I'm not reading this for the first time - far from it - but it's the first reread since I joined Goodreads, and I can't decide whether to give it four or five stars. I'm tending towards four, but I wonder if that's because there's parts of this story that make me plain unhappy, as opposed to believing it's ill-written or anything like that. It's not like there aren't sad books out there that earn their five stars, after all... but I hate seeing animals mistreated, and there are passages here where you just want to cringe in shame on behalf of the human species for what this dog is put through.

The Call of the Wild has been criticised, I know, for being excessively anthropomorphic in its presentation of Buck. The difficulty in realistically depicting animals can't be underestimated - there's always going to be part of them that we just don't know. That we can't know. And truthfully, London has filled in the gaps here with a very human brush, possibly too human. Yet the conclusion, when it comes, is unwavering, and really there can be no other end. With all his "civilisation" beaten out of him, Buck returns to the wild, joining a wolf pack, and while there is a sense of agency, of choice and delight in that choice... this triumphant sort of ending is, we know, only a brief one. Buck finishes the book in full strength, but there's only weakening and a bad death ahead of him, and I've yet to decide if it's a happy ending or not. Happy for now, I suppose, after a life that didn't have much happiness in it. Poor dog.