The Book of Eels

Recently, I’ve read a couple of references to electric eels, and that got me wondering,

How do they work? And that led me to stumble into a lovely little volume called The Book of Eels.

It’s by Patrick Svensson, translated from the Swedish by Agnes Bruma. And it’s a fascinating

Mix of natural history and metaphysics and metaphor. And it has all these surprising

Anecdotes about eels. Like, for example, did you know that when he was 17 years old,

Sigmund Freud, as a young medical student, was sent to Italy to dissect 400 eels to try to figure

Out their reproductive systems? I mean, it’s just kind of amazing stuff. And there are other

Are historical figures in there like Rachel Carson and Aristotle. And even the author of

The Book of Eels describes it as a very strange and nerdy book. But even so, it won Sweden’s most

Prestigious literary prize. So I’m glad I read it, but I was about three quarters of the way through

The book when I was wondering, when is he going to talk about electric eels? And it turns out that

Electric eels are an entirely different animal. They don’t have anything to do with the eel.

Oh.

Electrophorus electricus is not an eel, but a knife fish.

Oh, okay.

A little lesson in how one word might not mean what you think it means, but it was a cool book to read in any case.

Yeah, misnomer. It’s common names versus Latin names. It’s a thing.

What are you reading? What have you learned? Share it with us, 877-929-9673.