I found Why Fish Don’t Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life by accident. Someone had shared a screen capture of a Tumblr post which talked about how trees aren’t a thing, taxonomically speaking. How weird. And then I saw that fish are also not a thing. Mindblowing. Somewhere in my searches to prove to my girlfriend that I was not making this up (although she can be forgiven, because that is very much the sort of thing I’d make up), I found Lulu Miller’s 2020 book.

I checked it out from the library as an audiobook so that Miranda and I could listen to it together. We were prepared to learn all about how fish are a lie. But we did not learn that.

Well, we learned it eventually. But only in the last chapter does Miller actually touch on the subject. The rest of the book is a mix of her life and the life of David Starr Jordan. Jordan was a famous researcher in his day, credited with discovering a fifth of the fish species we know today. He was president of Indiana University and later was the founding president of Stanford University. Oh yeah, he was also a eugenicist and may have been involved in murder.

Miller does an excellent job of tying the ups and downs in her life to Jordan’s. He serves as both inspiration and…whatever the opposite of inspiration is. The book is a fascinating and engaging tale. Had I not been waiting to learn about the fish, I would have loved it. Instead, I found it frustrating. I might read it again, knowing what to expect—and what not to expect.

How did your street get its name? When did we start numbering buildings? What does it mean to have an address—or to not have one? If any of these questions are interesting to you, you’ll appreciate The Address Book: What Street Addresses Reveal About Identity, Race, Wealth, and Power by Deirdre Mask.

I first heard about this book on the podcast “Every Little Thing“. Mask was a guest on a recent episode and shared the story of a project to name roads in rural West Virginia. This story was relevant to a memory I had long forgotten. Although I grew up on a named road, we didn’t have a numbered address until 911 service came to the area when I was in early elementary school. Prior to that, addresses were just box numbers on rural routes.

But newly-named and newly-numbered roads are not unique to the US. Mask explores how roads were named and renamed in different places over the centuries. Naming, of course, is an expression of power so names and numbers reflect the power at the time. Even today, there are millions of people who don’t have addresses, which increasingly cuts them off from what we understand as modern society.

I’d love a book of trivia about road names. The Address Book is not that. But it’s a fascinating look at the deeper meaning behind the act of naming.

Jim Grey is a pretty ordinary guy. So why bother reading stories of his life? Because he tells them so well.

I first came to know of Jim through his roads website. At some point, I started reading his blog “Down the Road“. I can’t recall how long it’s been now, but it’s probably the better part of a decade, if not from the beginning in 2007. Although we’ve never met, I’ve come to feel like I know him. Not just because we share similar interests and have mutual friends, but because the way he is able to write his personal stories in a way that welcome strangers in.

Jim does not share every detail; his writing respects the privacy of those in his life. Nonetheless, he is able to warmly and openly share his stories in a way that invites to sit down and listen. There is no false modesty, no exaggeration, and no self-importance. Just honest tales of his life shared because he wants to share them.

Down the Road started in 2007 as a way to process and recover from a rough time in his life. Jim’s new (okay, six months old at this point) book A Place to Start collects some of the posts from the first two years of the blog.

The book is split into three parts: stories, essays, and faith. The stories are personal tales from all eras of Jim’s life. Told in no discernible order, they’re more like a conversation than a timeline. The short essays section contains reflections on lessons Jim has learned over the years. The faith section contains a mix of his personal experiences with his Christian faith along with what I would call sermons.

Admittedly, the faith section was the least engaging part for me. Being religiously indifferent myself, I suppose I’m not inclined toward that kind of story. Nonetheless, I do enjoy the way he is able to discuss his faith in a way that does not feel like evangelism. He shares his beliefs and how they color his life; the reader is free to do with that what they will.

Since each chapter is a blog post, they’re all short. This makes A Place to Start a great book for when you can only read in quick bursts. Even if you’ve never heard of Jim Grey before, this book with worth a read.

A Place to Start is available in print and digital forms from Midnight Star Press. I received no compensation for this review.