Good Books?

Hi. I'm wondering how many of you can remember your favorite horse books you read when growing up? I loved horses from the first I can remember and I loved reading. The first horse book I remember reading was Little Black by Walter Farley. I loved all of the books by C. W. Anderson. The illustrations in those books were incredible. I loved Come On Seabiscuit, Man O'War and as an adult I have enjoyed books on Secretariat and Ruffian's - Burning From the Start. While I a read a lot of other types of books now, I still love a good horse story. Has anyone read anything lately that they want to recommend? It occurs to me that a forum full of horse loving people might be a good place to get a recommendation for a good book. It can be fiction, non-fiction, educational or just fun.
Comments
The horse book I read last year was 'Sham, When Great Was Second Best' and it was a very good book, too. I do recommend it.
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My favorite/first was more a story than a book......about Black Gold....I was just sobbing as I finished it...never forgotten....sixty + yr later
Oh, YEAH! I loved the Walter Farley books, my favorites being Black Minx, and the two about harness racing. I recently went on a quest to attain all those great old books I had as a kid, just a couple short now!
Also loved Misty of Chincoteague, and several whose authors and titles I can't recall, since they were library books, but I can just see the illos!
Great thread.
I also have a video (there's no DVD of it that I know of) called The Jewels of the Triple Crown which has the stories of all 11 TC winners, actual footage, and narrated by the late Jim McKay.
I agree with Delamont about Walter Farley's two books about harness racing being favorites. I still keep an early print edition that I have of the Blood Bay Colt.
I think what I like about the Marguerite Henry books is that most of them tell stories about horses that were real. Maybe all of them do? Mustang, Wild Spirit of the West is a great story about Wild Horse Annie's crusade to stop the slaughter of our wild mustangs. When my daughter was doing a history day project I had her read this book and she ended up basing her project on Annie Bronn aka Wild Horse Annie. You can find newsprint articles about her if you search the internet.
I think the favorite authors that we all keep naming truly must have loved horses to have written the stories that they wrote. I hope that someday we can read books like these about some of our favorite well known horses such as Zenyatta, Smarty Jones, Totillas, Big Ben and Gem Twist to name a few.
I am getting some great suggestions for new books to read as well. Thanks!
I can reccomend the following:
My Racing Heart
Secretariat, the making of a champiom
Native Dancer - the grey Ghost
Funny Cide
SeaBiscuit - An American Legend
Let me tell you a story about me that involves this book.
I was in grade school and we were going on a field trip to the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. (kids were taken on long field trips back in the days when I was young). Anyway, we were told to take a bag lunch and I also took the book 'Misty'. When we arrived, I shoved my half-read book into the bag, and the Museum personnel told the class to put all their bags in a certain place in the cafeteria, where they would keep an eye on them while the class went through the museum.
At lunch time, my class arrived back at the cafeteria only to find out that ALL of our lunches had been stolen!!! (this was shocking to me, since I had never been a victim of an actual 'crime' before! LOL!) The museum 'gave' our class hot lunch, but I didn't care about the food... my BOOK WAS GONE!!! And because my family was rather short of cash, I never asked my mom to buy me a replacement 'Misty' book, so I never did get to finish that story, and to this day I remember that book because it was snatched, half-read, away from me. *sobs*
Isn't it funny what sticks in our minds forty years later? I'd bet anything that thief just tossed poor Misty into the nearest trash can.
I should also mention M. Henry's Justin Morgan Had A Horse. And I'm enjoying all the book recommendations.