A review by blackrabbitrun
The Book of Eels: Our Enduring Fascination with the Most Mysterious Creature in the Natural World by Patrik Svensson

informative reflective slow-paced

3.0

It's a fine enough read, but I have no idea why it became such a spectacle (two years after publication and the library queue was six months!). The book is roughly half about eels and the history of Europeans trying to figure out eels, mostly fruitlessly, and half about this guy's relationship with his father. The eel parts are fascinating and the family relationship parts sympathetic, but where the two intersect (increasingly towards the end when he's trying to pull it into a grand thesis) it slightly turns into white man navelgazing. 

Also Sigmund Freud was an incel but that isn't news.
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