Peña-Guzmán’s survey of dream research makes a strong case for the fact that some animals do dream, though as a philosopher, not a biologist, he ultimately poses more questions than he answers. How many animals dream, and which? His book doesn’t attempt to draw lines between species that dream and those that may not. (Elephants and chickens, sure, but what about bees? Sea sponges?) Instead, the book enters the far more slippery terrain of trying to build a unique case for animal consciousness. A mind that dreams is, Peña-Guzmán argues, necessarily a conscious mind.
An appropriate response to biosphere collapse is screaming, and Ned Beauman’s Venomous Lumpsucker is screamingly, bleakly funny. Beauman has a superlative knack for quotable, witty, and wince-inducing lines, stuffing every page with the kind of exhilarating humor borne of both despair and empathy. A thriller motivated by deep-sea mining destruction and mass extinction, a gut-punching satire of the failure of the carbon offset project: unfortunately, it’s the beach read we deserve. Fortunately, it’s a savagely entertaining one.
Landscapes invite contemplation. Natural or built, eerie or spectacular, they’re spaces to project ourselves into. What if I lived there in the woods? What kind of person would I be if I lived by that seaside? What if I leaped off this cliff?
Elvia Wilk’s “Death by Landscape” inspires the same kind of rangy feelings. This book of essays — divided into four sections: “Plants,” “Planets,” “Bleed” and an epilogue — takes its title from a Margaret Atwood short story. The premise: Two teenagers go for a hike. One steps off the path and disappears forever. The other is left obsessed with landscapes. She sees her lost friend in them, only in the form of a tree.
“A Factotum in the Book Trade” is memorable because a) it’s well-written, and b) it’s close in touch with the books. Kociejowski, now in his early 70s, never owned his own shop. He struggled financially while raising a family on an employee’s earnings. He simply loved the work because, he writes, “the book trade is a floating world for people of intelligence unsuited for anything else.”
A bonus is that he’s funny. When he told a young woman, a former bookseller, that he was working on this memoir, she said to him: “Go on, young people love reading about old white men selling books.” That kind of comment, over there, is what’s known as taking the piss.
Who gets to tell their stories, and who is supposed to read them? In her new essay collection, “How to Read Now,” Elaine Castillo dismantles the notion that art should be separate from the artist, because our understanding of where a story comes from, and who is telling it, matters.