An Immense World - Ed Yong

⭐7.5/10

This is a nonfiction book where the author helps us understand the world around us through how animals interact with it. I love this idea, and the idea that animals experience reality in ways we can't understand. For instance, he talks about birds that can see colours we can't, or how spiders sense the world through vibrations, or how our primary way of understanding the world is through vision, but animals such as dogs experience the world primarily through smelling. It's a lot of big ideas, all made accessible and enjoyable. 

I loved this book to start. I love the idea of realities being present that we have no concept of. I also just love the idea of humble animals having capabilities far above ours. It was cool and novel and I was totally into it. However, I'll fully admit I only got around 2/3 of the way through before it started to fizzle out. I didn't really care about the way that the mantis shrimp understood the world, or couldn't really glean any takeaways that were interesting to me. Every chapter had some cool concepts, but there was too much other stuff that i had a tough time getting through. 

The author is wonderful and explores some very interesting questions. For instance, how do animals experience fear and pain, and does that change the ethical questions around our treatment of them? I feel like there were cool points like that every chapter, though now upon writing this I'm having a tough time coming up with a second example.... Still, the writing is very engaging for a book of this type, and I found most of it quite readable. 

But this book is also pretty long and ebbs and flows. Its interesting if you're into this kind of thing, and I am, but this is a lot either way. My fried attention span just doesn't have the capacity for interesting, well-written books anymore I'm afraid. But I still wanted to write this review and shout it out because I do think it's very good and I enjoyed a lot of it.