August has gone to the dogs, it’s National Dog Month!
According to Forbes, over 65 million U.S. households have a canine companion, so chances are if you’re reading this, you’re a dog owner. Or as the old joke goes, maybe your dog actually owns you.
Either way, we hope these reads remind you of your favorite furry family members in the very best way. Take a break from playing fetch, cuddle up with your dog and enjoy a doggo-inspired book this month. Just like our dogs, these books may make you cry, laugh, or throw up your hands in frustration.
But hopefully just like our dogs, they’ll remind you to take a minute, slow down, and enjoy the world around you.
Lily and the Octopus by Steven Rowley
Teddy is unhappily single in L.A. In between sessions with his therapist and dates with men he meets online, Teddy has debates with his dachshund, Lily, who occupies his heart. Unfortunately, he is also able to communicate with the “octupus” attached to Lily’s head, which is soon revealed to be a metaphor for Lily’s lethal cranial tumor.
The Friend by Sigrid Nunez
When a woman unexpectedly loses her lifelong best friend and mentor, she finds herself burdened with the unwanted dog he has left behind. Her own battle against grief is intensified by the mute suffering of the dog, a huge Great Dane traumatized by the inexplicable disappearance of its master, and by the threat of eviction: dogs are prohibited in her apartment building. While others worry that grief has made her a victim of magical thinking, the woman refuses to be separated from the dog except for brief periods of time.
The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein
Nearing the end of his life, Enzo, a dog with a philosopher’s soul, tries to bring together the family, pulled apart by a three year custody battle between daughter Zoe’s maternal grandparents and her father Denny, a race car driver.
Good Boy by Jennifer Finney Boylan
This is a book about dogs: the love we have for them, and the way that love helps us understand the people we have been. It’s in the love of dogs, and my love for them, that I can best now take the measure of the child I once was, and the bottomless, unfathomable desires that once haunted me. There are times when it is hard for me to fully remember that love, which was once so fragile, and so fierce.
I Could Chew on This and Other Poems by Dogs by Francesco Marciuliano
Doggie laureates not only chew on quite a lot of things, they also reveal their creativity, their hidden motives, and their eternal (and sometimes misguided) effervescence through such musings as “I Dropped a Ball,” “I Lose My Mind When You Leave the House,” and “Can You Smell That?”
Travels with Charley: in Search of America by John Steinbeck
Author John Steinbeck was 58 when he set out to rediscover the country he had been writing about for so many years. With his elderly French poodle, Charley, he embarked on a quest across America, from the northernmost tip of Maine to California’s Monterey Peninsula.
Happy reading!
-Melinda
Read it or Weep 