Since the last couple weeks have been family and friends, this week is about those wonderful creatures that are both family and friends to so many of us-Animals.
Animals in literature are a long-standing tradition. Not only are animals present in most early literature, but they’re usually part of the first books we read. What’s the fascination?
Some possible answers follow.
Much literature includes animals. Early examples are Aesop’s fables and ancient Persian tales that used animals as ways to deliver a lesson. Certain animals gained characteristics through literature that were ill-attributed. The snake, for instance, isn’t particularly crafty or evil, yet the Genesis story makes the snake synonymous with evil and deception. Foxes aren’t particularly clever or owls particularly wise, but Aesop will tell us so.
Modern literature and popular fiction often includes or is even centered around animals. From Watership Down to Tailchaser’s Song, to the novels of Rita Mae Brown and Lillian Jackson Braun and the marvelous James Herriot stories, animals are often a big factor in what makes a story good and successful.
Not all animals in literature are cuddly or sweet. Shardik was a frightening animal, not something you’d collect a figurine of and decorate your room in as a child. Likewise, that perhaps most famous literary animal, Moby Dick.
In my opinion, animals are used primarily as a shortcut to get people to think differently when they’re reading. Animals also make for an easier write, sometimes, since it’s much easier to ascribe motives to an animal than to a person. A rabbit eats, breeds, and dies. A dog seeks its master. A cat is independent and nonchalant. Animals are built-in stereotypes, guaranteed not to offend. Animals make wonderful sympathetic characters, like My Friend Flicka, the innumerable Marguerite Henry horse books, Roger Caras dog and cat stories, and Lassie.
Books and stories about animals that stand out, though, go much further than that. Animal Farm, for example, and as mentioned above, Moby Dick. Rudyard Kipling forced his animal characters out of their molds, and made them much more than a lesser writer could have done. And of course, the animals of Dr Seuss, though often not real, were definitely speaking with their own voices and behaving in ways we never expected.
What are some of your favorite books about animals? Fiction and non-fiction, both. Are there books about animals that you read as a child that made a lasting impression on you? And as always, what have you read lately?
Just finished Terry Pratchett’s Going Postal. Still working on Cryptonomicon, and am poring over three piano tuning manuals that are making my head hurt as I’m trying to learn NOW NOW NOW.
I read every single book Marguerite Henry put out in about a 2 year period between ages 9 and 11. Loved those horse stories.
Enjoy the diary, and I look forward to your comments.
Never Cry Wolf had a indelible effect on me.
And, because I am feeding a lame raccoon, I joined a Yahoo group about raccoons, and am hearing the most fabulous stories … as I get permission to repeat them, I’m going to share some of them in a diary here. They’re wonderful. And the people are crazy nuts for their raccoons…. very sweet. (I’ve also been asking them for advice, and am getting great help .. most of the members are longtime state-sanctioned wildlife rehab/caregivers.)
in the afterlife of your choice for wildlife rehabbers. They’re truly angels. My mom volunteers at the local wildlife center, and the work they do is amazing.
I have mostly read children’s literature. Animals as characters allow us to explore a range of human experiences and feelings without the distraction of human factors, such as, color and ethnicity.
The Redwall series comes to mind, in regards to novels (chapter books). However, my first love is picture books.
Arnold Lobel’s “Frog and Toad” stories come to mind. And Eric Carle, with such HUGE themes as work, loneliness, etc, all done in thirty-two pages and a few words. The illustrations in both series are marvelous.
Ahh, the absolute joy in simple text and illustrations!
My most treasured animal book memory? “Sam and the Firefly,” by P. D. Eastman. I not only got to read it, but to own it – one of my first book purchases.
BTW, thank you so much for your time and effort in doing these book diaries.
I enjoy doing them, and my reading list has grown incredibly as a result. I’ve got things on it I never thought I would, and that’s a good thing.
My favorite children’s book featuring animals is not one I read as a kid, but one I discovered recently and bought for a friend’s son and daughter: Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus by Mo Willems. I just love the pigeon.
A favorite adult book about an animal: Flush: A Biography by Virginia Woolf. It’s the story of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s spaniel. It’s a bit whimsical, and certainly not to everyone’s taste, but Woolf is the only writer who occupies the same stratum as Austen, in my personal pantheon.
I went to the bookstore this afternoon and picked up American Jezebel by Eve LaPlante (a biography of Anne Marbury Hutchinson) and Our Fathers by David France (an account of the abuse scandals in the Catholic Church).
When I was in HS, I absolutely loved David Attenborough‘s Zoo Quest books. He went to far-off locals, under difficult conditions, giving us a really heart-felt account of the lives of all sorts of strange, little-known animals, like he’s done in all of his various TV series. I also loved Gerald Durrell‘s My Family and Other Animals and A Zoo in my Luggage, which are similar to Attenborough in style and that they deal with less popular critters. Both Attenborough and Durrell wrote those books over 3 decades ago, iirc, and so both have a nostalgiac feel to them.
As for literature, I guess I’d say my favorite animal is from Chrétien de Troyes’ Yvain, The Knight with the Lion. Our hero saves a lion from a dragon, and in return, the lion remains always at his side, helping him in his adventures. Something really cute about how this lion decides to be so loyal.
(Trying to post a pic of Yvain saving the lion, which is blue in this manuscript, haha, but don’t think it’s working…)
Does the pic of our hero come out now? Yes, I think it does! Woohoo! I’m not a computer idiot after all!
Ok, I am…
neat picture!
And you’re not an idiot-you read. And that sounds like a good story-I’ll have to check it out.
Other than Black Beauty and Watership Down, I didn’t read a lot of books about animals.
However, I just read The Dogs of Babel by Carolyn Parkhurst, which, while not a perfect book, is a great read. For those of you not familiar with it, the plot is that a man’s wife falls from a tree and dies. He’s at work when it happens, and the only witness is the couple’s dog. So, the man decides to teach the dog to talk so he can know what happened to his wife. Beautiful meditation on grief and the human need for control over the uncontrollable.
that sounds fascinating. Definitely going on my list-thanks!
Despite my faithful love (admitted to last week) for Wind in the Willows, I don’t read much about specific animals. I think it’s because most of them veer toward the sentimental, a prejudice of mine.
I do, however, like natural history books that deal with animals, especially if they have a strong personal component. A couple of ones in this category that I would recommend are
. Sy Montgomery’s Search for the Golden Moon Bear
. Alexandra Morton’s Listening to Whales
And for a really off the wall “animal” fiction book, I highly recommend Carol Emshwiller’s “Carmen Dog” which is about what happens when women turn into animals and animals turn into women. The main character is Pooch, a setter who has become a woman with a former owner who has changed into a snapping turtle. A great satire.
Just finished “Breath and Bones” by Susann Cokal, a interesting and sometimes quite weird picaresque about a young Danish woman in the 1880’s who pursues her lover to America (she gets passage by becoming a Mormon and a third wife). Anybody who liked Cokal’s first novel, “Mirabilis” won’t be disappointed by this one.
I just recently reread it. I don’t think I had read it since my teenage years, Catholic school, 1960s. At the time, it was often assigned as school reading (is it still?) and discussed in class as Orwell’s indictment of Communism.
But reading his “Notes on Nationalism” made me want to go back and take another look.
In the intro to the edition I read this time, the point is made that Orwell called Animal Farm a fairy tale. Not a fable. The writer of the introduction argues that the reason Orwell (who always chose his words carefully) used the term fairy tale rather than fable is that a fable has the aim of teaching how one should behave. It has a moral. A fairy tale, on the other hand, uses metaphor and fantasy to describe how human beings are – and how they are is often frightening.
It is still impossible to read Animal Farm without thinking of the Soviet Union. However, I think Orwell had a larger point – this is how human beings behave. Any attempt to “improve” the world and the human condition must take into account the reality of human nature.
As you say, “In my opinion, animals are used primarily as a shortcut to get people to think differently when they’re reading.”
I think there are probably a lot of progressives like me who haven’t read Animal Farm in many years. But it has food for thought for us now. The dynamics of idealistic groups, how information is selectively disseminated and manipulated, memories modified and shaped – these are topics still urgently relevant long after the demise of the USSR. Highly recommended reread.
Even before all the horse books and Moby Dick and Animal Farm and all the later allegories and studies of mythology and learned discourses, it was Winnie-the-Pooh. Paws down.
I still have the books on my reference shelves. Later stories about how the author was a bit odd and his poor son had an unhappy life as a literary symbol do not diminish the commonsense gentleness of books that speak of community and cooperation (Pooh, stuck in the rabbit hole and being pulled out by Rabbit and All His Friends and Relations as a kind of furry winch comes to mind).
As a child (late 50s-mid-60s), I read the entire Thornton-Burgess series–loved it!
http://tinyurl.com/bce6y
With my daughter (born in 1985), we re-read the TB series; as well as became involved (and loved) E.B. White’s works, and especially Steig’s Dominic.
http://www.williamsteig.com/dominic.htm
For a belly-laugh, my daughter thoroughly enjoyed the George and Martha series (James Stevenson) and a dog named Amos, I think–who was afflicted w/a case of separation anxiety disorder (zoomed around town on his couch)!
http://tinyurl.com/8t4zh
I’m glad to see I’m not the only one who held onto the bear of little brain and friends-it’s on my bookshelf right next to my old and battered Black Beauty book.
Watership Down is another I will have to revisit-I remember loving it the first time around. I love to revisit books, it’s like catching up with old friends.
Going Postal was wonderful, I loved it but then I’ve yet to be disappointed by Terry Pratchet.
I just picked up Outlaws of the Marsh-by Shi Nai’an and Luo Guanzhong and translated by Sidney Shapiro-it was the three book set, used and reasonable and I couldn’t resist. Banditry and rebellion set in the twelfth century and written in the fourteenth, I’ll let you know how it is.
Watership Down is probably the animal book I most remember… I read it many years ago and got so involved with the characters… even if they were rabbits.
Where the Red Fern grows is another that sticks in my mind… a youth book, in the ‘depressing but worth it’ genre. A real heartbreaker, if you like dogs. Or even if you don’t.
I just finished reading “On the Rez”, by Ian Frazier… interesting book, about the Sioux reservation at Pine Creek… or maybe River. Ack… you’d never know I actually read the book, and really did pay attention.
It’s written in an easy style… almost like a novel, with bits of history thrown in. While it doesn’t ignore all the blights that are on this reservation, the method is not so much to point them out as to weave them into the entire fabric of life there… the good, the bad, the triumphs, and so on.
It talked a bit about Ghost Dancing, and of course my first thought was… “hey, I know about that!” because of ghostdancersway and his diaries.
Good read.
I read Gregory Macquire’s Wicked a few months ago.
The book deals a lot with animals, the author creates a world in which there is a difference between Aniamls and animals; Animals being ones which talk and are equivilent and on par or exceeding human intellect and animals being what we think of non-human animals. Its an interesting book, I enjoyed reading it.
John Steinbeck
we find ourselves in the middle of reading tons of animal books to our child, age 7.
Turns out we LOVE James Herriot (and his books). Dog Stories, Cat Stories, and Animal Stories are a few we have burned through recently. The humor, compassion, and love just seeps through. I remember I loved his books when I was a teen. The ones mentioned above are selected stories.
Now I’m onto Jon Katz who , ironically, writes about dogs. A Dog Year is the one I finished reading today (I started it today, btw).
Also, as mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I’m in love with Because of Winn-Dixie by Kate di Camillo, a story really about love, faith, loss and building community though it centers around the dog, Winn-Dixie.
Animals have long played a central role in cartoons. Not surprisingly, perhaps, with various degrees of irony, some of the best cartoonists/graphic novelists have played with talking animals in their work.
Most famous in this regard is probably Art Spiegelman’s Maus, which is wonderful and rich, and thoroughly lives up to the hype.
Animals also play important supporting roles throughout Neil Gaiman’s Sandman comics.
One of my personal favorite animal cartoons of recent years is Jeff Smith’s Bone, which is now available in a huge, single volume edition (about 1300 pages I think…but a real page turner).
I highly recommend a novel called Eva by Peter Dickinson, a rather well-known author for teens who writes for adult too. The book is set in the near future when the planet is so crowded with humans that only tiny patches of forest remain, nearly all non-human animals are extinct, and many people just stay in their high-rise apartments and watch the equivalent of television all the time. To tell even a little of the plot would give too much away — it centers around a teenaged girl and her relationships with chimpanzees. It’s also about humans, animals, nature and ecology. A big package in only a couple of hundred pages.