Fangirl Day

 

HELLO THERE

I should probably rename this to "Random Ramblings," because there is no way I'm really going to do anything different than ramble here. 

Also, yes, I did change what my blog looks like again. I wanted to add a few features the previous style wasn't letting me use, like the lovely logo and the followers spot. So, I did the only logical thing: change it.

BUUUUT I'm not here to talk about the new style of the blog.

I want to scream talk about Call of the Wild.

Call of the Wild by Jack London is probably my favorite classic and has been labeled as my favorite book when I wasn't sure which ONE book to choose. The movie version, the 2020 film with Harrison Ford, is dubbed as my second or third favorite movie.

Every time I say this to someone, their reaction is always, "but... why?"

Isn't a really gory and violent book/movie and dogs killing each other?

...

In short, yes.

The majority of the first few chapters of the book feature Buck, the dog the story mainly follows, learning how to fight and survive the brutal Yukon and sled dogs. And it can be a bit gory at times.

The movie doesn't have all that; it's actually a lot different from the book, but I want to focus on the book today.

But that's not actually the reason I really like the classic. I like it balances the descriptive imagery seen all over most classics with good characterization of a surprising character.

The main character is Buck, and he's surprising because he is a dog. A literal dog. But he still follows a character arc (personally, one I don't really love for the most part) that takes him from a pampered brat who refuses to move without his special moccasins to the loyal and trail smart pack leader to leaping-through-fire to save his master. It's not something I really expected to see.

In White Fang, also by Jack London, you see the opposite happening. You more or less watch from an outsider's perspective as White Fang learns to be vicious and then has to unlearn it. It's still an arc for him, but you don't see it as intimately as with Buck. 

Something else I love is the way the internal thought/action sequences/etcetera of the story flows. It's prose, yes, since it's just the story, but there is a poetic feel to it.

Buck, leading the pack, sounding the old wolf-cry, straining after the food that was alive and that fled swiftly before him through the moonlight. He was sounding the deeps of his nature, and of the parts of his nature that were deeper than he, going back into the womb of Time. He was mastered by the sheer surging of life, the tidal wave of being, the perfect joy of each separate muscle, joint, and sinew in that it was everything that was not death, that it was a glow and rampant, expressing itself in movement, flying exultantly under the stars and over the face of dead matter than did not move.

Like I said, it's pretty beautiful. Even while the dogs are in the middle of a hunt for a smol innocent rabbit, there's still paragraphs like that. The movie, of course, doesn't have these long rants; instead, it has gorgeous visuals that literally make me jump up and down and scream (told you that happens a lot) but as I said, I want to concentrate on the book.

Plenty of people understand why I can like the movie, because of the stunning visuals, the overall plot works well (it's changed a good bit from the book), and the human characters are both entertaining and intelligent. As I've said above, however, the book can be harder to understand and enjoy?

"What is it about dogs killing each other and having their blood lust described that makes you like it so much?"

I hope I answered that question at least a little in my above ramblings. 

The last thing that puts this book so high on my list is a little confusing to most people I try to explain it too. Sometimes when I finish a book, I put it down, stare at the wall/ceiling/floor for a solid five minutes before saying "That was a good book." sometimes accompanied by a "wow" or a silent scream. But usually very casual and normal until I find someone else and fangirl about it as fast as I can. Several of my surprising top reads have been ranked in that same way. I wasn't expecting to enjoy them, and then I'm done and just like "whoa, where did you come from, and why have I never seen you before????

drat i almost made it with no gifs...

Anyways, Call of the Wild was one of those unexpected great reads. And it has stayed there for a while, so I think it'll keep it's place for now. 

I think that's all for now, y'all! Thanks for reading through, and I hope you have a great day! 

somehow I managed to get through a post without ranting or worrying about spoilers, is that legal????????