THE CALL OF THE WILD

For exercise, I not only bicycle daily, but I also do strength training, working out with weights three to four times a week -- I use a barbell with iron plates. I have my weight bench and weight set in a sunny storage room which has a lot of boxes of stuff -- including boxes of books.

About three or four weeks ago while I was taking a break from working out, I looked through one of my boxes of books and found "The Call Of The Wild", by Jack London.

My parents had bought it at a thrift store a long ago, and they never read it. I had seen it around, but I had never read it, either.

While soaking up the late afternoon sun (my weight room has large windows) I started leafing through the book, and I realized it's over 100 years old.

I decided to read it. It was a good story, and a quick read -- about 220 pages in three sittings (I usually read about an hour or two a day while trying to sleep or sometimes waking up -- my quiet time).

Jack London's writing style is very clear writing, and very descriptive in places.

It's a story about a big dog that lives on a sunny, California grape farm. The dog gets stolen and sold as a sled dog up north in Alaska, where such dogs were needed (as pack animals) during the Gold Rush.

The dog goes through several sets of owners. Some tragedies happen. In the end, you could say that the dog rediscovers his "inner wolf".

I don't want to give the entire story away, even though you could probably read the synopsis on Wikipedia -- but it's a good story, and very descriptive of how tough it was to travel the sled "roads" in the winter in 50 degree below zero weather.

A lot of the sled trails were actually frozen rivers, which apparently served as 'roads'. It was possible for a sled to break through the ice on the rivers and lakes during late winter or early spring -- and many people apparently died that way.

Jack London spent some time in the Yukon and Alaska during the Gold Rush and obviously used his experiences to create this classic book. It's his most well known book.

I have another of his books -- "White Fang" -- also about a dog -- hidden away somewhere, in another box of books. I'll have to dig it out and give it a read.