The Guinea Pig Lover's Bookshelf

We have so many guinea pig books we could open our own library, except that we really hate it when people bend the corners of the pages in our books (or any books, really).

We get asked a lot for book recommendations, by new and experienced owners alike, because there's a big array of care guides out there. When you're surfing Amazon or walking through a store, it's hard to quickly sort through the book choices and figure out which ones are worth the money, which ones are inadequate, and which ones are really similar to books that proceeded them in the marketplace.

So we've been reading them. We don't recommend a care guide that we haven't read every word of. If we find a lot of individual points that are wrong, that commit sins of omission and/or sloppy incompleteness, or that perpetuate the myths that guinea pig rescues everywhere are trying to kill, we don't recommend a book. If there's at least one chapter that we want to rip out in its entirety, we don't recommend a book. If a book is too short and/or rudimentary to even be called an intro guide or quick start guide, we don't recommend it.

Fortunately, on the literary side, we find a lot less to take issue with. Thanks to the kids, parents, and teachers in our circle of adopters, we're also acquiring quite the little library of storybooks and chapter readers. While children's books are so much fun to read that it's worth doing your own legwork, we're offering a starter list of good reads here.