An Immense World, by Ed Yong

Ed Yong’s book An Immense World is a great example of the kind of non-fiction audiobook that I listen to with great interest even though I only understand and retain a small fraction of it. It’s about the sensory lives of animals — how dogs understand the world through smell, what it really means to be blind as a bat, and things far more arcane than that. The writing is lively and engaging, and listening to the book was a great way of exposing myself to a vast world of knowledge that I was almost completely ignorant of. I definitely couldn’t pass a test on the contents of a book just from one casual listen-through, but I was left with a reminder that the world and the other creatures we share it with are far more rich, strange, and varied than my human understanding reveals to me.