terrier, George. As this latest string in a long series reveals, there&amp;#039;s something about our devotion to our pets that makes us feel foolish and noble at the same time. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.goodhousekeeping.com/life/entertainment/a19792/books-pet-lovers-apr05/>