Shelf Aware: Call of the Wild and Storygraph

I remember leaving Facebook back around 2010, and taking inventory of all the connected services that I used that also used my Facebook credentials.  The only one that I really cared about losing access to was Goodreads.  I jumped through the hoops to create and associate a dedicated Goodreads login so that I would lose my reading history and my too-read list. 

About 3 years later, Amazon bought Goodreads and now here I am exporting my Goodreads data and jumping ship to Storygraph.

Jumping ship might be a little harsh; I still enjoy the service and the friends I have on that platform, but I’m excited to try out something new and (for now) independent.  In the meantime, I’ll probably be posting updates to both places.

Updates like how today I finished reading The Call of The Wild by Jack London.  It’s been on my pile of classics to get caught up on for quite a while.  It’s one of those books that most probably were forced to read in school, but my English Lit curriculum didn’t contain.

After re-reading Gary Paulsen’s Hatchet in 2024, I went hunting for more outdoor adventure books and this one seemed like a must-read given its’ history and prominence.

From a historical perspective, having been published in 1903, this book is astonishingly well written. London’s prose is evocative and eloquent, and more modern than I assumed it would be. His decision to focus the narrative point of view on that of the dog had to be considered progressive storytelling for the time.

However, methodology aside, the story being told is an unflinchingly brutal one. Much like nature, the wild, itself. A rewarding read, but ultimately not a pleasant one.

Now, I’m trying not to go too deep down the rabbit hole of film adaptations.  There are so many to choose from and all seem to be equally evasive of the original source material.  I am going to attempt to watch the most recent Harrison Ford adaptation which was released in February of 2020, right before COVID-19 shutdown movie theaters for almost a year and forever changed the industry.