Category Archives: Books & Reading

“‘Tis a fearful thing, to love what death can touch” (Rabbi Chaim Stern, attributed).

I needed a good short read this summer. Sy Montgomery’s How to be a Good Creature — weighing in at just over 200 pages (roughly 3 hours in audio) — fit the bill. I had flagged it for my To Be Read list years ago, when the title and cover first struck me. The faint nod to Mary Oliver’s famous poem, “Wild Geese” likely helped How to be a Good Creature stick in my mind.

Montgomery titles each of her book’s chapters after an animal – or two, or three – who made a significant impact on her life as a writer, as a naturalist, and as a human being. I especially enjoyed her focus on the uncommon, harder-to-love animals: the bird-eating spider, the tarantula, the octopus. I myself am committed to the lifelong learning experience of being my own good creature, which has manifested as of late in the hair-raising rescue of insects who have found their ways into my spaces through no fault of their own.

At the heart of Montgomery’s book are the border collies with whom she has shared her life: Tess, Sally, and Thurber. Each border collie appeared exactly when they were needed — an experience I share with many of the dogs who have accompanied my own life. Beside them, a pig named Christopher Hogwood. Rescued as a tiny piglet, Chris grew into a 700lb gentle giant.

As I write this, processing the book in its entire, I realize that what irritated me the most about How to be a Good Creature was that far too often the book swung between sneak-preview and overt advertisement for Montgomery’s other adult nonfiction books: The Soul of an Octopus (2015) and The Good Good Pig: The Extraordinary Life of Christopher Hogwood (2006). I got what I could ask for from a short, quick read, but if I had to pick up another one of her books for my introduction to Montgomery, I think I would have picked one of these two instead.

Montgomery loves her animals, despite most of them being long gone from this earth. That’s fine — in fact, that’s great, because (to quote an excellent movie) “Death cannot stop true love.” We humans are so much longer-lived than the animals who join us on our journeys; to be an animal lover is to put a layaway on grief. However, the significant amount of woo-woo (an informal term for what I felt was a mystical and anthropomorphic perspective taken too far) and Montgomery’s wild mood-swings (which would have been better balanced if the book had been single-minded and significantly longer) detracted from my overall enjoyment of an otherwise poignant book.

While I do not believe that Montgomery lived up to her thesis, I did find value in my read. In one of her shortest chapters, “The Christmas Weasel,” Montgomery recounts the story of the time an ermine (a sleek weasel-like animal), who killed one of her beloved hens at Christmastime. What it sorely lacks in stature and size, the ermine makes up for in ferocity and confidence. When Montgomery takes the body of her hen, the little weasel charges at her, enraged at the loss of a good and necessary meal. There’s a wealth of commentary here: the blameless act of an animal doing what an animal must do, humanity’s constant and futile battle to remain separate from nature, and the inseparable nature of life and death.

Sy Montgomery narrates the audiobook, and in my research of her biography, I learned that she was a radio commentator. Her narration is crisp and even, (mostly) properly emotive, and overall well-done. Her performance played out at just the right tempo for an afternoon of sewing.

Sy Montgomery, and Rebecca Green. How to Be a Good Creature : A Memoir in Thirteen Animals. Boston, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018.

Shakespeare has a robot now. She’s yellow, humanoid and kind of sassy as she introduces each scene in this revamped Romeo and Juliet.

Did I mention she actually walks around the page and talks to Shakespeare on occasion? I wish I could say you will open Living Popup’s magical book and she just appears like a Star Wars-esque hologram on the page, but we’re just not there yet. This book is Augmented Reality (AR) Enabled, which means you download an app on your phone, point your camera at illustrations in the book, and the scene unfolds on your screen.

I had so much fun with this book at the ALA conference that I got a little giddy and bought it on the spot. I’m a big kid now, but Living Popups actually made me like Shakespeare. If I had had this version as a teenager, my eyes wouldn’t have glazed over while being forced to analyze every turn of phrase back in the day. But fear not! The original Shakespearean text remains untouched, just formatted more like a modern movie script than the version with tiny font that was inflicted upon me. I’m replacing my obligatory Shakespeare collection with the AR version immediately.

The AR illustrations appear at the start of every act and scene. We all know the themes, character development, and lessons learned from Shakespeare are timeless. The robot is another fun way to bridge the gap from the old, unfamiliar language to the new world. Unlike my Shakespeare professor in college who seemed determined to make me memorize passages, the AR robot jumps in to explain the setting, little parts of history, and important plot points in a way that actually makes sense. And doesn’t make me want to take a nap.

It was also fun to see a robot have a conversation with Shakespeare to ask him what in the world he was thinking, writing a play about two dying teenagers. I paraphrase, but you get the idea. Robot gets real. If you want to make Shakespeare interesting, but still stay true to the original text, the robot can help. It’s better than sitting down and watching the Leo DiCaprio movie again. Though that is an undeniable classic. I own the soundtrack. It couldn’t hurt to do both? I digress.

Living Popups makes a little quartet of robot-ified Shakespeare books, some Boxcar Children books, Animal Farm, Legend of Sleepy Hollow, and a growing collection of books for Elementary to Middle school students. The AR scenes are actually good, with voice acting and everything.

Give Living Popups a try if you want to see the future of books.