Philadelphia Weekly

Happy cur-istmas: Howl is a collection of contemporary dog wit.

Some books are born cute, others achieve cuteness, and still others have cuteness thrust upon them.

Books that set out to be cute usually sport titles like A Pop-up Day in the Life of an Irish Redhead--nothing one could read in public.

Then there are children's books featuring anthropomorphic animals overcoming adversity or doing good deeds and learning important lessons in the end. But while no one will know you have a secret devotion to The Doodlebops, you'll still get glances buying it at the store. (Order it online. Better yet, have a child.)

If you need something to read to your kid, best bet is to go for the classic Little Golden Books. LGBs--published by Random House--"changed publishing history" by making kids' books high quality and low priced. Today The Poky Little Puppy--by far the cutest and therefore best Little Golden Book--will set you back $2.99 online (or a penny plus shipping on Amazon).

Publishers Weekly ranks The Poky Little Puppy the best-selling children's book of all time (almost 15 million copies). But there's also Dog Goes to Nursery School for younger kids. It's a soothing tale of a talking dog and how he learns nursery school isn't so scary. You'll just eat it up, honest.

Keeping with the cute-dog theme, a bevy of recently published books deal with our interactions with canus familiaris.

Former Inquirer columnist John Grogan's Marley & Me (Marley being his gangly Labrador retriever) was a New York Times bestseller, so clones and knock offs abound. Grogan has written his own children's version, Marley: A Dog Like No Other, which is a 208-page illustrated, dumbed-down version of what was already a pretty simple story. And there's also a picture book edition, Bad Dog, Marley!

The most brazen Grogan knock off comes from the Inquirer itself, which slapped together a bunch of Grogan's old columns--not too many of which had to do with dogs--and titled it Bad Dogs Have More Fun. Grogan wrote on his Marley & Me blog that the deal was struck behind his back and labeled the book an "unauthorized collection."

Howl: A Collection of the Best Contemporary Dog Wit is the follow-up to Dog Is My Co-Pilot, which won the Best Book of the Year award from the Dog Writers Association of America. And like its illustrious predecessor, it's again compiled by the editors of Bark magazine.

Howl is a collection of essays about people's experiences with dogs, some of which seem dated (like a Million Little Pieces parody, for instance) but it's a good gift for the mom obsessing over her Cavalier King Charles spaniel now that the kids have flown the coop.

Recently out in paperback is Pets in America: A History by Delaware professor Katherine Grier. It chronicles our historical appreciation of cuteness--from Philadelphian colonist Elizabeth Sandwith Drinker's dog diaries to Franklin Delano Roosevelt's dog Fala, who received letters and gifts from the public and never answered back--kinda the 1940s version of Barbaro.