36 books like Pagoo

Octopuses are amazing creatures: eight legs, 3 hearts, and thousands of chromatophores in their skin that enable them to change color and patterns in a fraction of a second. But intelligence?

Years ago, when on a film assignment at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute on Barro Colorado Island, Panama, I met a renowned scientist of animal behavior, the late Dr. Martin Moynihan, who said that cephalopods, the group of ocean animals that includes octopuses and squid, have a complex communication system.

He compared their repertoire of signals to a language with grammar and syntax. I filed that information away in my brain until I discovered Sy Montgomery’s book. During her research, Montgomery actually interacted with several octopuses. They got to know each other, with the animal showing as much curiosity as the author. This is a new view of octopuses for me.

If you have a teenager wanting to be a marine biologist, this is the book to read! It is a coming-of-age book but also one of great charm and devotion to marine life. The tale and the writing are irresistible. It is so rare for an author to personalize marine biology, especially for teenagers.

This book does a remarkable thing. I loved it because it was a great story about teenagers who somehow managed to connect their love for the shoreline, and it even managed to give us a lot of great biology. Children often want to be marine biologists but their love is usually not very well connected to the real worlds of the ocean.

This book is a really great Natural History book. It puts teenagers in the mud, collecting clams, and doing things marine biologists do. Yet it has a heart—a really great book.

If you ever wondered what would happen if a great writer and a hard-drinking, great marine biologist got together for some zoologizing, exploring, and idle conversation, this is a great pair of books to find out.

Yes, Ed Ricketts is the same author of Between Pacific Tides, the greatest guide to seashore life ever written. He also invented Ricketts’ Folly, a rather nasty alcoholic drink, which was brought to life in his writing of The Log. “It was said that the commanding officer of the unit, and he a major at that, after two drinks of it, had marched smartly and with no hint of stagger right into a wall and that he made a short heroic speech as he slithered into the ground.” The book revolves around two guys lying in a small boat, talking about the ocean. 

I was particularly attracted to this book because it was one of the first works to provide a timely reminder of the fragility and centrality of the ocean and the life that abounds within it.

This enduring work, published over six decades ago, makes an important case for the primacy of the ocean. I was first exposed to this book at a relatively young age, and its profound influence shaped my future endeavors in ocean science.

This book is another classic of marine biology. It focuses on the shore as a place of wonder, excitement, and beauty.

It describes the behaviors and habitats of the animals in the rocky shores and tide pools of the Pacific Coast of the US. The animals are discussed in relation to their habitat, be it rocky shore, sandy beach, wharf piling, or mud flat.

The detailed and fascinating lives of these creatures are described in relation to their physiology, life history, interrelationships in their community, and the influences of waves and shifting tides.

Once again, there's a poetic quality in this discussion of the shore and the life within it.

The author talks about the lives of the creatures that live in the empty shells we find and the kinds of creatures found on rocky shores, sandy beaches, and coral reefs. Along the Maine coast are the surf zone and tide pools, where barnacles, limpets, and periwinkles live along rocky shores. On sandy beaches, we explore the holes and tracks of crabs and the burrows of clams and whelks that come out at low tide.

She discusses geologic history in the reefs off the Carolina coast and the sponges, starfish, barnacles, and shipworm tunnels in driftwood. In the Keys is the coral coast—with a vast variety of life. In this area are also mangrove swamps, making "the edge of the sea" a fascinating place. 

This lyrical nonfiction picture book takes readers on a mesmerizing, sometimes dramatic, and almost deceptively informative exploration of a tide pool’s inner workings at the ocean’s edge.

Fleming’s virtuosic text (complete with significant backmatter) is gorgeously enhanced by Hevron’s layered artwork, and while the book works perfectly as intended for very young children, it’s also a special treat for more skilled readers to read and revisit.

This is a tiny little book and nowhere near as famous as her Silent Spring, but it doesn't need long to work its magic.

The Sense of Wonder helps you lay aside the habit you've developed of ignoring things you think you know, the familiar. To head into the woods with a child and hold back from telling them what things are and instead to see things with them and through those eyes.

I've done this with my daughters and have seen worlds I would have missed with them. As Carson writes: “Exploring nature with your child is largely a matter of becoming receptive to what lies all around you."

This simple story offers an intimate view into the life of a hermit crab who has outgrown his shell. He travels along the shore, by the sea in the sand…scritch-scratch, scritch-scratch looking, looking. The lyric repetition I strive for in my own writing helps build tension. The hermit crab needs a place to hide from the prickle pine fish.

I can feel that sandy beach in the illustrations and I have walked there where Hermit Crab encounters a rock, a rusty tin can, driftwood, and an old bucket. None of these make a house for Hermit Crab. I can relate to the satisfaction of a journey’s end. In a new home that is not too heavy or too noisy, not too dark, not too crowded. A safe new home that fits just right. Something we all look for.

Yes, it’s the old chestnut, and forgive me, but we must read to write, we must wade into other worlds to understand what is at stake, and what is possible, when we begin to shape our story for the page. Noble’s anthology begins with a quote-worthy meditation on the lyric essay and its manifold forms. It carries readers forward with a range of essays and commentary by writers both well-known (Dinty W. Moore, Diane Seuss, and Lidia Yuknavitch) and up-and-coming. The flash, the braid, the collage, the mosaic, the hermit crab—all the forms are here, waiting to be admired and adapted.