The 6th Floor Blog: How to Read Like a Monkey Man

Jon Mooallem is a contributing writer for the magazine. His last article was about an escaped macaque in Tampa Bay, who has since been caught.

Book I'm reading now:

"The Silent History," by Eli Horowitz, Russell Quinn, Matthew Derby and Kevin Moffett. It's a fictional oral history of a creepy epidemic of speechlessness: in the near future, children are born and grow up without any instinct for language. Doctors are stumped and unsettled. Parents are in agony. The cool, buzz-generating thing about "The Silent History" is that it's being published as a digital serial. The "book" is really an app: every day, I get another contribution to the oral history on my iPhone. Each entry advances the story just a little bit further. This will go on for a couple of months, I think, but you can start reading anytime, or wait and read lots of entries at once. You can also access bonus entries by standing with your phone in certain geographical locations. The technological dimension of the project is cool, and the execution is fantastic. But I'm hooked on the story itself.

Last book I loved:

"City," by Clifford D. Simak. I don't know much about science-fiction, but think this 1952 novel is considered a classic. A friend sent it to me last year, promising it would blow my mind. He told me something like: "It's a book about a civilization of talking dogs that inherits the Earth." So, of course, I never read it. Then, a couple of months ago, I did. It blew my mind! Yes, it's ridiculous and pretty poorly written. But the story unfolds over many millennia, and to be forced to think about society and evolution on such a long timescale is disorienting and thrilling; honestly, it changed the way I look at the world, even if I'm embarrassed to admit it. I can't even begin to describe the plot, but basically: humans teach dogs to talk. They also build robots which, after the humans depart for another planet, are employed by the dogs to do things dogs can't otherwise do. (The dogs are intelligent, but are limited by their lack of opposable thumbs.) Ultimately it's the ants who develop the superior technologies, though. I never saw the ants coming!

Unread book on my nightstand that gnaws at my conscience:

"Mockingjay," by Suzanne Collins. The third Hunger Games book. I read the first Hunger Games book right after I read "City," the book about talking dogs. Something had come over me; I was starting to picture myself as being a completely different, more eclectic kind of reader than I'd ever been before: no boundaries, no snootiness, no making syllabi for myself in my head. I loved the first Hunger Games book. And it felt good to love it. But somewhere toward the end of the second book, all the dystopian bloodsport started to fall away for me, and it became clear that I was actually just reading a young-adult novel about a moody teenage gal in a love triangle. I tried to read the third book, but couldn't. So the third book gnaws on my conscience because I'm a completist by nature — a finisher of trilogies. But it also gnaws on my conscience because it makes me feel ashamed, retroactively, about how much time I spent on the first two books. Who was I back then, tearing through the Hunger Games? Was I actually happy? Was I more free — like, as a human being? I don't know. But I'm not sure I'll ever be that guy again.

Three books in my field that I recommend:

For the last two years, I've been writing a book about people and wildlife in America called "Wild Ones," so I'll recommend some books on that front:

"Flight Maps," by Jennifer Price, is a collection of hard-to-sum-up, mesmerizing essays. She's trying to reinvent nature writing for our post-nature world. A key fact from this book: the "ratio of plastic to real flamingos in the United States is 700 to 1."

"The Big Oyster," by Mark Kurlansky, is a short, brilliant book about the decline of oysters in New York City's waterways and, more broadly, about how the city increasingly fouled up, and became cut off from, the natural world surrounding it.

"A Whale Hunt," by one of my favorite writers, Robert Sullivan, tells the story of a Native American tribe in Washington state relearning to hunt whales. It's one of the books that made me want to do journalism. I love Sullivan's sincerity, his curiosity, his eye for off-beat, humanizing details. And I love the tangents he's willing to go on, like the one about how, in 1843, Herman Melville took a job at a Honolulu bowling alley, setting up pins: "The job was somewhat controversial given that American missionaries considered bowling somewhat indecent at the time."

One book I would recommend to anyone:

"The Men Who Stare at Goats," by Jon Ronson. Fun, stunning and all true. I still can't believe it's all true.

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