The Language of Butterflies

Picked this one up at the library browsing my favorite section: such a pretty cover and intriguing subtitle. It has lot of really interesting facts about butterflies. I learned all about detailed butterfly fossils and how rare they are, about Darwin’s early observations on insect evolution, and how a butterfly actually uses its proboscis (more like a sponge than a straw), about an early woman scientist who was the first to specifically study butterfly life cycles and connect caterpillars with their adult forms, that butterflies retain knowledge the caterpillar obtained through experience (nobody knows how), more about monarch migrations and physiology, and so on. But the delivery kind of failed me. It’s told in a very friendly style, easy to read, unfortunately I kept mentally stumbling over the odd inclusions of pop culture reference- made to help the common reader relate? or to be funny? I’m not sure, but it always annoys me when these feel out of place or forced. Which they did here. It got in the way of me feeling really immersed in the book, or simply carried away by fascination with what I was learning. I often found myself setting the book aside, not really inclined to pick it back up for a while. It got better when I started just skipping over all the asides, and skimming the personal bits. Usually I like it when science writers tell about their personal experiences travelling to collect data and interview people, but in this case those parts did nothing for me.