Booking through Thursday: Dogs and Pets

Today's subject on Booking Through Thursday is dogs and other pets:

My dog just had his birthday (12 years old, thanks), so … how do you feel about books about dogs or pets? Fluffy stories of fluffy family members? Solid books on training them or taking care of them? Touching reminiscences of trouble and the way a person’s dog (or pet) has helped get them through?
(Mind you, almost all the pet-related books on my shelf are about dogs, but I’m well aware that people love their cats, horses, ferrets, rabbits, fish, etc. just as much, so … any species is fine!)
Any favorite books to recommend?

I used to love animal books and still read them occasionally. My favourite books featuring pets specifically are by Gerald Durrell, who kept a varied and exotic menagerie of pets throughout his life and ended up running a zoo, and the books by Yorkshire veterinarian Alf Wight, writing as James Herriot, about the animals he treated through his years in practice.

I have also enjoyed pet biographies, i.e. books that follow one particular animal through its life, although I have come to dread the inevitable final chapter about all the things the (by that time inevitably dead) pet taught its owners. Marley and Me is a good example. It was a fine pet biography without the author having to feel he needed to expound on all the things Marley taught him about life, love, etc. That particular chapter lost the book a whole star when I reviewed it.

Books about pets or featuring pets I would recommend are:

Books by James Herriot. I have linked to his bibliography on Wikipedia because they were published under different titles in the USA and the UK and there are a number of them.
My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell. It's not about any particular pet or indeed only about pets, but they make up an important feature of the book. Most of the rest of his books feature animals as well, but mostly wild animals, which is outside the scope of this meme.
The Cat Who Covered the World: The Adventures Of Henrietta And Her Foreign Correspondent by Christopher S. Wren. This book covers the adventurous life of the eponymous cat who travelled all over the world with Wren and his family, including stints in Moscow, Beijing and Johannesburg. She roamed free in all those places, and even put in a stint as a stray in Cairo when she got lost for several weeks.
I also have to mention Seabiscuit by Laura Hillenbrand. Although Seabiscuit was a racehorse, he was a domestic animal and became his owner's pet after he was retired from racing. The book is an amazing portrait of American society at the time, with the horse binding all the different strands of the story together.

Icelandic folk-tale: The Devil Takes a Wife

Stories of people who have made a deal with and then beaten the devil exist all over Christendom and even in literature. Here is a typical one: O nce upon a time there were a mother and daughter who lived together. They were rich and the daughter was considered a great catch and had many suitors, but she accepted no-one and it was the opinion of many that she intended to stay celebrate and serve God, being a very devout woman. The devil didn’t like this at all and took on the form of a young man and proposed to the girl, intending to seduce her over to his side little by little. He insinuated himself into her good graces and charmed her so thoroughly that she accepted his suit and they were betrothed and eventually married. But when the time came for him to enter the marriage bed the girl was so pure and innocent that he couldn’t go near her. He excused himself by saying that he couldn’t sleep and needed a bath in order to go to sleep. A bath was prepared for him and in he went...

Book 40: The Martian by Andy Weir, audiobook read by Wil Wheaton

Note : This will be a general scattershot discussion about my thoughts on the book and the movie, and not a cohesive review. When movies are based on books I am interested in reading but haven't yet read, I generally wait to read the book until I have seen the movie, but when a movie is made based on a book I have already read, I try to abstain from rereading the book until I have seen the movie. The reason is simple: I am one of those people who can be reduced to near-incoherent rage when a movie severely alters the perfectly good story line of a beloved book, changes the ending beyond recognition or adds unnecessarily to the story ( The Hobbit , anyone?) without any apparent reason. I don't mind omissions of unnecessary parts so much (I did not, for example, become enraged to find Tom Bombadil missing from The Lord of the Rings ), because one expects that - movies based on books would be TV-series long if they tried to include everything, so the material must be pared down ...

How to make a simple origami bookmark

Here are some instructions on how to make a simple origami (paper folding) bookmark: Take a square of paper. It can be patterned origami paper, gift paper or even office paper, just as long as it’s easy to fold. The square should not be much bigger than 10 cm/4 inches across, unless you intend to use the mark for a big book. The images show what the paper should look like after you follow each step of the instructions. The two sides of the paper are shown in different colours to make things easier, and the edges and fold lines are shown as black lines. Fold the paper in half diagonally (corner to corner), and then unfold. Repeat with the other two corners. This is to find the middle and to make the rest of the folding easier. If the paper is thick or stiff it can help to reverse the folds. Fold three of the corners in so that they meet in the middle. You now have a piece of paper resembling an open envelope. For the next two steps, ignore the flap. Fold the square diagonally in two. Yo...

Reading in Reykjavík

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