2026 Reading Log pt 8.
036. Chasing North American Monsters by Jason Offutt. The worst book I have finished so far this year. This book covers monster legends throughout North America, covering every country, every province of Canada and every state of both Mexico and the USA. I appreciate the thoroughness, and I appreciate the coverage of some fairly obscure monsters. I do not appreciate the actual writing. Every single geographic division is introduced with a paragraph of basic geography facts, ended with “and then of course, there’s [Monster X].” Every. Single. One. The discussions of the monsters themselves are facile and sensationalistic, basically summaries of the first couple Google results for each creature and leaning heavily into tropes around “Native American curses” and other racist projections by modern white people instead of actual ethnography. And all the illustrations are done with AI! Honestly, considering how samey those intros are, they could have been written by AI too. I only cared enough to finish it because it was the book by my nightstand for when I wanted to read a little before I went to bed but didn’t have the attention span for something actually thoughtful or good. Not recommended.
036a. The Genius Bat: The Secret Life of the Only Flying Mammal by Yossi Yovel. This book I did not finish, because it was even more racist than Chasing North American Monsters. The author, an Israeli professor, refers to Israel as “the gateway to Europe” in the first page, which gave me weird vibes (I guess the rest of the Arabian Peninsula doesn’t count? And Asia doesn’t exist?). The book talks about research into bat behavior, ecology and neurology, alternating between the author’s research and those of other scientists, but it becomes very quickly clear that Yovel doesn’t view the people native to the places where these bats live to be actual people. He’s incredibly condescending towards the local guides and assistants helping with his research in the Caribbean Mexico, and when he makes a joke about a scientist in Cameroon learning that the people living there “only recently abandoned cannibalism. Maybe.” I put the book down in disgust. There are better books about bats, there are better books about modern synthesis of molecular and field biology, and I didn’t want to waste my time reading something by someone actively hateful.
037. Slither by Stephen S. Hall. This is an example of a book synthesizing molecular and field biology, written by someone who actually cares about human beings. The topic is snakes, and each chapter covers some broad swath of their biology from the perspective of historical and modern research. Several of the chapters are about scientists trying to apply snake biology to human medicine, such as understanding snake venoms (and the possibility, still out of reach, of developing broad spectrum antivenoms) and understanding how snakes use gene expression to precisely control their metabolisms, to the extent of shrinking and growing whole organs rapidly. Each chapter also has a “snake road” sub-chapter, discussing snakes in human culture, how Christianity demonized the snake and why many other cultures did not. And! I’ve actually met one of the scientists profiled. There’s a chapter about the research on snake sexual selection and genital shape done by Patricia Brennan, who I met when I was in grad school.
038. The Dog Encyclopedia, 2nd Edition, consultant editor Kim Dennis-Bryan. This book took over the “read before bed” niche after CNAM, and I liked it a lot more. This is a DK book, so that means lots of little info-boxes and excellent photographs. After a short chapter about dog anatomy and their cultural impact (spoilers: it’s huge), the bulk of the book is taken up with a survey of hundreds of dog breeds, many of which I hadn’t heard of. The breeds are sorted by rough category, like working dogs, companion dogs, gundogs and terriers, and the text talks about how those categories blur together, considering all the crossbreeding going on. The book is responsible enough to talk about how purebred dogs often have health issues and about breeds that have been designed in an attempt to mitigate them, and then the breeds chapters end with “Random Breeds: these dogs may lack a pedigree but they can provide love, companionship and fun” along with several pages of pictures. The final chapter is a short overview of what to consider when buying and owning a dog, which is thoughtful for those who might want to use this book as a one-stop-shop for dog advice. I was mostly using it for cute pictures of dogs, and it delivered on that.
039. Poisonous Plants and Fatal Fungi by Sandra Kynes. Those who have followed these book reviews for a long time might know, I have something of an obsession with poisonous plants. So it’s nice to find a book about them that has lots of information I didn’t know! I was a little apprehensive about the introduction, which is very brief and summarizes history in a way that I found, well, bad. But the species overviews that make up the bulk of the book are very good. There’s more of a focus on culture than biology, discussing the etymology of names, the uses these plants had for both medical and murderous aims, magical practices and folklore. Some of the plants covered were a blind spot for me, not covered in previous books: plants like corn cockle and darnel, which are pests of grain that contaminate flour when mixed in to the harvest by mistake. Ergot takes over the discussion of grain contamination in most modern coverage, which I think is a shame.
040. Dungeon Denizens II, lead designers Chris Doyle and Michael Curtis. I got this book through a Kickstarter—tons of new monsters intended for the Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG. I got the 5e edition, partially because if and when I convert some of these monsters for @thecreaturecodex, the ability scores are the same and helpful for my calibration. The gimmick of this book is that it’s aimed at low level play, which is convenient for DCC, where power levels are typically lower than modern D&D, and convenient for D&D, where most games peter out before level 15+. The bulk of the monsters are CR 6 and below, with only a handful of critters above that, and most of those are variants covered in a sidebar. I had quite a bit of fun with this book, and think it’s overall stronger than the first Dungeon Denizens. There’s a big strain of Weird Fiction running through DCC, and many of the monsters incorporate science fiction and/or body horror elements. Some highlights in my eyes include the BIAB—a brain in a beaker, which has a tentacled robot body with customizable limbs; the reshaper, which is a termite queen-like colonial insect that turns humanoids into its workers; the gronkbird, which seems to be an adaptation of the Greek legend of the war between the cranes and the pygmies (in this case, halflings); and Gygaxian gotcha monsters that are so absurd, disguising themselves as things like soup or wigs, that they become a parody of the trope.
