The Call of the Wild
As Buck, a mixed breed dog, is taken away from his home, instead of facing a feast for breakfast and the comforts of home, he faces the hardships of being a sled dog. Soon he lands in the wrong hands, being forced to keep going when it is too rough for him and the other dogs in his pack. He also fights the urges to run free with his ancestors, the wolves who live around where he is pulling the sled.
Stats for nerds
14recommend
40mentions
38people
2010–2026years
35% recommend65% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Yes, I had read London's Call of the Wild, as a kid. Good one too.
- I really enjoyed both The Call of the Wild and White Fang by Jack London.
- I listened to Call of the Wild and it was excellent. I think some of the intonation and contextual emphasis, tone etc could be improved. I suspect this is definitely the nail in the coffin for artisanal narration. Some of the recent SOTA models (below) do very well in these areas, so I’ll wager in 5 years all ebooks will be narratable via a local or cloud model as part of the reader.
https://ai.meta.com/blog/voicebox-generative-ai-model-speech...
https://news.play.ht/post/introducing-playht2-0-the-state-of...
- Baden-Powell's "Scouting for boys", Jack London's "The Call of the Wild", The Commodore 64 Reference Manual... just to name a few. The first one because it lured me to the great outdoors, the second one because it pointed me where to go - I paddled the Yukon from Whitehorse to the Bering Strait with a water- and most likely bulletproof solar-powered "Virgin WebPlayer" and a hat/canoe-mounted camera to record it "all" (the camera was not totally waterproof so it died just before Eagle, the border town between Canada and Alaska...), the third one (which I actually destroyed way before I paddled that river) because it laid bare the soul of the new machine.
For the rest I just read whatever I can get hold of, I don't really have any "cornerstone books" - probably because I've seen too many of them rise to fame to later decline when the fad they promoted got out of fashion...
- What are you missing out on?
Moby-Dick. Don Quixote, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Alice's Adventures In Wonderland, The Call of the Wild, Lord of the Flies, The Painted Bird, The Handmaid's Tale, 2001: A Space Odyssey, On the Beach, Naked Lunch, I Am Legend, The Grapes of Wrath, Last and First Men, Frankenstein,
Try to avoid "Great Books" lists, though. Ask your closest friends who they read. Or if a literary reference comes up that sparks your curiosity, ask where it's from and read that. Did you like a movie? Look it up on IMDB and see if it is based on or borrows from a book (you'd be surprised how many movies are drawn from books, even if they aren't direct adaptations.
Pick one, read it a while. Give it a chance, some start slow. If it doesn't resonate, move on to the next one. If you like a book, try another book by the same author, or from the same genre/era. Follow your curiosity.
- So it is a biography of sorts, if it is possible to biographize a fictional(or possibly real) dog and focusing more on your request for important moments or changes in history... the Klondike gold rush was one of those.
Jack London's [0] book, Call of the Wild [1] is a great read and one that should be part of everyone's library.
I would imagine there are also biographies on Jack himself but if you are looking for a book that will transport you to another time filled with historical accuracy and adventure, you can't go wrong reading this one.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_London#Gold_rush_and_firs...
