In dubious honor of my upcoming 30th birthday, I present: my cat steadfastly refusing to be photographed with 30 of my favorite books.

Dr. Boop steadfastly refuses to be photographed with 20 poemas de amor y una canción desesperada (Neruda) and The Stranger (Camus).

Idem Death and the Penguin (Kurkov), The Satanic Verses (Rushdie) and The Center of Things (McPhee).

Her interests do include cookie crumbs but do not include The House of Leaves (Danielewski), The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí (Dalí) or Confessions of a Pretty Lady (Bernhard).

Dr. Boop is strongly interested in the ancient art and science of plumbing, but she’s iffy on The Halloween Tree (Bradbury), Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams (Plath), Anna Karenina (Tolstoy) and Devils (Taschen/Neret).

Dr. Boop refuses to even acknowledge the existence of The Body Artist (Delillo), The Fall of America (Ginsberg), Hello Cruel World (Bornstein), The Catcher in the Rye (Salinger) or Zombie (Oates).

She briefly considered being photographed with Doc and Fluff (Califia), Welcome to Night Vale (Fink and Cranor) and Wigfield (Sedaris, Dinello and Colbert), but eventually decided against it.

The doctor had grave reservations about being seen to endorse The Selected Poetry of Mayakovsky, The Beat Reader, The Miracle Hater (Hareven), The Bell (Murdoch), and especially Lunar Park (Ellis).

She couldn’t get away fast enough from Venus in Furs (von Sacher-Masoch), The Twelve Chairs (Ilf & Petrov), The Woman Destroyed (de Beauvoir) and The History of Luminous Motion (Bradfield).