An Immense World

An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us by Ed Yong, 464 pages.

I think this is one of my new favorite books. Yong guides the reader through the mechanics and corner cases of various senses (and not just the five that humans usually talk about), but that really undersells what this book is. I had initially picked up this book with the intention of getting some insider knowledge for a game where I was playing a character who can turn into animals, but what I got instead was a total paradigm shift. Yong does an unbelievable job adding magic to the world we live in, and I often had to put down the book to really sit with the implications of something I just read (the chapter on vision in particular had a lot of these moments). 

I've been recommending this book to pretty much everyone, even before I finished it, and I'm going to keep doing that here. Read this book to learn more about nature, or people, or just to add some wonder into your life. Yong is funny, thoughtful, empathetic, and does an excellent job writing for science in a way that laypeople can understand. This book was never a drag.

Fair warning: if you're anything like me and read this with anyone else in the room, you WILL have to stop every five minutes to share fun facts.