This book is 210 years old, beloved of many, assigned reading for some. There's really not much I can say about this book that hasn't been said before, so instead, let's consider -- did my corgi Emma's previous family name her after book Emma?

There's strong similarities between the two of them. They are both beautiful and loved by their families, but some might find them annoying. They both have very strong opinions about rules and manners. And they both care a lot about balls (dog Emma doesn't realize this is also a kind of dance).

Dog Emma isn't much of a matchmaker. She'd actually prefer that my spouse and I didn't kiss, but then again, book Emma didn't approve of certain matches, either. The question is, which of us does dog Emma think is below the other's station? Probably best not to ask.

In conclusion, I'd like to share two quotes that definitely feel like they could be about or spoken by dog Emma:

"The real evils, indeed, of Emma's situation were the power of having rather too much her own way, and a disposition to think a little too well of herself."

and,

"Oh! I always deserve the best treatment, because I never put up with any other."

You get weird reactions when you tell people you’re reading a book about eels. “…eels?” they’ll say, as if they can’t quite fathom that 1. there are books about eels and 2. there are people, who are not ichthyologists, who want to read about eels.

I suspect that the publisher of Slippery Beast by Ellen Ruppel Shell was also worried that there might not be a lot of people who want to read about eels, because the cover boldly states it’s “a true crime natural history.” People may not want to read about eels, but they sure want to read about true crime!

Let me make one thing abundantly clear: this is not the next The Orchid Thief or The Feather Thief. The true crime portion of this book is so scant that I can’t even tell you the exact details of the crime, because I was thinking a little hard about the craft I was doing while listening to that part of the book, I missed some of it, and they never truly came back to it. There was some sort of raid? On poachers? I think. The problem with audio is I can’t just flip back and refresh my memory.

Throughout the book, people the author spoke to would occasionally make references to poaching, or possible organized crime, or at least violent conflicts between fishers, and it never really comes together as a throughline.

So please go into this book expecting a natural history. You will not be disappointed from that angle! This book really goes into what we do and do not know about eels, specifically freshwater eels, the kind commonly served as unagi.

The thing about freshwater eels is that they actually spawn out in the ocean and then the young swim to freshwater to mature. How wild is that? Even more wild, we still don’t know exactly where they spawn, or how they figure out how to get to and from their spawning grounds.

The other thing about freshwater eels is that wild-caught eel tastes like mud and has a high potential to be contaminated with pollutants, so people catch the baby eels (called elvers) and raise them in captivity, fattening them up on delicious food that in turn makes them delicious to humans. So the book is largely about the attempts to try to figure out how/where eels breed, and whether we can breed them in captivity, and whether it’s really sustainable to eat freshwater eel.

Much like Under the Henfluence has made it difficult for me to eat eggs and chicken, it’s going to be hard for me to eat unagi now.

One reason why I wanted to read Slippery Beast is that I am actually afraid of eels. I have been ever since I was a child, when we went to SeaWorld and they had a brand new moray eel exhibit. The morays sticking out of the rocks, just hanging out there with their mouths agape and their alien eyes made a deep impression on me. The fact that eels also look and move kind of like snakes, which I am afraid of, did not help.

Are these eels the reason why I’ve long had disturbing dreams about dark aquariums full of unseen things that I am instinctively afraid of? I’m sure Freud would have something to say about it. True fact: before Freud become the father of psychoanalysis, he spent some time trying to find eel gonads. No wonder he left biology, it sounded like unpleasant work.

But I digress. I love insects and spiders, and I hate it when people respond “kill it with fire!” to a bug that scares them. I want to show snakes and eels the same respect I would like people to show insects, so earlier this year I read a book about snakes, and now I’ve read a book about eels. I have a great respect for these creatures and the role they play in the ecosystem, even if I still have a gut-deep fear of them.

I think the world would be a better place if we could all show a little more grace towards that which we unreasonably fear.

PS: There should be an eel emoji.

Looking for queer icons in history can be complicated. A lot of the labels we use and ideas we have about gender and sexuality are pretty modern. Gay and trans people have been around for a long time, but they didn't necessarily call themselves that, and absent labels, it can be hard to tell if, for example, someone was a trans woman or a cis man who enjoyed drag.

So, is Universal Friend (sometimes also called Public Universal Friend) a queer icon? After recovering from an illness, Friend claimed to have died and been reborn as a holy messenger, neither male nor female. That's pretty queer, but there's little else in Friend's life that maps onto the modern queer experience, except for a true love of found family.

Friend's story is interesting, and whether or not you consider Friend a queer icon, this book is one lens at how people thought about gender in the early USA. Some people continued to see Friend as a woman, some saw Friend as trying to take on a masculine role, and Friend's nearest and dearest appear to have taken the minister's word about a lack of gender altogether.

Do be aware that there will be frequent use of Friend's birth name and gender throughout the book. It is clear that friend eschewed the use of that name and gender in life; it's not clear how Friend felt about others misgendering and using a literal dead name. I do wish Friend had left record of these thoughts as I think it would be of real value for modern readers to know how a non-binary person navigated that and thought of it in a time when it was so far from the norm.

This book does spend a lot of time on pretty tedious land rights issues and not enough time on some big drama in Friend's religious community, but over all I found it pretty engaging.