The secret world of slugs and snails

The Secret World of Slugs and Snails: Life in the Very Slow Lane by David George Gordon
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Now I know...

--what a wild snail eating sounds like: "... a cross between a bastard file and a chainsaw - like something out of Evil Dead II."

-- Some snails have elaborate mating rituals that involve kissing.

-- Speculation about Cupid's arrows in Greek mythology being inspired by the "love darts" that snails shoot into each other if they go the male/female route instead of using their hermaphroditic prowess.

-- that Darwin observed another scientist's experiment in which a sickly snail and its healthy partner were placed in an ill-provided garden. The healthy snail crawled away, over a wall, into a better garden. 24 hours later, it "returned and apparently communicated the result of its successful exploration, for both then started along the same track and disappeared over the wall."

-- That David George Gordon is one of the best nature writers ever.

Did you read The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating? Read this next. Really.




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A Jane Austen Education

A Jane Austen Education: How Six Novels Taught Me About Love, Friendship, and the Things That Really Matter by William Deresiewicz
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Take one intellectual graduate student, force him to read  Emma, add one professor whose technique is styled as "stripping the paint off our brains," and mix in some Austen plot synopses. What do you get? In this case, you get a quasi-memoir-cum-appreciation of Jane Austen's major novels that (I believe) would make Austen wince and Oprah applaud.

Bleah.


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