So this starts with a quick story of how I got to this book, The Art of Racing in The Rain by Garth Stein. May seem a bit shallow at first but I don’t really care. I’m just being honest (Future voice)
I meet a girl (fairly attractive) and after seeing I have one, she tells me she writes a blog. Now I’ve been told to check many blogs out before and to keep it a 100, I 90% of the time, don’t ever actually check it out. But in this case I thought man, this chick is pretty dope so if her writing is dope that would be VERY dope. Long story short, I check out the blog and her most recent post is about this book (Her pst is pretty cool and probably better than this will be, so y'all should check it out). I immediately peep that her post was very similar to my Maktub post in that she chose to write about a book that changed her way of thinking. Anyway, I read her post and like it a lot. So much so, that the next time I went to Barnes & Nobles I bought it mainly to see if she was gassing it or not.
Nope.
This book is top 5.
And after reading this book, I felt compelled to write about it in the same way I wrote about The Alchemist.
The perspective the book is written from is genius. The narrator is a dog. Which may seem weird to you at first but that’s the best part. You read the first few chapters thinking “Man, this is ridiculous”. However, the book is so well written that a million times throughout reading it you feel yourself completely seeing things from the dogs perspective and feeling for the dogs moments of helplessness, without having to necessarily read the words. Throughout the book there are moments of irony too like while eating a peanut butter cracker the narrator says “ What a shame to waste something so wonderful on a dog. Sometimes I hate what I am so much”.
The book also draws parallels to the sport of Indy Car Racing, a sport I couldn’t care less about, but throughout reading you’ll grow a slight interest while seeing the connection between life’s ups and downs and what driving a race car is like, especially in the rain.
“I know this much about racing in the rain. I know it is about balance. It is about anticipation and patience. It is about believing that you are not you; you are everything. And everything is you”.
Through the dogs eyes you can see that some things we go through in life that we make out to seem complex are actually very simple. And the things we deem simple, are actually complex. Along with The Alchemist, this is probably the best book I’ve read in years. It makes you think along the same lines as The Alchemist, but you it’s from a different perspective. It’s a book that really makes you think while you read it, while you’re away from it, and after you put it down.
“The human language, as precise as it is with its thousand words, can still be so wonderfully vague.”