Octopus!
The Most Mysterious Creature in the Sea
by Katherine Harmon Courage
Current, Penguin Group, 2013
[Substitution: Challenge # 31: Nonfiction of any kind]
I was having a lot of trouble finishing Undead Worlds, the collection of zombie short stories I intended as Challenge # 8, because it was only on my iPad and my boyfriend kept borrowing it to watch Amazon Prime. So I chose another challenge at random which came up as # 31: Nonfiction of any kind. I decided to sub this book which I had acquired, as I had The Other Boleyn Girl, from a local Little Free Library.
Not a bad book, I definitely learned a lot about octopuses (not octopi) in it, but ultimately it was a little too colloquial for my taste. I did like that alongside the natural history, there was also a culinary history. I’d say it was a good introduction for the layman but I would have liked something more along the lines of She Has Her Mother’s Laugh, by Carl Zimmer (not part of this challenge) the excellent history of genetics I read a few months ago. I felt a wider scientific background was missing. Though the latest (2012) research was included for Octopus! I would have liked to see more evolutionary history. (Incidentally, although I like the taste of octopus, a few years ago I vowed never to eat them again after reading of how sensitive and intelligent they were.)
Thus concludes the 2018 Reading Challenge.
