I read Lynne's Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, and really enjoyed it, so, I was happy to try another of her nonfiction efforts. Unfortunately, it did not impress. It is a book constructed from columns she has written for various publications. They seem to centre around being a single woman with cats, and other random items thrown in for no apparent reason. I didn't really find it amusing, in fact, I was glad when I finally finished it, and could move on to something else. I almost marked it as a 1 Star, but since I did smile (once or twice) at some of the bits, I decided to be generous.

2 Stars = Blah. It didn't do anything for me.

This book was a collection of newspaper columns that were written by Lynne Truss (author of Eats, Shoots, and Leaves) and originally published through The Listener, The Times, and Woman's Journal. It is devoted to commentary on the single life, the behavioral oddities of cats, and general neuroticism pertaining to society, and I found it quite entertaining. I enjoyed the audiobook on my commute and would recommend it for a free time read.

This was better than it had any right to be. I’d already read some Truss before, in the form of Eats, Shoots and Leaves, but this is an entirely different type of non-fiction. It’s basically just a series of short essays about whatever the hell Truss felt like writing about at the time. And the fact that this was published back in 1995 – and that several of the pieces mention details that date them as even earlier, such as a reference to Roald Dahl being alive – actually makes it even more interesting.

So what if it’s a book about a single woman being a single woman? I’m a male who’s in a relationship, and I still found the stories inside highly relatable, especially when she talked about her cats and her relationship with them. The truth of the matter is that Truss writes in an approachable way that’s pretty much guaranteed to make you laugh, whoever you are. And while I’m sure you could classify it as a feminist book, it’s not – not really. It’s more like a collection of comic essays, and I often wondered whether she was an influence on Danny Wallace.

I found it a very witty laugh out loud sort of book; when I read it on the train people kept giving me those looks. It is a little dated now, the current events mentioned are history, but the author has written a very funny book.

Lynne Truss pre-'Eats, Shoots & Leaves' - a collection of her newspaper columns which was a godsend when I was too groggy with some virus or other to concentrate on anything demanding. A read-once-and-pass-on book, but no worse for that.

A collection of columns, apparently. Not that funny/interesting/compelling.

Random, amusing anecdotes and musings. Kind of a journal although not structured as such. Whilst entertaining, I couldn't read a lot in one go.

Some very good bits, some not quite so funny, the last one really really made me smile!

Published in 1995 but didn’t feel dated. I was half way through before something jarred me and I wondered when the book was written.
Entertaining humorous short pieces.

It's always a little nerve-wracking to re-read a book that you loved when younger but haven't read for years - will it stand up? Have the years been unkind to it? Worse, did it always have problems and you were just too unsophisticated to notice? Thankfully, Making the Cat Laugh was just as good as I'd remembered - not least because (as it turned out) I remembered it so well, in some places word-for-word. Revisiting my favourite columns (the one about accident statistics, which I once read out in public on my school's speech day; or the one about cooking ready-meals with the ghosts of Russell and Wittgenstein; or the one about trying to book Norman Mailer to write a column) was a delight, but the columns I hadn't remembered so well were also a surprise and a joy. "Oh, it's this one!" I kept thinking. Some columns had improved with age - I had never had a cat when I first read the book, but for the last nine years I've had two, so the cat-related columns were both funnier and more powerful. The final column, written in the voice of her cat, is wry, relatable, and heartwarming.

I wuv this book!
It's really that good till it's OK to use baby talk when speaking to it.
I wuv wuv wuv this book! Wuv!

Brilliant! Would have given it a five if I understood all the references. If I lived in the UK, I imagine I would have died laughing. Love her!