I read this when I was a kid, because it was a favorite of my mother’s. It’s funny, sometimes meandering, sometimes profound.

The premise is that it was written by a cockroach named archy. The author left a blank sheet in the typewriter every night, and archy took this opportunity to jump onto it and laboriously bang away about his life and thoughts. Archy couldn’t manage capital letters or punctuation marks, so he has a distinct and very modern style.

Archy tells us that he wasn’t always a cockroach, and that his current shape is punishment for having been a free verse poet. He also transcribes the songs and sayings of mehitabel, the cat, who is a reincarnation of Cleopatra. Mehitabel is an alleycat with great pretensions, and she says, “To hell with anything unrefined has always been my motto.”

In one chapter, archy describes the balance of power between species. He describes how the angleworm speaks, after it is eaten by a robin, about how it has lost its individuality and become part of the bird. The bird, meanwhile, sings its own song of well-being until it’s eaten by the cat. Archy concludes “how beautiful is the universe when something digestible meets with an eager digestion, when atom rushes to the arms of waiting atom and they dance together skimming with fairy feet along a tide of gastric juices.” (I added the comma; there are no commas in this book.)