Chicken Soup for the Dog Lover's Soul by Jack Canfield, Mark Victor Hansen, Marty Becker, Carol Kline and Amy Shojai

I don't have a dog, but I like dogs.  They just require a lot of time, effort, which I don't really have an abundance of.  So I enjoy dogs through reading about them and this book was chock full of dog stories.

Like the other Chicken Soup books, this one was filled with little stories that were meant to inspire and create warm fuzzy feelings for you.  The stories ranged from dogs as rescuers, letting go of a dog, adopting dogs, and a whole lot more.  The dogs as rescuers was the most interesting because a lot were dogs that taught themselves how to help sick owners or alert them to danger.  It just shows how intelligent they can really be sometimes.  About the only story I didn't enjoy was the one where it described a dog going after a bunch of bicyclists.  The only thing that stopped the dog was quick thinking by one of the bicycle riders, but for some reason the story was presented as trying to be cute, instead of as a dog not properly supervised that almost hurt some people.

Dogs can be characters, but I didn't really get the goofiness I associate with dogs from this book.  In fact, none of them had a huge personality, despite their owners describing them and having lived with them.  The sense of the animals themselves just wasn't there, despite their stories being told.  I think the humans in the book came across more strongly.  Their love for the dogs and how they related to the dogs.  That seemed to be the bigger focus here.

The short stories were easy to read and you could read this over several nights or in one sitting because of the format.  I enjoyed most of the stories about the dogs and there were a few truly remarkable ones in there.  While some were just so-so and had more to do about the person than the dog, there weren't too many of that type.  And although this is a Christian publication, there wasn't much about religion in it, just a lot about dogs.

Not a bad read for people who like dogs.  There's a little bit of something in here for every type of dog lover.

Chicken Soup for the Dog Lover's Soul
Copyright 2005
398 pages

Chicken Soup for the Cat Lover's Soul by Jack Canfield, Mark Victor Hansen, Marty Becker, Carol Kline and Amy Shojai

I'm a cat person.  I currently have two of my own and could only wish for more.  So, on this streak of Chicken Soup books that I've been reading lately, it only seemed appropriate to read the Cat Lover's Soul book.

Chicken Soup for the Cat Lover's Soul is filled with the normal short stories of the Chicken Soup series.  They are broken down into different chapters titled, "On Love", "Celebrating the Bond", "A Furry RX", "Cat-Egorically Wonderful", "Cats as Teachers", "Farewell, My Love", "Rescue Me!", and "One of the Family."  Each of these chapters has several short stories relating to the themes and of course, they are all about cats.  There are stories of adopting special cats, cats alerting their owners to danger or illness, and many other things.  I especially liked the story "The Call of the Lobster" about a cat who talks to a special toy, because one of my mom's cats does the same thing with a fuzzy ball she carries around.  I knew she was strange, but at least she's not alone in her strangeness.  There were other stories I didn't like though, like the one about a lady who rescued a cat with FIV and then after treating it at the vet let it roam with her other cats (yes FIV can be contained and treated, but it can be infectious and it seemed an unnecessary risk to her other cats).

I'm of the opinion that all cats are pretty wonderful.  It's the owners that I sometimes don't care for.  There are a lot of people out there that are just cruel to animals (including a story in this book where four teenage boys are practicing target shooting on a cat) and it hurts to read about people like that.  Granted, there are just as many if not more wonderful people in this book who adopt cats and take care of them, so it does have that redeeming quality to it.  But really, it's the cats that make this book worthwhile and it showcases them.

I will admit that there were quite a few stories in here that made me laugh or cry.  The cat getting its head stuck in the garbage disposer (it was rescued successfully) made me giggle.  But, despite there being a specific chapter for cat death "Farewell, My Love", kitty death was rampant through this book.  I'm fairly convinced that the people at Chicken Soup aren't happy unless there's a death of a person, animal, plant, whatever, every ten pages or so in their books.  Not sure what's so inspiring about that, but they've sold a lot of books so it much be working.  I just wish there was more life than death in these books, especially this one since I appreciate my kitties being alive and don't want to think about their eventual deaths right now.  Still, they had a lot of good stories in this book.

Overall this is one of the better Chicken Soup books.  As a cat lover, I did enjoy it and read it in one sitting.

Chicken Soup for the Cat Lover's Soul
Copyright 2005
378 pages