100 books like Dog Is Love

I’ve spent the last 21 years in the company of a golden retriever, all through my career as a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer – and ever since I left the paper in 2015 to write memoirs. I wrote a memoir for an Iranian child soldier, a memoir about my childhood beekeeping with my grandfather in Big Sur, and it was only a matter of time before I turned to my dog for inspiration. After two perfectly happy golden retrievers, Edie’s extreme anxiety baffled me: I hired trainers, behaviorists, specialist veterinarians, read everything I could on the canine brain, tried CBD oil, and even a pet psychic to understand her emotions.  

I’ve spent the last 21 years in the company of a golden retriever, all through my career as a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer – and ever since I left the paper in 2015 to write memoirs. I wrote a memoir for an Iranian child soldier, a memoir about my childhood beekeeping with my grandfather in Big Sur, and it was only a matter of time before I turned to my dog for inspiration. After two perfectly happy golden retrievers, Edie’s extreme anxiety baffled me: I hired trainers, behaviorists, specialist veterinarians, read everything I could on the canine brain, tried CBD oil, and even a pet psychic to understand her emotions.  

I love wild empty beaches, traveling to unusual places, swimming, snorkeling, and scuba diving. These interests combined one year when my family spent Christmas at a remote dive resort in Papua New Guinea. I was fascinated by the colourful reef creatures, nudibranchs, coral, anemones, reef sharks, and octopuses. Then I heard about the ancient practice of shark calling…I write across genres and researched anthropomorphism in children’s literature for my PhD, with The Shark Caller and The Dog with Seven Names being my linked creative works. I live near the ocean in southwestern Australia, am a bookworm, and a full-time author of 25 titles (and counting). 

I’ve spent the last 21 years in the company of a golden retriever, all through my career as a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer – and ever since I left the paper in 2015 to write memoirs. I wrote a memoir for an Iranian child soldier, a memoir about my childhood beekeeping with my grandfather in Big Sur, and it was only a matter of time before I turned to my dog for inspiration. After two perfectly happy golden retrievers, Edie’s extreme anxiety baffled me: I hired trainers, behaviorists, specialist veterinarians, read everything I could on the canine brain, tried CBD oil, and even a pet psychic to understand her emotions.  

The whole concept of Your Next Big Idea is to change your perspective on how people come up with ideas. It is easy to count yourself out as not creative, but creativity and the ability to generate ideas are something that can be taught. You just need to refresh your perspective on how to look at the topic. These books do the same things for other categories in nonfiction, rethinking kindness, working, play, and changing people’s minds. These are skills that anyone can apply to any field of work (like with Your Next Big Idea) and can change how we act for the better!

Kat Albrecht-Thiessen is a police detective-turned-pet detective and is the founder / director of the Missing Animal Response Network (MARN). Since 1997, Kat has worked search dogs trained to find lost pets. She is widely known as the leading authority on lost pet recovery training. Kat is a regular speaker at animal welfare conferences. She and her search dogs have appeared on Animal Planet and articles about her work have appeared in People, Reader’s Digest, Parade and many other publications. In 2005, Kat launched the first-ever pet detective academy and since that time has trained over 800 volunteer and professional pet detectives from across the world.

Some of my fondest memories have been of curling up with the family dog and reading a good book. This started as a child with our golden retriever OJ, and continues today with Lolo, our sweet but spoiled German shorthaired pointer. Dogs are such wonderful companions, always up for anything: hiking, exploring, car rides, sitting on the couch, and lounging. It’s no surprise, then, that not only do I love reading books featuring dogs I’ve also included a canine sidekick in each of the nine thrillers that I’ve written. I hope you enjoy this dogged list of mysteries and thrillers as much as I have. 

I am a historian of biology and biomedicine who has always been an outsider. Most of my colleagues have worked on ‘Darwin to DNA’ – evolution, physiology, genetics, and molecular biology. My interests have been in applied biology – parasites, insects, fungi, bacteria, biomedicine, animal diseases, and latterly dogs. It was a book on rabies, that I wrote with Neil Pemberton, that got me into dogs. In our research and writing we explored the wider social history of dog ownership and then, encouraged by the new interest in Animal History, researched how, and by whom, dogs’ bodies and behaviour had been shaped and reshaped, beginning in the Victorian period. 

I grew up on a small farm in Mississippi and discovered the wide world through a movable feast of books provided by the Bookmobile. The hayloft was my favorite reading spot. I could look across the lake to imagine myself in WWII Paris, the frozen tundras of Alaska, or anywhere beyond the pastures where Daddy’s cattle grazed. I fell in love with words when I was eight years old, a dreamer spinning stories inspired by the ones I read between the covers of my beloved books. I still love words and hear their music as they flow onto the pages of the thrillers I currently write.

Michael Konik is the author of 13 books of fiction, poetry, and journalism, including Ella in Europe: An American Dog's International Adventure, an LA Times best-seller and the inspiration for the Animal Planet series Ella & Me. Surrounded by dogs since toddler age, Konik is currently the owner of Benji, a Golden Doodle, and Billie, a magnificent mutt.