What an Animal! Reading Challenge
By Debra Durham • Jun 28th, 2008 • Category: Non-fictionThanks to Sarah at Puss Reboots who pointed me to a new reading challenge that is perfect for me and ReadingAnimals: What an Animal! hosted by Kristi of Passion for the page.
Here are the general guidelines:
1. Read at least 6 books that have any of these requirements:
a. an animal in the title of the book
b. an animal on the cover of the book
c. an animal that plays a major role in the book
d. a main character that is or turns into an animal (define that however you’d like ;>)).2. The animal can be any type of animal (real or fictitious)–dog, cat, monkey, wolf, snake, insect, hedgehog, aardvark…dragons, mermaids, centaurs, fairies, vampires…you get the idea…
3. Challenge runs from July 1, 2008 to June 30, 2009. You can still sign up after July 1st as long as you can get 6 books read by June 30th ;>).
4. Books can be fiction or nonfiction.
As I’ve mentioned before, reading is part of my work and my non-fiction reading is less of a cover-to-cover all at once phenom. The challenge for me, then, is not so much to read books about animals, as to read them in a more conventional way and post more conventional reviews.
What an Animal! book list
- Monkeyluv by Sapolsky
- The parrot who owns me by Bburger
- The animal that I therefore am by Derrida
- Watching Wildlife by Chris, and
- Baboon Metaphysics by Cheney and Seyfarth
Check out this good looking line up, eh?
I’m so glad you’re joining the challenge! You have some intriguing books on your list (the parrot one especially speaks to me for some reason. I’m not sure why, I don’t own a parrot, although I may someday — my mother has an African Gray ;>)). Anyway, I’m looking forward to reading your thoughts on these books. My training is in biochem and genetics and, as well as the Animal Challenge, I have a personal, on-going, non-fiction science challenge that I’m working on. So I’m always looking for well-written, engaging science books to read ;>). I hope you enjoy the challenge!
Kristis last blog post..What an Animal Reading Challenge
@Kristi -My thanks to you for putting together such a great challenge! I’m always on the look out for science reads, too.
Off the top of my head, I can think of several books that frame the kinship between humans and other primates in terms of genetic similarity to greater and lesser degrees - for example “What it means to be 98% chimpanzee in the case of the former and Next of Kin in the case of the latter.
Thanks again! The entire challenge is relevant ot the theme of hte blog so I expect I’ll be writing and linking often.