100 books like The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

This is a book you wouldn't want to lend to a friend, but you might want to buy it for a friend! It’s a genre-defying memoir of a grieving daughter that I found inspirational and validating in the wake of my own parents' deaths. Helen MacDonald loses her father and embarks on a journey to find, adopt, and train a goshawk, one of the fiercest and most feral predators on Earth...a remarkable metaphor for her own wild grief.

As her relationship evolves with the goshawk, Mabel, they learn together the beauty and terror of being alive. I found great inspiration here because it taught me that you can talk about hard things in a lyrical, uplifting way, leaving your readers to soar on the last page, not jumping out of windows. 

I love this book because of Enzo, the canine narrator. In fact, he may be my favorite narrator of all time. He is one of those narrators I would love to be friends with or who I would love to have as a professor or a spiritual guide. 

The first time I tried reading it I put it down because I ugly-cried in the first chapter when Enzo recounted the story of how he planned to simplify his beloved human’s life. Thankfully, a trusted friend convinced me to give it another try because it’s now one of my all-time favorite books. Coming from an English teacher of twenty plus years, who reads a lot of good books, I think that's pretty high praise.

Yes, I cried a lot in this one, too, but I also laughed and did not want to leave Enzo or the humans he loved so dearly… show more.

You’ll have picked up a theme here: dog behavior is pretty simple. It’s human behavior, illuminated by how we act toward dogs, that’s damnably complicated. In this book a supremely well-informed behaviorist and trainer turns her scope not on the animals she’s studied so intently, but on the humans who interact with them. Only in that context can we understand why our pets do what they do: they do stuff because we are another kind of animal entirely. As primates, we persist in treating everyone else as if they were a primate, too. McConnell asks us to “get out of” ourselves—to think like a dog, to understand the needs of the Other, which is the essence of compassion. This book is a rare beauty: thoughtful, kind, ultimately radical in its request that we learn a little about the species we bring into a human world to unwittingly demand it adapt… show more.

About half the size and nearly twice as epic as J.R.R. Tolkien’s seminal The Lord of the Rings, this tale of a rabbit clan in search of a new home and their defense of it thereafter rocked my middle-school mind and has scarcely left it since. 

From the canny Hazel to the delightfully brash Bigwig to the terrifying General Woundwort, Adams made sure to populate his grand lapine journey with compelling heroes, striking villains, and a mammoth mythology that takes you deep into their world.

It was the first book that I actively felt winded upon finishing, having been through such an odyssey and one whose 1978 animated film adaptation stands as much a classic (and a personal favorite) as the text that spawned it.

As entertaining as the PBS series about Yorkshire veterinarian James Herriott (pseudonym for author James Alfred Wight) is, the book is even better.

A blend of memoir, travelogue, and journal, Herriott’s tales of life among the farmers of England’s Yorkshire Dales are heartwarming, hilarious, and riveting. From his familial relationships with the Farnon brothers, with whom he lives, to the sometimes endearing, sometimes mercurial encounters with his patients—both the 2-legged and 4-legged variety—reading the adventures of this country vet is both informative and engaging.

You’ll go places you never imagined, want to watch the series—original and remake—all over again, and will, if you’re like me, make a solemn pledge to visit the Dales before you die! 

Charlotte’s Web has it all: animal characters, a strong story with life and death at stake, yet as gentle as a breeze. Starring a naïve pig named Wilbur who faces a daunting future… and a unique friend in a spider named Charlotte. Again, a tale of true friendship when brave Charlotte soars beyond the limitations of a spider to save Wilbur. 

Charlotte’s depth of character and creativity, paired with Wilbur’s innocence, makes this a classic book for all ages. Yes, she spins the words “Terrific” and “Some Pig,” but in the end, Charlotte herself is one terrific and memorable spider.

This is the best book I’ve read on the science behind canine nutrition and helping someone's dog live a long and happy life. Rodney Habib and veterinarian Karen Becker create a prescriptive plan that integrates nutritional health sciences through the study of the most long-lived canines. They incorporate environmental principles, stress reduction, and the principles of an overall healthy lifestyle with preeminent science about what nutrients dogs require. They emphasize stress, isolation, and psychological factors, how even exposure to negative energy—insults and mean behavior—can so badly affect dogs and their owners alike.

The authors also dig deep into the subject of what pet food manufacturers don’t want customers to know about. They help the reader get out from the matrix of how we typically feed our canine companions, with information about how standard pet foods are made with the lowest quality ingredients, based on how large corporations do not consider… show more.

Opportunity abounds with a new puppy, both a potential for brilliance and the possibility for troublesome behaviors. When I adopted my second dog, Raleigh, I wanted to be sure she learned from me rather than picked up her training tips from Jackson who was always a little mischievous. I studied this book for a month before Raleigh came home and heavily relied on the techniques and insight to help guide Raleigh into being an incredibly smart and obedient dog, while also allowing her the opportunity to be funny and playful. (Another book that tends to disappear when I lend it out!) 

This book is a UK best seller. It deals with a variety of communication difficulties, including the author’s own stuttering. The only thing it doesn’t really cover is literacy, occasionally mentioning it, which is my only beef with it. Problems like aphasia caused by strokes, where words are forgotten or where words are slurred as in degenerative brain disease are well covered as are autism and Tourette's syndrome, which isn’t all swearing but includes tics. He also asks do we need to be hyper-fluent in speech as some people are and mentions ways people try to disguise their disability. He argues that such defects are genetic and that exercises like slowing down speech therefore can’t help but then mentions contrarily instances where they do, indicating the speed of delivery matters. He also fails to mention that self-censorship through fear of embarrassment, puts conscious blocks on communication.

I was working part-time at an independent bookshop in 2008 when this book arrived in the latest shipment. In addition to the title—named for Driftless Region near where I grew up—the author’s personal comeback story was a novel in itself: Iowa Writers Workshop graduate Rhodes published three books in quick succession in the 1970s, then promptly fell off the face of the earth until, decades later, fledgling Milkweed Editions tracked him down and learned he’d been paralyzed in a motorcycle accident but was still very much alive (and writing) in a small farmhouse in rural Wisconsin. Hooked, I read the book—and was moved to my core.

Nobody captures the particular quirkiness, heart and faith of the people that make up tiny Wisconsin communities better than Rhodes.