Join OTown Reads, Our Community Book Club!
We invite you to join us for our fourth OTown Reads book club selection: An Immense World, by Ed Yong. Described by the New York Times as, “thrilling” and by Oprah Daily as “One of this year’s [2022] finest works of narrative nonfiction,” An Immense World takes us inside the lives of land and aquatic life to discover never before imagined sensory abilities. We can’t wait to dive into this New York Times bestseller, our first nonfiction book selection for OTown Reads.
Unlike other book clubs, OTown Reads invites you to follow our prompts virtually, through Instagram, Facebook, and email - and then gather in-store on October 19 (7 to 9 PM) to discuss the book, meet your fellow OTown Reads participants, and celebrate the experience of reading it together . . . virtually. Please sign up for that gathering here.
An Immense World will be available at HV Books for Humanity beginning August 29, when it comes out in paperback. Sign up for OTown Reads in the store and get your copy of the book for 10% off the cover price. There’s no fee to participate in the book club, but please let us know you’re participating by sending an email here.
Looking forward to reading with you this Fall.
About An Immense World
From the Penguin Random House website:
”The Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. But every kind of animal, including humans, is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving but a tiny sliver of our immense world.
In An Immense World, Ed Yong coaxes us beyond the confines of our own senses, allowing us to perceive the skeins of scent, waves of electromagnetism, and pulses of pressure that surround us. We encounter beetles that are drawn to fires, turtles that can track the Earth’s magnetic fields, fish that fill rivers with electrical messages, and even humans who wield sonar like bats. We discover that a crocodile’s scaly face is as sensitive as a lover’s fingertips, that the eyes of a giant squid evolved to see sparkling whales, that plants thrum with the inaudible songs of courting bugs, and that even simple scallops have complex vision. We learn what bees see in flowers, what songbirds hear in their tunes, and what dogs smell on the street. We listen to stories of pivotal discoveries in the field, while looking ahead at the many mysteries that remain unsolved.
Funny, rigorous, and suffused with the joy of discovery, An Immense World takes us on what Marcel Proust called “the only true voyage . . . not to visit strange lands, but to possess other eyes.”
WINNER OF THE ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL • FINALIST FOR THE KIRKUS PRIZE • FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD • LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/E.O. WILSON AWARD
About Ed Yong
Ed Yong is a Pulitzer Prize–winning science writer on the staff of The Atlantic, where he also won the George Polk Award for science reporting, among other honors. His first book, I Contain Multitudes, was a New York Times bestseller and won numerous awards. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, National Geographic, Wired, The New York Times, Scientific American, and more. He lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife, Liz Neeley, and their corgi, Typo.