The Fly Trap

Suddenly it seems I'm on a roll (or a jag) of reading (or wanting to read) books by men about their uncommon professions (airline pilot Mark Vanhoenacker's Skyfaring, neurosurgeon Henry Marsh's Do No Harm, James Rebanks's The Shepherd's Life). On the face of it, The Fly Trap, by a Swedish entomologist, is one of those books too, but it's not like the others. You won't learn much, at least in a systematic way, about the 202 species of hoverfly he's identified, but you will learn, fascinatingly, about the nature of solitude, patience, and obsession. As he says, it's not easy to explain why he does what he does: "enjoyment is so awkward."