Marley and Me. (revised)

Let me get one thing straight, I am not the biggest fan of dog books; or animal books for that matter (even if many of you argue differently). Officially I have read three, Alex and Me , My Friend Flicka, and of course Marley and Me. When I read those other books, each was flawed in the way you might expect and animal book to be flawed. each one was either too sappy, or just not well written. This book did not over complicate the dogs life, nor rephrasing it to make him perfect. this book simply told you what the owners knew, the hilarious stories of the worlds worst dog.

this book also brings up an important point: mortality. most animal books are forced to end with the animal dying. That's what happened. Animals have so much of a shorter life span then a human. ours is long enough that sometimes we lose sight of it. They don't have that pleasure. for an Animal, especially a big dog, life can sometimes mean only ten years, they aren't given enough time to forget.

Plenty of people, from all over the world feel immortal at their prime, life becomes a game (a fun one at that), and feeling pain doesn't quite seem possible.

I was reading my book on the subway this weekend, and nearing the end of my book an old woman sitting next to me leans over and smiles, she says "I love that book!" I looked at her, her face was deeply wrinkled and her lipstick badly smudged. She wasn't immortal. I smiled back and engaged in a deep conversation about the book with her until my stop (basically comparing the movie to the book).

Around the middle of our conversation I realized that she thought I had never read the book before. Now to say that this was untrue was an understatement, I had read this book thousands of times; it never got old.

therre happens to be an episode o a show called Doctor Who, where there's this whole thing with Agatha Christie,  when he says how much he loves her books she shakes him off saying that soon they would be forgotten. And how wrong she was! It gave me an odd feeling to think that something that will out live us all is literature. In class we are reading the words of Shakespeare, the very same one that died five hundred years ago. the immortal, those who are going to outlive us all are not vampires, or zombies. It's the books.