or: Should I buy or should I wait? A book decision

It’s nearly the end of April and I am yet to buy a new book.

One of my New Year’s Resolutions was to not buy any books since I have a To Be Read Pile that should see me through the year and I thought it would be a good idea to put a dent into it rather than seemingly buying one new book for every one I read. I’m not sure if that is my actual statistic… I suspect that it’s closer to two for one since my TBR never seems to shrink.

I also set a number of caveats of the kinds of books I am allowed to buy.

One of these was for work-related books.

This is a very generous category for me since, as I acknowledged at the time, I am quite clever at being able to make all sorts of books fit into this category whether they are fish related right through to social media and how to improve our web presence.

Here I sit now, playing with this category.

While I read all sorts of books, I’m quite active on the internet too reading articles that relate to diving through to the social media ones – this could be another reason why my TBR pile doesn’t shrink much.

I came across a very interesting article which quoted a number of experts.

One of those experts was Marah J. Hardt. She is a coral reef ecologist and a research co-director for a non-profit called The Future of Fish. She was quoting from her studies she did for her book Sex in the Sea: Our Intimate Connection with Sex-Changing Fish, Romantic Lobsters, Kinky Squid, and Other Salty Erotica of the Deep.

There was “book” and the title of it in the same sentence and what she had said was interesting so I did what I would normally do and went to the smile.amazon.com site (if you type “smile” first, a portion of any money you spend on Amazon is donated to a charity of your choice. Mine is the Project Aware Foundation as that is PADI’s environmental charity and is run independently of PADI – the dive organisation that I am affiliated with), read about it and then downloaded a sample chapter.

I’ve read the chapter.

And yes, now I want to buy the book.

I thought I’d want to buy it before even reading the sample so that only served to confirm my desire to purchase it.

I guess this is why they provide sample chapters.

Sneaky…. clever…

Anyway, I’ve been able to justify buying it as it covers the sex lives of ocean creatures. I spend a lot of my time in the ocean (when it’s not a lockdown), and observe quite a few creatures courting and/or reproducing. I like to share my observations with those I dive with and any other useful / interesting piece of information that goes with it.

It really is fascinating – some animals can change sex in one direction but not the other, some can do this multiple times and others are stuck with what they’re born with and there are some that will never have sex even though they are of reproduction age. They’re just not good enough to mate with or there are enough other mates around that it doesn’t fully develop to be able to reproduce.

Interesting isn’t it?

So this book falls into this category to me. I figure I can learn some new interesting bits and pieces.

She’s written it in quite a conversational style which is unusual for a scientific book and she’s linked how climate change, over-fishing and pollution is also impacting their behaviours. This is interesting too because it’s not done in a negative way ie sand temperature influences the sex of the turtles that hatch and then what this means for the turtle population in the short to longer-term.

When I chat about this with others however, I have the impression they think I’m drawing a long bow and breaking my self-imposed no book buying for the year.

I throw it out to you all now, what do you think?

 

Thanks to Brandy (featuring Ne-yo) for the title to this post.