The Soul of an Octopus

I like to use audiobooks to catch up with books that everyone else has been reading, and lately I've been catching up with The Soul of an Octopus, a surprise hit from last year (and National Book Award finalist). What comes across especially well in the audio (available from our partners at Libro.fm), which is read with a gee-whiz wonder by Montgomery herself, is the warmth of her story. There is plenty of science, but the real drama comes from the emotional connection of intelligence and curiosity reaching (in both directions) across the species barrier. One sign of the strangeness and awe that encounter inspires is the way Montgomery is torn at every turn between humanizing these creatures and acknowledging how deeply, weirdly different their fluid and formidable intelligence is.