The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating Kindle Edition

Great book, wonderful approach to writing by the author. Very intriguing insights into the world of snails and mollusks! Well done, especially given the illness the author endured through while writing this book. Thank you Elizabeth Tova Bailey!

In summary, The Sounds of a Wild Snail Eating by Elisabeth Tova Bailey is a memoir about the author, being bedridden and accompanied by a wild snail. What kept her in strive was her curiosity and interest in the snail she kept in a terrarium. I must say this is not a memoir for everyone, unless you're a snail enthusiast. The chapters are filled with captivating moments of her snail grazing on portobellos, producing slime, estivating during the summer months, laying eggs, and more. There's ample information on mollusks in general. Although not apparent, the chapters provide unique perspectives and golden nuggets (or writings) about life and purpose. One of my favorites is "Survival often depends on a specific focus: a relationship, a belief, or a hope balanced on the edge of possibility. Or something more ephemeral: the way the sun passes through the hard, seemingly impenetrable glass of a window and warms the blanket, or how the wind, invisible but for its wake, is so loud one can hear it through the insulated walls of a house." The isolation and dependence between Bailey and her snail created a society of their own. After reading, it is certainly wild (pun intended) to reflect on the underappreciated things in life and how they contribute to our living. Overall, I enjoyed reading Bailey's intimate connection with her snail. Bailey does a great job in comparing her conditions and struggles to her snail. Information about mollusks was excessive but I think it shows Bailey's passion and love for nature and her companion.

A feast for the spirit.

The Sound of a Wild Snail EatingThis little book of 184 pages I digested at one sitting. I couldn't put it down. From the opening quote of Florence Nightingale that "A small pet is often an excellent companion" to the farewell cameo from "Snails and Their Houses", 1888 about love-making among snails (sorry, but you will have to read the book yourself to find what was said there) the narrative held me spellbound. I thought I knew a good deal about snails, but this little book opened my eyes to a whole new world of discovery about terrestrial snail behaviour.This is a true story. The author, Elisabeth Tova Bailey, was confined to bed with a debilitating and fluctuating chronic illness that she has fought for over two decades. During one year of this time she became intrigued with the behaviour of a snail that had taken up residence in a small potted plant that a friend had brought her as a present and which was placed next to her bed. Her fascination in the snail's midnight wanderings and reactions to small morsels of different foods introduced into its environment makes for fascinating reading. We are taken on a journey of discovery that includes observations of a hole that appeared overnight in an envelope she had propped against the base of a lamp. How could a hole - a square hole - appear in an envelope over-night? Then she thought about the nocturnal activ-ity of her snail and reasoned that it must have some kind of teeth, "and it wasn't shy about using them". Intrigued to learn more, she offered the snail some real food, some withered blossoms, and stayed awake over several evenings making observations with her torch. In this way she introduces the reader to what we as malacologists know as the radulae. But she goes further with her observations, further than most of us have gone. She listened carefully and could hear it eating! "The tiny, intimate sound of the snail's eating gave me a distinct feeling of compan-ionship and shared space.....The snail and I were both living in altered landscapes not of our choosing; I figured that we shared a sense of loss and displace-ment....After weeks of round-the-clock companion-ship, there was no doubt about the relationship: the snail and I were officially cohabiting...Whereas the energy of my human visitors wore me out, the snail inspired me". Wanting the snail to have a safer and more natural home she later moved it from the flow-erpot into a fresh terrarium where it thrived on por-tobello mushrooms and hatched its offspring. And so we learn about snail courtship and spiral mating, its sophisticated method of scent tracking, "the mac-romolecular architecture of molluscan mucus", tele-scopic tentacles, snail shell spiral assymetry, and more. Eventually, all the snails were returned to their native habitat. Elisabeth Bailey made her snail obser-vations for over a year but continued her research for several more years as is evidenced by the valuable list of Selected Sources (books and articles for fur-ther reading) provided at the end of the book.I would venture to say that few of us have heard the sound of a wild snail eating. Now you can. The author has a web site (...) where she has posted a 4 min 30sec YouTube video that al-lows you to view and listen to the sound of a snail eating !I recommend you buy two copies of this little book; one to read yourself and one to pass on to someone who does not even LIKE snails. You will both find you want to learn more about these fasci-nating creatures