Mocha, a regular contributor to this blog, gifted me this book two weeks back, after I generally spent that week moping around with the saddest "nothing can melt me" look in my eyes. "Hopefully, this will make you smile," she said. I took it woefully. Smile? Optimistic, indeed!
The Bad Dog's Diary: A Year in the Life of Blake: Lover... Fighter... Dog by Martin Howard is not likely to be a classic ever. In fact, it will not even grace the Top 500 in the New York Times Best Books of 2008. It's nonsensical, trite, and often cliched, with ribald jokes, and raunchy humor. But it's worth a laugh. Worth quite a few laughs. I do love dogs, but I am not the sort who would love any book just because it has a four-legged canine trotting around, making us humans look ridiculously foolish. Marley and Me is just about the cult favorite in this and Blake is not quite as elite and adorable as Marley. But he is fun. And it is enjoyable for a while to read about this mad world of ours from a dog's perspective. The Bad Dog's Diary is written in the first person, and I found myself giggling initially over Blake's observations on us weird humans.
Yet, good as it is, the book gets a bit tedious towards the end. Probably had Howard stuck to the dog's capers with his owner, and reduced the length to just within 180 pages, it would have read just fine. As it is, Blake's prolonged battle with vicious pit-bull Razor, stretched on to epic proportions, turns an sometimes enjoyable read into an average, "let me get it over with" read. Humorous, yes, it is. Quirky, yes. Lovable, up to a point. Classic, no. But yeah, Mocha, it did make me smile.
Verdict: Readable. Once Only.
Rating: 3/5
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