Help me ID a book

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from my childhood. It was a young adult mystery and had something to do with two english bull terriers (aka the spuds mckensie/target dogs). I think it might have been english, or at the least set in the UK. No searches I run on google return anything familiar. This would have been in the early-mid 80's.

Also, help anyone else ID any books they can't remember the titles of!

― anthony kyle monday (akmonday), Wednesday, 14 January 2004 16:40 (twenty-two years ago)

Only book I remember with two dogs was 'The Plague Dogs', and that depressed the shit out of me. Sorry, can't help you.

― writingstatic (writingstatic), Wednesday, 14 January 2004 22:19 (twenty-two years ago)

It wasn't that, I've read that. This was something much less heady.

― anthony kyle monday (akmonday), Wednesday, 14 January 2004 23:18 (twenty-two years ago)

Any of these books ring a bell? (under Fiction)
http://www.alohabullies.com/bull_terrier_book_list.htm

― Chris Hill (Chris Hill), Thursday, 15 January 2004 20:07 (twenty-two years ago)

Can you help me ID a book? It's something I read in junior high, and my best friend and I have been trying to remember the title for ages. I've searched and searched, but I can't remember enough of the details. I know it's a well-known book, and I feel like a bit of a fool not knowing it.

It's about a boy who somehow ends up left in the desert with no supplies, and he is being hunted by a man in a Jeep, I think. I remember that he finds a pool of water in a cave and drinks from it. That's all I can remember. I thought the title was Hunted, or something similar, but I seem to have a mental block.

― Aimee, Tuesday, 20 January 2004 14:06 (twenty-two years ago)

i just recently picked up a vhs copy at the thrift store of a t.v. movie from the 70's that is exactly what you describe. Andy Griffith was the guy in the jeep. he was creepy.

― scott seward (scott seward), Tuesday, 20 January 2004 14:19 (twenty-two years ago)

It was called The Savages. Andy accidently shoots an old miner and the kid wants to go for help. but Andy has other plans. Then it becomes a deadly cat and mouse game and there are slingshots involved.
Andy Griffith is just creepy in general. Ever see A Face In The Crowd? Even the Andy Griffith show reminds me of Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me, but with more pie-baking and less blood.

― scott seward (scott seward), Tuesday, 20 January 2004 14:33 (twenty-two years ago)

I love you guys!!!! The Savages is based on the book "Deathwatch", which I found by searching the movie title. I'm excited. Thanks so much!

― Aimee, Tuesday, 20 January 2004 17:20 (twenty-two years ago)

That's the one where he has sand in his pubes right?

― Leee Majors (Leee), Tuesday, 20 January 2004 19:08 (twenty-two years ago)

Yes. It's also the book where a starving, dehydrated child runs fast enough, sideways no less, to use a carved-out downslope of rock as a "hippodrome" (inspired by his earlier trips to the circus) so as not to plunge to his death. Who knew it was comedy?

I should mention I loved that book when I was made to read it in 9th grade--in a course, incidentally, in which we seemed to read only about neo-gothic sex and death. The Most Dangerous Game, Lord of the Flies, The Lottery, Leiningen vs. the Ants, Alas Babylon, Hiroshima, The Rocking Horse Winner, Romeo and Juliet, A Distant Episode. What a strange diet for children, when imposed (and how obvious, when not.)

― Matthew K (mtk), Tuesday, 20 January 2004 21:12 (twenty-two years ago)

I had forgotten all about the hippodrome. I'm going to re-read the book as soon as I can get to the library.

Funny you should mention the strange themes fed to middle-schoolers... I also read The Most Dangerous Game, Lord of the Flies, The Lottery and Romeo and Juliet that year, yet was denied extra credit (we were given a percentage point for every 100 pages read, resulting in my grade for the year reaching the 200% mark) for reading anything by Stephen King, who was my favorite author at the time. Though certainly not equal in literary value, no Misery or Cujo could be more disturbing to a 13-year-old than Lord of the Flies.

― Aimee, Friday, 23 January 2004 13:33 (twenty-two years ago)

nine months pass...

I was probably 11 or 12 when I read this book. It was about a boy in New York City whose father owned a deli or bodega or something, and they boy got put in charge for a while (father had a health problem?) and expanded it into a chain. It became huge and the family got rich and he threw a giant party in Central Park but he wasn't happy.

In one scene some kind of fatalistic older character tells the boy about a man who died and his epitaph read: "Life is a jest and everything shows it; I thought so once and now I know it." The high school stock boys all laugh at this. I remember this scene because I didn't get why that was funny.

― W i l l (common_person), Thursday, 28 October 2004 19:16 (twenty-two years ago)

the book I was looking for up above might have been "sleeping dogs" by Dick Lochte or "laughing dog" by the same author.

― kyle (akmonday), Monday, 1 November 2004 19:20 (twenty-two years ago)

whoops, no it wasn't , those were just written a few years ago

― kyle (akmonday), Monday, 1 November 2004 19:21 (twenty-two years ago)

six years pass...

I read a story by a Japanese person written in the 80s or maybe the early 90s. The story is about a Japanese student living in Italy, I think with an older guy. The student spends a lot of his time playing a home console video game version of Dante's Inferno. A lot of the story is about how the game plays and the progress the guy makes in the game.

Only you can help. The library that had the anthology I read the story in has sold heaps of their stock because they are trying to focus on online texts and they don't have it anymore.

― bamcquern, Saturday, 12 February 2011 05:50 (fifteen years ago)

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