The Animal Dialogues; Uncommon Encounters in the Wild by Craig Childs

I’ve been reading this book slowly, as if I were on a desert island and it was my last chocolate bar.

In The Animal Dialogues: Uncommon Encounters in the Wild Childs brings a series of essays about meeting animals in their natural setting, without romanticism or condescension, and there’s no anthropomorphizing, either. The animals he discusses are entirely themselves, and they belong to no one. His writing is vivid, clear, and engaging, filled with metaphor that makes the narrative sing. The stories themselves are in each case interesting, and emotionally engaging. The story Dog left me angry with Childs for a few days. The story Raven will challenge every preconception you have about birds, animals in general, and the questionable uniqueness of humans and a sense of the sacred.

Delving into this book is more than just reading, it’s opening your life to the natural world around us, the one we (supposedly) came from in the first place.