A place for my photos and thoughts and stuff.
How did I miss this classic about one of my favorites, the 1918 Kentucky Derby hero, Exterminator? I picked up a battered copy online and it’s a keeper! It’s a kid’s book, but the writing is evocative and the horse’s wise, laid-back point of view is captured with humor, sympathy and understanding about the way our animal companions think. Good stuff!
Buff: A Collie by Albert Payson Terhune (1921)
I loved Terhune’s dog books as a kid. Revisiting them now, it’s surprising to see how harsh some of them are. There’s a little of that in “Buff,” but it’s primarily a pretty nice dog/man story, about loyalty and reclamation. Terhune’s weakness is writing people, and there’s too much people in this book to stack up among his best stories. But as always, his understanding of dogs — he really gets them — makes the Buff-centered parts of the story really work. Not the best read, but it was short.
The Compleat Horseplayer by Tom Ainslie (1966)
This classic handicapping tome is old, but the info is still sound. Read it, highlighted it, took the info to the track and put it into play and made enough to enjoy the rest of the day mostly on their money. I have to go through it again to absorb more before I become a obscenely wealthy tycoon, but all such worthy goals take time.
Bright Wings – Billy Collins, Editor (2012)
This is a lovely book full of poems about birds, accompanied by wonderful illustrations. A very nice read.
So I’m trying to catch up on reading some classic kids’ literature, and we’ve got a great used bookstore at our local library, so I picked this one up. I should have known what I was in for because it’s about a kid and a dog, but I didn’t listen to my gut.
Anyway, it’s about a West Virginia boy who finds an abused beagle in the woods near his house. It’s quickly determined that the dog belongs to his a-hole neighbor who is trashy and isn’t nice to animals. As in he starves them and kicks them around to keep them “sharp.”
The kid wants the dog and thus ensues a kind of cat and mouse game with the boy lying to everyone, and finally confronting the neighbor and coming to grips with some thorny moral issues that are well-explored in the book. Good character writing, including the bad guy, means you’re dealing with recognizable humans throughout.
That said, the constant specter of animal abuse as the motivator for the story, the constant scenarios playing out in the boy’s mind, the actual scenes of animals being kicked around, illegally killed, etc. made this a very unpleasant book for me. It got repetitive and tiring and depressing and even though the kid gets the dog in the end (yeah, oops…SPOILER ALERT)…the neighbor still has a yard full of abused hunting dogs. So how the hell am I supposed to be happy with that?
I had to get a photo of the cover online. I didn’t even keep it in the house long enough to take a photo of it.
This book is the first in a trilogy. Thanks, but no thanks.
This is a wonderful book about many things. It’s nominally a children’s book, the story of a princess trying to undo an old family curse. It’s about friendship and faith, and how little missteps and misunderstandings can spawn great sins. It’s about the indelible power of the fruits of the spirit. And it has the most wonderful, cathartic ending it’s ever been my pleasure to read in a book. I need to read all of Elizabeth Gouge’s books! Highly recommended.