Summer Sale! Save 25% off a BookBrowse Membership, offer ends soon!

Summary and Reviews of Dog Years by Mark Doty

Dog Years by Mark Doty

Dog Years

A Memoir

by Mark Doty
  • BookBrowse Review:
  • Critics' Consensus (9):
  • Readers' Rating (1):
  • First Published:
  • Mar 13, 2007, 224 pages
  • Paperback:
  • Apr 2008, 256 pages
  • Rate this book

About This Book

Book Summary

When Mark Doty decides to adopt a dog as a companion for his dying partner, he brings home Beau, a golden retriever. A moving and intimate memoir interwoven with profound reflections on our feelings for animals and the lessons they teach us about life, love, and loss.

Why do dogs speak so profoundly to our inner lives? When Mark Doty decides to adopt a dog as a companion for his dying partner, he finds himself bringing home Beau, a large golden retriever, malnourished and in need of loving care. Beau joins Arden, the black retriever, to complete their family. As Beau bounds back into life, the two dogs become Mark Doty's intimate companions, his solace, and eventually the very life force that keeps him from abandoning all hope during the darkest days. Their tenacity, loyalty, and love inspire him when all else fails.

Dog Years is a remarkable work: a moving and intimate memoir interwoven with profound reflections on our feelings for animals and the lessons they teach us about life, love, and loss. Mark Doty writes about the heart-wrenching vulnerability of dogs, the positive energy and joy they bring, and the gift they bear us of unconditional love. A book unlike any other, Mark Doty's surprising meditation is radiantly unsentimental yet profoundly affecting. Beautifully written, Dog Years is a classic in the making.

Chapter One

No dog has ever said a word, but that doesn't mean they live outside the world of speech. They listen acutely. They wait to hear a term—biscuit, walk—and an inflection they know. What a stream of incomprehensible signs passes over them as they wait, patiently, for one of a few familiar words! Because they do not speak, except in the most limited fashion, we are always trying to figure them out. The expression is telling: to "figure out" is to make figures of speech, to invent metaphors to help us understand the world. To choose to live with a dog is to agree to participate in a long process of interpretation—a mutual agreement, though the human being holds most of the cards.

What the interpreter must do is tell stories—sometimes to the dog in question. Who hasn't heard a dog walker chattering away to her pet, as if she were serving as a kind of linguistic mirror: "You are scared of that police horse," "Lola loves that ball!" Some people speak...

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $60 for 12 months or $20 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Reviews

BookBrowse Review

BookBrowse

Doty's earnest sincerity and relentless probing at his subject matter will not be to everyone's taste. Inevitably compared to Marley & Me, Dog Years has more in common with The Year of Magical Thinking. Doty offers more than just a simple celebration of the relationship between a man and his dogs, or even between man and dog, delving into the universal themes of life and death, grief and happiness. His style is more philosophical than it is sentimental, merging memoir, poetry and prose into his eulogy for his two dogs...continued

Full Review Members Only (396 words)

(Reviewed by BookBrowse Review Team).

Media Reviews

Entertainment Weekly
No human has ever loved his animals as Mark Doty has…Doty possesses a particular brilliance...[A] stirring chronicle of love.

Houston Chronicle
A wounding yet arresting memoir about living with his dogs…Doty’s gorgeous prose and piercing meditations...are simply sublime.

Los Angeles Times - Susan Salter
This is Doty at his best, crossing lines between dream and reality, poetry and nonfiction, life and death, human and dog.

Minneapolis Star Tribune
This is Doty at his best....Doty does in fact make the unsayable sayable, bringing the ungraspable within our reach.

Kirkus Reviews
While Doty is clearly fond of animals, his boundless affection is tempered by graceful observations. His warm commemoration of the lives of Beau and Arden makes a fitting companion to his previous chronicles, in prose and poetry, of Wally's illness and death. A profound reflection on hope, and a song of praise for the dead.

Library Journal
Its tone is plangent, its complex formal structure is like memory itself, and its exquisite pace reminds one of nothing so much as a stroll in the park with Fido. Poignant, intelligent, and quite simply superb; highly recommended.

Publishers Weekly
Starred review. Evocative, compassionate, a love story both intimate and grand, this is a beautiful book.

Booklist - Carol Haggas
Sprinkled among poignant and merry anecdotes about typical and peculiar doggie behavior are Doty's tender yet cogent reflections on the underlying truths such conduct reveals about the canine species, observations that transcendently celebrate the essential connection between man and pet.

Reader Reviews

hi

Iz awesome man!!!!
Yeah, it was, like, good. I, like, liked it. It was, like, cool. I just, like, wanna know, like, what age is it supposed to, like, be for?

Write your own review!

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $60 for 12 months or $20 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Beyond the Book



Mark Doty's seven books of poetry and three books of nonfiction prose have been honored with distinctions including the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Martha Albrand Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and, in the United Kingdom, the T. S. Eliot Prize.

He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public ...

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $60 for 12 months or $20 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Read-Alikes

Read-Alikes Full readalike results are for members only

If you liked Dog Years, try these:

  • Mornings Without Mii jacket

    Mornings Without Mii

    by Mayumi Inaba

    Published 2025

    About this book

    A beloved Japanese modern classic: a meditation on solitude, independence, writing, and life alongside a cat.

  • H Is for Hawk jacket

    H Is for Hawk

    by Helen Macdonald

    Published 2016

    About this book

    More by this author

    Winner of the 2015 BookBrowse Nonfiction Award

    Obsession, madness, memory, myth, and history combine to achieve a distinctive blend of nature writing and memoir from an outstanding literary innovator.

We have 8 read-alikes for Dog Years, but non-members are limited to two results. To see the complete list of this book's read-alikes, you need to be a member.
More books by Mark Doty
Search read-alikes
How we choose read-alikes
Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $60 for 12 months or $20 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

BookBrowse Book Club

  • Book Jacket
    The Ghostwriter
    by Julie Clark
    From the instant New York Times bestselling author of The Last Flight and The Lies I Tell comes a dazzling new thriller.
  • Book Jacket
    The Busybody Book Club
    by Freya Sampson
    They can't even agree on what to read, so how are they going to solve a murder?
  • Book Jacket
    The Lamplighter's Bookshop
    by Sophie Austin
    The Lost Bookshop meets The Lost Apothecary in a beguiling novel full of secrets…

Members Recommend

  • Book Jacket

    Making Friends Can Be Murder
    by Kathleen West

    Thirty-year-old Sarah Jones is drawn into a neighborhood murder mystery after befriending a deceptive con artist.

  • Book Jacket

    Ordinary Love
    by Marie Rutkoski

    A riveting story of class, ambition, and bisexuality—one woman risks everything for a second chance at first love.

Who Said...

Silent gratitude isn't much use to anyone

Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!

Wordplay

Solve this clue:

B a L

and be entered to win..