When I’m an old bitch I’m totally going to have a reading club. Wait, it’s called a Book Club isn’t it? Whatevs. I’m gonna have one. And not Oprah’s top 10 shit either but like COOL shit, that’s themed. One such theme I have thought of is that everyone has to designate a book to read with their first name in the title. How great would that be? You’d totally get a random selection. And we’d have cheese and wine and weed and sit around my baller treehouse in Hawaii and discuss them while we get fucked up. Man, retirement is gonna RULE.
Anyway the point is as I’ve been on planes a heap of late I’ve been reading a bunch of shit. Mostly mags but some books and I thought I’d tell y’all about it because the world needs to read more damnit!
Alex & Me

This is what got me thinking about the name themes for my future book club. I will nominate this book (happy to read it again, probs will have forgotten what it was about in 30 years anyway). I think I may have mentioned Alex the parrot before on this blog but this is an amazing book by his teacher and researcher Dr Irene Pepperberg about her relationship with him, and all the things that came from her studies with him. Alex stands for Avian Language Experiment and the study was all about how animals can learn to communicate and learn new cognitive processes. Alex is basically the awesomest bird ever before his untimely death at 31 (they usually live into their 50s). He could add up sums, identify objects verbally and talk to his trainers. He was also hella cute and would say he was sorry if he dropped things and his last words were “Be good, I love you, I’ll see you tomorrow” to Irene. It’s a super interesting book and really easy and fun to read too. I also enjoyed the parts where she talks about the every day hassles of just trying to securing funding and getting shoved into tiny offices and labs. It’s kinda a relief to see the hassles that someone else has gone through to work on something so amazing. Very interesting to see that many of the language traits we think are so exclusive to humans are really not. We’re all just animals. Alex broke down heaps of boundaries. I actually cried on the plane when it talks of his death. Totally recommend this book to any animal lover or person interested in language.
5 Stars!
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