73. John Grogan - Marley & Me

Marley & Me by John Grogan is not a book I would normally read. I won this book at my previous job and I decided to give it a go this week. I've seen the film, of which the poster is on the book (I hate that!); but the book is just so... Simple.

It's a cute true story about a columnist who writes about his family's rambunctious dog, Marley. Nothing big really happens though, he takes us through Marley's puppy years and ends, very fittingly, at his last breath. It's no literary masterpiece. It's just a story about a guy and his dog.

What annoyed me, was that I watched a few episodes of The Dog Whisperer on YouTube and John and Jen Grogan were on it because they couldn't control the dog they had after Marley passed away. This annoys me, because it's quite clear that they just can't raise a dog. The second thing that I found a bit too much was the few pages at the end of the book where John Grogan suddenly starts talking about 9/11. The below passage doesn't add anything to the story, especially since he contemplates the below while visiting the site of the crash in 2003:

"I felt something else, as well - an amazement at the boundless capacity of the human heart, at once big enough to absorb a tragedy of this magnitude yet still find room for the little moments of personal pain and heartache that are part of any life. In my case, one of those little moments was my failing dog. With a tinge of shame, I realized that even amid the colossus of human heartbreak that was Flight 93, I could still feel the sharp pang of the loss I knew was coming." (Grogan 299)