Book Review: Scytodes thoracica & 99 Other Animals by Jelle Reumer

 

 

Note: The title of this book has been translated into English by me for the reading comprehension of this blog's viewers as the book itself isn't available in English (yet). The original title reads De getijgerde lijmspuiter & 99 andere beesten.

A cheap book I bought because it seemed interesting to me. Let's check it out!

In this book, Reumer gives us a look at a hundred unique animals and writes a little piece about each of them, usually two pages long. These sections give us some basic information about each animal, as well as how they're relevant in the news, or some funny things about them.

Just a neat book if you're in for a quick read and want to learn more about animals. It's not super in-depth and thorough but each section on each animal tells us enough for the bare bones basics. This is also not supposed to be an in-depth book, simply a quick look at some relevant species (this book is actually a compilation of short pieces the author wrote weekly for a Dutch newspaper in the past year, so most pieces were relevant a while ago). And at what it does, it's quite good. The pieces usually aren't just straightforward basic information about the species, but Reumer also often has some kind of point to make or just wants to point out something unique about the animals. 

The book also isn't devoid of humor, or covering extinct animals. There's one piece dedicated to the now-extinct quagga and one to the Mosasaurus, and even funnier there's a piece dedicated to the Pokémon Squirtle from when Pokémon Go was all the rage. But even the other animal pieces could be funny at times. I kind of wish that, since the author wasn't opposed to covering extinct animals, there'd be more of that because it could be a unique way to show off some lesser-known extinct species, however this book is still 99% modern-day animals and while there's nothing wrong with that, I kind of was left wishing for more after the quagga and Mosasaurus sections.

I also appreciate that this book was clearly split up into sections (or chapters?) where they talk about a certain type of animal based on how many legs it has. So we have sections dedicated to animals with no legs (snakes, worms), two legs (mostly birds), four legs (mostly mammals), six legs (mostly insects), eight legs (arachnids), many legs (millipedes) and fins for legs (sea creatures). I was glad everything was clearly structured here, because I've read a few books similar to this (covering many different animal species briefly) where there's no consistency of how the animals are listed at all, whether it be by leg count or alphabetic or type of animal or whatnot. That always just feels too random for me, so I like this execution better.

Overall this was a fun and quick read. I don't read the newspaper, so I don't read Reumer's pieces there, but reading them this way as a compilation is fun anyways.

Rating: 3.5/5