favorite books i read in 2024: an immense world
(I usually end up short-changing good books toward the end of my list so this year I’m going to split things up into separate reviews instead.) Ed Yong’s An Immense World turned up on everyone’s lists of favorites the year it came out, and deservedly so. Late to the party, I listened to the audiobook which Ed Yong himself read brilliantly. Not to be a shallow bitch but the narrator of an audiobook makes a huge difference. A bad narrator leaves you struggling to parse whatever sense the author was trying to make, whereas the author reading his own work competently draws you by gentle degrees all the way into his own sphere of perception.
Check out that segue! Because this book is about animals’ spheres of perception – their umwelt – and how their various sensory capabilities, so different from ours, mean that they live in overlapping but fundamentally nonidentical universes from us and from one another. This is, in fact, a book about empathy. However well the narrator reads, we can’t experience life from the point of view of another being, but in spite of the impossibility of doing so, it’s incredibly important to try.
I did think about my political opponents, listening to this book before the election. I tried to imagine the world from their point of view, and how their choices – ruinous from where I’m standing – might make sense to them. It was hard and probably futile but it was one small thing that helped me to clamber out of the impact crater in the awful days immediately after.
