Ah yes, Dog Book by Jack London— not to be confused with the spiritual successor, Dog Book II, where travel along the dog–wolf continuum is flipped. I read The Call of the Wild in school, but not for school— London does too good and gleeful a job of explaining what the point of the story is, so there’s little purpose in making kids write five-paragraph essays about it.
Actually despite maybe being the definitive Dog Book, The Call of the Wild is not a great book for dog lovers because loyalty and cuteness are not prominent themes, and also many bad things happen to dogs in this story. I recommend reading it as a dog-centric suspense story with some horror elements, including horrible elements: the brutal cold of the Yukon and the dog-emaciating labor it demands buries the story in a snow of doom and dread, powdering the numerously scattered beatings, injuries, sicknesses, starvations, and deaths.
The hero is Buck, a St. Bernard–Scottish collie mix who is a good and big boy, heavier than many human women, and who leads a pampered life in sunny California, but he gets kidnapped and undomesticated in short order. This book has a boss fight with a real motherfucker of a dog against whom Buck must use his considerable civilized wits. It has extremely metal chapter titles. There is a terrifying part where a hundred starving dogs rush into camp like fast zombies and try to eat anything even slightly chewy, including leather. There is a satisfying part where arrogant dipshits get themselves turned into Yukon lake fish food. By the end of the book, it’s Buck who exudes the final-boss movie-monster energy, much to the chagrin of the Native Americans who unwittingly move Buck along to the last stage of his transformation.
With all the crazy dog shit to balance it out, this book manages to stay readable even though there is a lot of adventure, environmental, and survival description that makes my eyes glaze over. This book also makes me hungry with its frequent sad description of dog-famine, so I will go have a snack now.