HT reviewer Syed Saad Ahmed picks his favourite read of 2023

Have you heard the story about crabs in a bucket? When one tries to escape, others claw it down, giving rise to the term “crab mentality”. I find the tale, often proffered with trite self-help nuggets, grating. Not only do we ascribe imagined motivations to crabs, we place them in a situation they would have never encountered without human intervention and then make generalizations about their “mentality”.

Beyond this, we tend to cherry-pick certain animal behaviours and generalise them to life as a whole, regardless of the context in which those behaviours evolved. And thus, what animals do is conveniently used to justify any belief one espouses: humans are “innately” selfish; monogamy is “unnatural”; and might is “evolutionarily” right, among others.

Amid these tired comparisons and metaphors, Sabrina Imbler’s book How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures hit me like a wave with its incisive, delightful insights. In 10 separate essays, Imbler profiles “the ocean’s strangest creatures” and seamlessly weaves them with personal stories: growing up as a queer, mixed-race person in the US, finding community in the grimmest of places, navigating sex and relationships, surviving, and thriving.

In the essay, How to Draw a Sperm Whale, the author presents their observations as a series of clinical reports — Necropsy Report: A Relationship alternating with Marine Mammal Stranding Report. The former catalogues a romantic relationship, its unspooling and its aftermath, while the latter dives into how whales nourish life for decades after their death, among other facts about cetaceans. Both narratives unfold parallelly, inform each other, and, to quote the blurb, “illuminate wondrous models of survival, adaptation, identity, sex, and care on our planet”.

The interplay with biology pervades the writing style too, yielding scintillating locutions such as “When you kissed M for the first time, you felt friable, like the contents of your cells had broken free of their membranes and were misting out of you”.

Thus, marine biology and memoir meld together in intriguing ways to expand the horizons of life and highlight radical, compassionate ways of living in a difficult, often hostile world. The result is unlike anything I have read. For once, I found myself echoing the lavish adjectives studding a book’s jacket: “miraculous”, “transcendental”, “wildly tender”, “generational talent”, and “bright, shimmering gift of a book”.

READ MORE: HT reviewers pick their best reads of 2023

Syed Saad Ahmed is a writer and communications professional.