It's Monday, What Are You Reading?

It’s Monday! What Are You Reading, is where we gather to share what we have read this past week and what we plan to read this week. It is a great way to network with other bloggers, see some wonderful blogs, and put new titles on your reading list.


It's been quite the busy week between work, school, and work #2, so my pages read this week has been pretty low.

I just finished Sara Gruen's Water for Elephants, which is a work of historical fiction that deals with a circus in the 1930s. The main characters all dealt directly with the animals, so I suppose that makes it relevant to post about here. There has been a lot of controversy (especially in recent years) regarding Circuses and their treatment of animals. Whatever your stance on the issue, the book was pretty good and gave an interesting look at Circus life and culture during the Great Depression.

I also went through a few more books by Robert E. Wells, What's Older Than a Giant Tortoise?, Did a Dinosaur Drink This Water?, and What's Faster Than a Speeding Cheetah?. Like some of the other books of his that I've looked it, each of these had a concept- Age, Water, and Speed- and they explained that concept to a young age level.

I have a few things on the plate for next week, including finishing up Feathered Dinosaurs: The Origin of Birds, and taking a crack at The Audubon Reader.

It's Monday, What Are You Reading?

It’s Monday! What Are You Reading, is where we gather to share what we have read this past week and what we plan to read this week. It is a great way to network with other bloggers, see some wonderful blogs, and put new titles on your reading list.


I read Last Chance to Seeby Douglas Adams last week, and I absolutely tore through that thing. That's probably the fastest I've read in a long while. Last Chance to See was a project put together by Adams and zoologist Mark Carwardine, they go around the world looking for rare animals, and the project was finally assembled as a book and BBC radio show. It is a really funny, entertaining, and informative, and I'll be getting the review for that up soon. I also need to hunt down the updated documentary version with Carwardine and Stephen Fry. Just watch this video!



This week I'm not sure what type of animal joy I'll look at. I just got a Nook this past weekend so now I have even more options!

While I sort out what longer text I want to look at, I got a handful of Robert E. Wells books in, as well as Dinothesaurus: Prehistoric Poems and Paintings, which looks adorable.

It's Monday, What Are You Reading?

It’s Monday! What Are You Reading, is where we gather to share what we have read this past week and what we plan to read this week. It is a great way to network with other bloggers, see some wonderful blogs, and put new titles on your reading list.


Well I finally finished Witness to Extinction, and I'll have a review up for that sometime this week. I haven't started anything else yet, it was quite the busy weekend... but I have a few options.

• The Lost World of the Moa: Prehistoric Life of New Zealand
• Last Chance to See
• Alex & Me: How a Scientist and a Parrot Discovered a Hidden World of Animal Intelligence--and Formed a Deep Bond in the Process

Haven't decided what I want to read first... Hmm, probably Lost World, since it is an interlibrary loan with a limited check out time. 

It's Monday, What Are You Reading?

It’s Monday! What Are You Reading, is where we gather to share what we have read this past week and what we plan to read this week. It is a great way to network with other bloggers, see some wonderful blogs, and put new titles on your reading list.

Regrettably I wasn't able to finish Witness to Extinction  this week as planned. Grad classes starting again killed a bunch of my free time. Hopefully that should be completed this week, along with a review. It's great so far, but really sad and makes you think a lot about the way different countries view wildlife conservation, and just how incredibly difficult the process can be from multiple angles.

I ordered a few more library books, most notably Feathered Dinosaurs: The Origin of Birds by John Long and Peter Schouten. I've browsed around a bit and so far I'm really liking it. The illustrations are absolutely fantastic! As a child of the Jurassic Park era, I grew up with a pretty specific concept of what dinosaurs looked like. Science has progressed so much that we now know that many species actually had feathers at some point in their life, and seeing those findings matched with beautifully interpreted visuals is quite stunning.

I also wrote up reviews for What's Smaller Than A Pygmy Shrew? and Is a Blue Whale the Biggest Thing There Is? More books by Wells are incoming.

It's Monday, What Are You Reading?

It’s Monday! What Are You Reading, is where we gather to share what we have read this past week and what we plan to read this week. It is a great way to network with other bloggers, see some wonderful blogs, and put new titles on your reading list.


I finished up The Search for the Giant Squid last week, as evidence by my review post. And since then I've picked up Witness to Extinction by Samuel Turvey. It's a book about the Baiji, or Yangtze River Dolphin, which was driven to functional extinction in the last century. Turvey was actually the lead author of the report that declared that probable extinction back in 2006.


I'm only about 30 pages in to the book, but so far its been a really fascinating read. It's hard to use positive adjectives to describe a situation that is so sad, but the book is interesting and well written, and tells the tale of an amazing animal with a tragic history.

On a happier, lighter note, I'm also looking at Is a Blue Whale the Biggest Thing There Is? and What's Smaller Than a Pygmy Shrew?, both by Robert E. Wells. I technically read them last week, since they are children's books that take about ten minutes to go through. However, I haven't written up reviews for them yet, so that's one of my plans for the week. I also need to get my darn bibliography page restructured, but that's a whole other issue entirely. Baby steps... baby steps.

It's Monday, What Are You Reading?

It’s Monday! What Are You Reading, is where we gather to share what we have read this past week and what we plan to read this week. It is a great way to network with other bloggers, see some wonderful blogs, and put new titles on your reading list.

I'm going to be overhauling the Bibliography section of the site soon, and putting a little more emphasis on all the materials I've been reading. So as a kickoff to all of that I'm going to try out one of these community blog type things.

This week I'm finishing up The Search for the Giant Squid: The Biology and Mythology of the World's Most Elusive Sea Creature by Richard Ellis. I don't want to get a full review up, since I haven't finished it yet, but so far it's been a really enjoyable book. It covers how the giant squid has affected Mythology and Cryptozoology, its long, shadowy history in the Biological Sciences, and our perception of the animal within our culture in movies and television. I gotta say, its really make me want to go back and watch The Beast. What a fun movie.

I've also ordered a whole mess of animal-related children's books through my library account, so I'm looking forward to having some fun with those.