Last week, I promised a review of the above speculated-on title, and here it is. It's not really important enough to warrant a full-length review, but what the hey; I'm working in a book fandom whose main series currently produces only one new installment every year, so I'll take what I can get.
Checkerbee's Reader's Checklist and Reference Guide is much more the former than the latter - the slim volume, the length and width of a standard paperback and as thick as a thin glossy magazine, is primarily an overblown checklist for the series, each book's entry containing basic info such as publication data and a synopsis of the plot's premise, as well as (and this is neat) a space for the reader to write their own little review once they've finished that particular installment. The Checklist is also prefaced by a short biography of Lilian Jackson Braun, most of the information within having been gleaned from The Cat Who... Companion (and, at least in the first half, composed in a fashion strangely similar to the Braun biography in this site's Shrine section - hmmm. Ah, well). The back of the book contains info on The Cat Who Had 14 Tales and other anthologies and publications in which Braun's short stories and writings can be found, a considerable plus (though it would've been responsible of them to note that the stories included in the Mystery Cats anthologies et al. are the same ones previously published in 14 Tales).
The meat of the book is the title entries, and I think it was a mistake on CheckerBee's part to arrange them alphabetically instead of chronologically. Indeed, this system makes it easier to locate individual titles, but the number-one question I receive for the site is which book follows which and where a sequential listing of the titles can be found - an understandable concern for readers of a twenty-two-book series. The book does indeed include a chronological list in the back, but it's folly for the primary list not to be organized in this format. (What is it with Cat Who... books and resources not being able to effectively organize information? I had this problem with certain chapters of the Companion, and I must admit that I've wished for my own site to be more compactly laid out at times.)
The other problem is that the author seems confused and convinced that the Cat Who... books are taking place in real time over the course of the 35-odd years Braun's been wriitng them; Could Read Backwards is listed as taking place in the 60s, Saw Red in the 80s, Said Cheese in the 90s, etc. It's been discussed in a previous C-Pad why this cannot be true and that there is a definitive, plausible timeline within the series; in theory, it might be nice to include when each book was written for "context" (the year of original publication is included in the publication data, though) - but the Cat Who... series really doesn't contain any dated, era-specific references or pop-culture allusions where context might be helpful. As it stands, this assertion only serves to potentially confuse early readers.
That said, though, it is a serviceable little primer for new readers (my mother, who's never read a Cat Who..., enjoyed it well enough). It's sturdily bound and well-presented, and the short introductory articles are breezily informative for a newcomer. The individual book entries boast a good deal of nice (if not always perfectly executed) touches - publisher and page count (for the first edition, though - it'd've been better to list this for the present paperback editions), notations of which formats (softback, hardback, large print, or audio) the book's available in, the "Reader's Worksheets" rating/review pages, the highest spot each attained on the New York Times bestseller list, the little "Checkerbee Notes" that denote interesting things about certain books (there're only two of these, though...), and extra space to fill in info about future volumes. They could've rethought including the "review" blurbs, though, which were most often excised from Putnam publicity releases and not from independent, serious reviewers.
So, is the Checkerbee Checklist a must-buy? Depends. If you're a really devoted fan of the series? No, not really; you'll know most of the stuff here. If you're new to the series? It might be quite useful, but it doesn't seem to be widely available (at least not in the U.S. Based on the ISBN, I believe this book is published in Canada, so the situation might be different there). When I was a kid, I would've loved this book, with the "write your own review" spaces and all the little check-off things; it'd make a great travel companion, too. There is no new information to be had here, but it's a neat little novelty.
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