Buying a book for someone who loves cats might sound simple. In reality, it’s a trap. Search vaguely for “cat book gift”, and you’ll quickly land on three main categories: coffee-table books full of photos of sleeping kittens, practical guides to understanding your companion’s meows, and collections of lukewarm quotes about feline wisdom. In other words: plenty of options, but not necessarily much worth giving to an adult still in possession of their faculties.
The right book for a cat lover isn’t necessarily the one that teaches them to recognise an ear infection, nor the one reminding them that “cats choose us”. The right book is the one that understands just how absurd, humiliating and fascinating life with a cat really is.
A good book about cats needs to start by admitting they’re strange
Cats aren’t just cute. They’re huffy, capricious, manipulative, unpredictable, sometimes downright unsettling. They wake you at dawn, refuse fresh water in favour of a vase, demand food and then look outraged at the taste, and can watch you cry without offering the slightest bit of solidarity.
A book that talks properly about cats should start there. No “unique bond between human and animal”, no mystical prose about feline grace. Just an honest observation: living with a cat means accepting that a small living-room predator runs your schedule, your sofa, and a fair chunk of your mental health.
The best gift is often a funny book
Why? Because a cat lover already knows an enormous amount about cats. They know exactly what time their pet demands food, which side of the sofa they prefer, which food gives them diarrhoea, and how to tell a hungry meow from a contemptuous one. What they don’t necessarily have, though, is a book that turns this deeply lopsided relationship into comedy material.
That’s where a book like What to Do If My Cat Is Gay? becomes a brilliant answer to “what book should I get someone who loves cats?”. Not because it explains what to do about sick on the carpet — it doesn’t — but because it fully understands one fundamental truth: when you live with a cat, you always end up inventing a completely deranged personality for them.
Why this book works so well as a gift
Because it takes that absurd reflex — projecting opinions, neuroses and human behaviours onto your cat — and pushes it to breaking point. The book imagines 100 possible worst-case versions of your feline: they become woke, racist, promiscuous, a conspiracy theorist, an insufferable Londoner, anti-work, and so on, with every chapter offering warning signs, solutions and increasingly catastrophic conclusions.
It’s exactly the kind of gift that works when:
- the person loves cats and absurd humour;
- they’ve already said “I swear he’s making me pay for something” about their cat;
- or they need a book they can dip into, open at random, and read aloud over drinks to humiliate their friends.
What to avoid when buying a book to give
Very serious practical guides, unless the person has genuinely just adopted a cat and asked you for help. Overly polished coffee-table books, unless they collect decorative objects. “Feel-good” books about feline wisdom, unless you actively want them to hate you.
If the person loves cats to the point of talking about theirs like a child, an ex, or a toxic flatmate, chances are they’d much rather have a book that makes them laugh at themselves than yet another title about the soothing virtues of purring.
Conclusion
So, what book should you give someone who loves cats? Honestly: a book that understands this particular passion has stopped being entirely reasonable, and that’s exactly what makes it funny.
What to Do If My Cat Is Gay? plays that role brilliantly, because it doesn’t talk about cats as wise, mysterious or spiritual animals. It talks about them the way their owners actually experience them: toxic flatmates, soft-handed tyrants, agents of chaos utterly convinced they own the place.
And frankly, that’s a lot closer to reality.
