The Call of the Wild

Far more brutal than I expected.

I'd known that Call of the Wild (and White Fang) were firm favourites of friends, and I knew they were books held in high regard - and I kind of assumed it was good for dog lovers.

I had originally thought of reading this aloud to my daughter (absolutely a dog lover) but I'm glad I didn't.

This story quickly gets to Buck being beaten, and beaten and then beaten some more. I guess the story is about finding strength when pushed to your limits, but I'm no English scholar so I could have totally missed the point!

Buck is certainly heroic (or perhaps stoic) in the face of insurmountable hardship, and perhaps this is representative of the times that London lived in?

What amazed me was, apparently, the Kindle version of the book is 45 pages - and it took me a week to read - either my page numbers are wrong or I stumbled through this book!!!

I was just in Skagway for work and figured it would be fun to read a contemporary description of the Klondike Gold Rush, in the form of this high-school-summer-reading-list-staple of a dog coming of age and discovering his wild, primordial self through kidnapping, abuse, enforced labor, and eventual freedom in the arctic wilderness. The politics of this book are... interesting? And much of the dog's-eye-view philosophizing is... verbose? But it is a fun glimpse into the crazy world, characters, and brutal exploitation of the gold rush, and what “the last great adventure” in “the last Frontier” meant for a rapidly industrializing Victorian public.