The cat is on the book. She wasn’t a moment ago. You looked up to think about a sentence, and in the time it took, she arrived, turned once, and lay down across the open page like a letter being sealed.
There’s no solution to this. There are techniques. Here they are, in order of how much they’ll annoy her.
1. The read-around
Most cats, on landing on a book, cover about sixty percent of it. The other forty is readable if you tilt your head. Read the visible half of each line, guess the rest. For a cozy mystery this works surprisingly well: “The vicar had been” [cat] “since Tuesday” is enough to go on. For a thriller with four narrators, less so.
2. The slow slide
Place one hand flat on the page beside her, and move the book, not the cat, very slowly, a centimetre at a time, out from under. Her weight will transfer onto the chair. She may not notice for several minutes. When she does, she’ll give you the look, and you’ll have gained one paragraph. Whether the paragraph was worth the look is a question for your conscience.
3. The second book
Keep a decoy. A hardcover you’ve finished, left open on the arm of the chair. Cats don’t want your book; they want the warm flat thing you’re looking at, and if there are two warm flat things, she’ll sometimes take the one closer to the lamp. Sometimes. I’d put it at a third of the time, which is better odds than anything else here.
4. The lap exchange
If she wants to be on the book because the book is on your lap, offer the lap without the book. Blanket on the knees, book held up at chest height, cat in the gap. This is the formal treaty: she has the lap, you have the book, the lamp is shared. It’s how most of the evenings in this house actually work. See the system.
5. Read aloud
She doesn’t care about the words, but she cares about the voice, and a low, steady reading voice puts most cats to sleep in a few pages. Once she’s asleep, the slow slide becomes possible. This technique also means you’ve read a murder mystery aloud to a cat, which you were going to end up doing anyway.
6. Accept the bookmark
Sometimes the cat is the bookmark. She’s chosen the page. The evening’s reading is over and something else has started, which is sitting in a chair with a warm animal on a book under a lamp, and it’s not a worse evening. It’s a different one. The vicar will keep.
7. Never, ever move her
Not properly. Not with both hands, lifted, placed elsewhere. You’ll get the book back and lose the cat, who’ll go and sit in the hallway facing the door, and then you’re reading horror whether you meant to or not. The book can wait. She’s made that clear. The whole brand is built on her having made that clear.