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I was drawn to read Heart Of Swine by its brilliant cover design which evokes the graphics of Animal Farm by George Orwell with a titular nod to Heart Of A Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov, both of which rank highly amongst my favourite classics. Heart Of Swine is a brilliantly surreal tale, often nonsensical but with stark truths about how we live and especially about how easily fashionable trends can persuade vast swathes of the population to act against their best interests. While several aspects of the story did remain frustratingly unexplained - and were possibly just inexplicable - the whole concept does make a dark, warped sense. It's certainly a cautionary tale for our times.

Vegan truisms had me chuckling and I loved the whole London vibe that permeates Heart Of Swine. I found it best to go with the flow in reading this book. Overthinking individual aspects only served to make them more confusing whereas allowing the ideas to wash over me clarified them. There's so many wickedly funny nods to current and recent trends as well as Fonseca's unusually angled viewpoints which illustrate how daft some of our accepted wisdom really is. If, like me, you enjoy losing yourself in inspired surrealism, I heartily recommend picking up Heart Of Swine.

Beyond Flight or Fight is a fascinating, in depth exploration into the psychology of rehabilitating fearful and traumatised dogs so that they can have a happy future in our human dominated environment. Sunny Weber has immense experience and understanding in this field and her expertise really does shine through every page. Beyond Flight or Fight is not a step by step instruction manual, but rather an invitation for us to understand how our own behaviours can influence the dogs in our care - for better or for worse. I was especially interested in the sections where Weber explains how exceptionally fluent most dogs are in interpreting our body language and that they will often give body language signals precedence over whatever verbal commands we make. As humans on the whole have lost much of our ability to communicate non-verbally, it's no wonder our dogs get confused when we send conflicting signals!

Beyond Flight or Fight does include a number of case studies of formerly fearful dogs, most of which are quite challenging emotionally to read. I find it hard to accept how casually people can abandon a pet, yet thousands do and often for reasons that would have seemed to be obvious problems had they really considered how much of a commitment they were taking on. Weber discusses the differences between shelters and foster homes, but mostly focuses on foster work as the individual care component here is vital in rehabilitating a fearful dog.

While I don't have a dog myself, I was very interested to read this book and picked up a few tips myself for better ways to greet the dogs I do meet pretty much every day. For people who share their homes with a dog however, whether a fearful one or not, I imagine Beyond Flight Or Fight would become an invaluable resource and conversation starter, allowing owners to better understand their canine companions and also, hopefully, allowing those dogs a similar improved understanding of their humans!

I first discovered Ink through taking part in an Xpresso Reads spotlight blog tour a couple of years ago. I loved the tattoo art cover design, but wasn't sure how much I would enjoy the book's fantasy genre so didn't read more than the excerpt above. When recently trawling my past Literary Flits posts for books for this vegan blog, I realised that Jobie Baldwin is herself vegan and this prompted me to give Ink a try. I'm so glad I did! The story is a fun adventure story where an incongruous band of young peope are brought together to save Earth from Settler aliens who have their own ideas on how the planet should best be saved. Individually selected by ancient Rune Gods, each of our intrepid heroes learns how to meld and focus their powers - except for our narrator, Christian, who just can't seem to stop blowing things up!Ink is a very funny read and I enjoyed spending time in Christian's company as he tries to understand exactly what is going on and the role he is destined to play. I could have done with a bit more in the way of world building as I was intrigued by the overall premise, but still had questions that weren't answered. Perhaps they will be addressed in the sequel, Flak, which I'm looking forward to picking up soon. If you're in the mood for a light-hearted yet violent escapist fantasy, Ink could be well worth a read.