Herding Cats by Sarah Andersen

After a morning when I had a conference call on a supposed vacation day and also managed to think (erroneously) I'd messed up the steering lock on my car for half an hour in a parking lot, I was ready to read something light, fluffy, and entertaining.

So I went back to Sarah Andersen and found Herding Cats, the third collection of her "Sarah's Scribbles" strip. (See my posts on the first two books, Adulthood Is a Myth and Big Mushy Happy Lump.) It was indeed as light, fluffy, and entertaining as I hoped, and put me in a better mood for the rest of the day.

This is the third collection of Andersen's strip, so it's very much the same kind of thing as the first two books. For some readers, that might be too much, or it might not be what they want in the first place. Again, see my previous posts for details - but it's all cartoons focused on a goofy, borderline-incompetent version of Andersen as a millennial goofball, with cartoons circling the main topics of cats, art, the millennial version of "mental health," and the making of art.

This book also has a long, mixed-text-and-comics section at the end, specifically talking to other, presumably slightly younger millennials, who want to make art themselves. I tend to have cynical reactions to assumptions that the audience for a thing is largely people who want to be doing that thing themselves, but this is all solid advice from someone who just went through it. I do hope most of Andersen's audience is not frustrated art-makers; the world needs plumbers and account reps and OB/GYNs and patent attorneys and CPAs and CDL drivers and forklift operators and software engineers just as much or more as art-markers, and young people rarely yearn to do those things as they do with art.

But this is a nice book, about mostly nice things - with some lurking anxiety and imposter syndrome for spice - by a creator still in the early phases of her career, and it can be a great thing if you, too, need a dose of mostly positivity in your life.