Finding Gobi: A Little Dog with a Very Big Heart
By: Dion Leonard, Craig Borlase / Narrated By: Simon Bubb
Length: 6 hrs and 36 mins
AWWWW! What a true feel-good kinda book!
I get it. Like, totally. I’m the person that stray feral cats seem to find. Not only that, but they somehow decide they’d like to be tame, all things considered. It’s a weighty obligation, I tell you! And I don’t take that responsibility lightly.
So imagine how GOOD it was to listen to Finding Gobi, Dion Leonard’s account of a little homeless dog who came to trust him whilst he was in China for an Ultramarathon.
At first, Dion doesn’t know where the little desert dog came from, and she kinda sorta sidles up to all the runners, but soon she’s running with him. And soon, though he’s a majorly competitive type of guy, he finds himself doing things like backtracking to carry her over wide streams of water (she barked and barked most piteously—how could he just leave her behind?!?). He finds himself sharing his meager rations with her. He finds himself naming her Gobi.
And he finds himself looking for her happy tongue-lolling face each time he crosses the finish line of a stage. It’s true and pure love.
What got me was how Dion just didn’t give up, as in: How on earth is somebody supposed to get a stray dog out of a COUNTRY? Impossible! But he did everything he could, all with the complete conviction that he and Gobi were destined to live out the rest of their lives together.
The book is about the MANY hurdles he has to jump, the MANY people who helped out.
But it’s also about him growing to let go of the past and embrace himself as a Can-Do sort of person. He had a troubled childhood, later as a teenager his principal shakes his hand and comments, “I’ll see you in prison.” Dion also was a couch potato, and here he is now, running Ultramarathons and loving it.
And the narration! Okay, so like, I very much had to speed it up to x1.5 a lot, but other than that, it was spot on. Simon Bubb is an Aussie, for gosh sakes! Aussie narrators rarely can do wrong, as their very nationality seems to confer upon them grand senses of humor. It made for chucklesome listening; it made for some super sweet listening.
I’m still wondering what I’m going to do with stray cat Blanche and her daughter, David, over where I work, but Gobi’s story and the man who loved her enough to travel to China and back, then to China, again filled me with hope and even a sense of purpose.
Good going, Dion!
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