100 books like A Three Dog Life

This is quite possibly my favourite memoir ever written. It made me laugh, cry and scream. Never have I seen such a clearly dysfunctional family that didn’t even realize they were dysfunctional.

I loved them because they embraced life no matter what and hated them because they didn’t see how bad what they were doing to one another was. Full of elements and emotions from my own childhood, this book made me feel deeply and emotionally.  

I read this book sitting on the balcony of a condo at the beach. I got a sunburn because I couldn’t put it down.

Cheryl’s trek along the PCT is weirdly harrowing and heart-warming as she meets creeps, clowns, and kindred folk. But what makes the book so compelling for me is how Cheryl delves into her need for this test of her resolve, which is to figure out what went wrong with her life after her mother’s death and how to fix it.

I was with her every step of the way and felt as if I, too, had conquered the PCT and overcome my misbegotten past. The honesty of her self-examination nailed this book to my heart. 

Joan Didion’s book is heralded for its bravery, clarity, and confessional witness about grief and loss. Indeed, it’s all these things, but for me, more importantly, this book paints a masterful depiction of the loss of innocence that comes when you lose something meaningful—like a loved one.

Particularly, it shows, with exhilarating force, the fragmented sense of time of such an experience, moving from Didion’s darkest moments of despair at the loss of her husband in the present to treasured memories of her life before his passing and musings about what comes now—in the future.

This book is not for the faint of heart, but it is for the savoring soul who, like Didion, possesses an inherent human desire for a sense of coherence and wholeness after life has torn it asunder.

I love this book mainly because of her deeply flawed, hard-drinking dad, who still managed to impart wisdom and love. I couldn’t help wishing I’d had a dad like him.

When Karr grew up, she had her own substance abuse issues that she talked about in another memoir, but this book is my favorite because her family is so screwed up and yet so brave and so tough. To me, they epitomize all that is good and bad about the South.

Personally, I love lyrical, poetic language, and Karr’s writing is transcendent! This is a book that will be with me forever. (I almost got to go to a workshop with Mary Karr, but the pandemic got in the way.)

Meet Daisy, a bouncy puppy with a favorite red ball. One day, while playing in the park, a bigger dog bites on it and –puff! Her ball completely deflates. Daisy is crushed!  She returns home and buries herself on the sofa, totally downcast. Told in wordless panels, Daisy’s feelings are deeply felt and understood. The illustrations are amazingly expressive and perfectly capture the character’s emotional journey from playfulness to sadness. On a return visit to the park, can Daisy find a way to joy again?

A quirky story about a ginormous canine and a fearless young heroine? Yes, please! And bonus points for starring a big black dog—the kind that blends into the shadows at humane societies and is, therefore, least likely to get adopted (and the kind that I always adopt). Tempera paintings of an eccentric family in their Gothic house juxtaposed with tiny sepia vignettes will spur kids to explore every inch. They’ll cheer as the dog shrinks down from the magnitude of a T-Rex to an adoptable size.

This book made such a clever use of the “gutter” in the middle of the book.

I have an irrational fear of picture book gutters and margins after formatting my first self-published book and making sure all the important stuff (including the text) stays in the frame.

This book gave me the feeling of ownership over the gutter that I never knew I needed.

We presume all animals love their habitat and their lot in life; birds love the sky, snakes love the grass, and bears, of course, love the woods. But not so much for the star of this book; a petulant little penguin who seems to have gotten up on the wrong side of the ice floe. He’s crabby about the too-white snow, the too-cold temperature, the too-salty sea, and his too-lookalike colony of penguin pals. Basically, everything makes him crabby, but in a way that’s amusing. After a day of carping, a wise walrus gives him a lecture about appreciating the beauty of his world and the love of his companions. This improves his attitude…for about two pages.

By the end of the book, the little grump is back to his old self, griping about the weather and the early darkness. It’s refreshing to see a character who doesn’t completely transform… show more.

As a lifelong doodler and a dog lover, I am a fan of James Thurber’s simple lines that say a lot and his witty whimsical way with words. Thurber was a celebrated writer and cartoonist—he died in 1961—who had a wry take on human nature and our idiosyncrasies. While much of his work feels dated now, in my opinion, his dog doodles are evergreen.

My good friend Ray Coppinger, who died in 2017 at age 80, was known as the world’s leading scientific expert on the behavior of dogs. As well as writing some of the most important scholarly works on dog behavior, he also penned this slim volume - the hands-down funniest book about the dog-human relationship. Ray could act impatient when people got mushy about their dogs, but in this small gem he reveals that he understood the emotional bond between people and dogs at a very deep level.