4-minute read

2024 was a year in which I managed to read and review 38 books. What follows is my personal top 5 of the most impactful, most beautiful, and most thought-provoking books I read this year.

1. Jay Matternes: Paleoartist and Wildlife Painter

I instantly fell in love with Jay Matternes’s palaeoart when I encountered it in Visions of Lost Worlds. Science historian Richard Milner spent eight years on this fully authorised career retrospective by Abbeville Press, and it is full of mesmerising palaeo- and wildlife art by an underrecognized master of the genre. Read more…

2. Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life

I read this book as part of a still-ongoing review series. Author Jason Roberts writes an epic history of taxonomy across three centuries that charts the lives, works, and legacy of Linnaeus and Buffon. Published by Riverrun, it quickly became a personal favourite for introducing me to a new intellectual hero. Read more…

3. Eat, Poop, Die: How Animals Make Our World

What a killer title. I was stoked the moment Profile Books announced this one. Fun, fascinating, and always with one eye firmly on the facts, conservation biologist and marine ecologist Joe Roman shows how animals shape ecosystems through their everyday activities. Read more…

4. Playing Possum: How Animals Understand Death

Princeton University Press published this translation from the Spanish original by philosopher Susana Monsó where she provides an exceedingly interesting take on how animals understand death. Playing Possum manages to be both accessible to a general audience and relevant to specialists by showing why comparative thanatology still has a whole lot of growing up to do. Read more…

5. Why Animals Talk: The New Science of Animal Communication

Zoologist Arik Kershenbaum joins Viking Books to deliver Why Animals Talk: a highly stimulating and thought-provoking exercise in decentering the human experience and trying to understand animals on their terms. Read more…

In the category “also-ran”, honorary mention goes to Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will and Alfie & Me: What Owls Know, What Humans Believe. I would have loved to include these deeply impressive books as well, except that they were technically published in 2023. If you are looking for more recommendations, do check out my earlier top 5s or browse the archive which lists all reviews.

Finally, some announcements. First, I realise the total number of books read this year is the lowest it has ever been. It is not that I am losing interest, but simply that the same processes of intensification I mentioned last year are still in effect. I am spending more time with each book, taking more notes, doing more background research, drawing on more accumulated knowledge, and writing longer reviews. Second, I intend to continue doing more two- and three-parters and go back to relevant earlier books when touching on certain topics. I hope readers are enjoying the digressions into yesteryear’s books. Once I am finally in control of my to-be-read pile, I hope to feature the occasional classic from decades ago that I keep coming across and have since acquired. Third, you might have noticed that I have abandoned certain social media platforms: their business tactics and management were becoming insufferable. I am really enjoying the crowd on Mastodon, so find me there or sign up here to get email notifications of every new review. I have also opened a Ko-fi account and would like to once again thank the readers who made some very generous donations there: you know who you are. Lastly, I would love to have your feedback! This blog has been running for over seven years now and I am only a few posts away from review #500. I am doing a fair amount of maintenance on older reviews, cleaning up broken links and streamlining the layout I have settled on. I have toyed with ideas such as audio versions of reviews, author interviews, or a newsletter. What would you like to see more or less of?