So here’s the real reason I decided I wanted to resurrect this blog. I read about the four-legged friends reading challenge over at The Written World and decided that I wanted to join in. Of course, that meant that I would need someplace to post my reviews, so I decided to get back into the blogging game.
Anyway, Kailana suggested that since the challenge is being held in honor of her recently passed away dog Sandy, that we should talk about a pet we were participating in honor of.
That cute little pooch up there is my dog Quan Lin who just passed away this April. She was 12 years old and while I was very sad about her passing, she was very sick and we were considering whether it was time to put her down and it was somewhat of a relief to know that she passed on her own terms.
She was a great dog and while she lived at home with my parents in Colorado, I looked forward to getting to see her over my breaks from school. It’s still weird to think that when I go home for the holidays she won’t be waiting for me. She was a very friendly dog who loved to meet new people, so long as they didn’t ring the doorbell first. I used to joke that she’d gladly let a burglar into the house as she seemed to go into a guard dog mode only when the doorbell was rung. Of course, she was a little thing ( a shih tzu) so she wasn’t very intimidating even then. Her favorite snacks were carrots, spaghetti, and ham bones. She was horribly spoiled and begged from the table all the time and I hate to say we encouraged it because we found her “meerkat” beg to be quite adorable.
As for the books I’ll be reading, here’s my choices:
Dogs of Babel by Carolyn Parkhurst
All Creatures Great and Small by James Herriot
The Cat Who Could Read Backwards by Lillian Jackson Braun
Travels with Charley in Search of America by John Steinbeck
Plague Dogs by Richard Adams
On God and Dogs by Sephen H. Webb
If anyone else is participating in the challenge and is still looking to round out their list, I’d also suggest Hard Times by Charles Dickens and The Places in Between by Rory Stewart. The dog character in Hard Times isn’t a huge part of the novel, but has a pretty pivotal role and I found her to actually be one of the most memorable characters and while The Places in Between is actually about Stewart’s decision to walk across Afghanistan he adopts a canine companion along the way.
