Call Of The Wild by Jack London aka Black Beauty Part 2

Hello there. Hope you're feeling well today.

There is always for the reader too many books too little time. And so you try and avoid as much film/TV series/any illustrations of a book as possible. But of course you're never going to completely successful. Snippets will come to your view.

If you take the Lord Of The Rings / Hobbits books for example. I know there is a search for rings, the hero has funny ears and there are old men with authority and white beards. Nothing though that would be any degree of spoiler to when I actually read the series.

So we come to Call Of The Wild. by Jack London, the latest ebook I've been reading. The snippets I knew beforehand were as follows. It involved a dog,it was set in somewhere icy and there was a sympathetic male character. I knew the final fact because though I've not seen it "the film of the book" starred Charlton Heston and if he's in a film you know he's not playing the bad guy be it in ice or the Planet of the apes.

What was unexpected, and I'm sure I'm not the first person to mention this, was that this turned out to be Black Beauty Part two. A different animal, I know. Tougher, I know. But still Black Beauty Part Two.

Essentially this is about an animal taken from a more comfortable environment and what it has to experience with different owners. It is tougher. It has literally, more bite,  but in concept it's no different from Anna Sewell's novel.

Is it better than Black Beauty? Given I read the latter as a child not sure whether my view would be swayed by the passage of time. What I will say is that the whilst Call of the Wild is readable I'm not sure whether it deserves classic status especially as now I've realised it's basic concept is not new.

Perhaps indeed there should be a greater appreciation, as I've also explained in earlier posts, of what Anna Sewell actually did.

The next one on the great ebook unread is Twilight in Italy by D H Lawrence. Regular readers of this blog will know that I'm not a fan, but let's see if this changes anything.

Until the next time.