Reading and Conversation. Glaister's Sheer Blue Bliss is a thrilling novel about the sources of art and the unpredictable forces of loss and human craving. Houston, the author of the cult classic Cowboys are my Weakness presents her first novel Waltzing the Cat, a beautiful novel about relationships and place with one of the most dazzling aerial sequences ever written. The spectacularly inventive and magical Gowdy returns with her novel The White Bone, a story in which we learn everything anout elephants, their societal structure, their mythology, their language, their beliefs, an entire invented universe which is brilliantly put together, it seems almost logical.