Well, it took me several months to plow through it, but I finally finished Susan Orlean’s essay collection, On Animals.

All fifteen essays, all 235 pages. Several months…

I think you can see where this review is going….

The essays – all on animals in case that was unclear – are a collection (assuming “the best”) written over the past twenty years, most originating in “The New Yorker.” It’s not laid out chronologically, so an essay from 2020 can be followed by one written a decade earlier. Many short story collections are chronological, so one can see the writer mature/themes change as the author ages.

While I’m sure Orlean has picked up a trick or two over the years, her writing is almost always brilliant – it’s just that sometimes the essays missed the mark for me. Oft times it was just the overreaching that turned me off. Editors!

The introduction (written in 2021) really sucked me in, and it was followed by great first essay – from 2009 – about chickens. Delightful.

But I really got bogged down in a essay about tigers (too disjointed), and essays about show dogs and rabbits were just *shrug* – whatever. And while I learned a thing or two about oxen from “Carbonara and Primavera,” the abrupt ending still baffles me. Read the last line on the page, turned to continue the essay and: nada. The story was over.

She seems to genuinely love animals – her last essay, updated for this collection – is an overview of her (now sold) upstate New York menagerie, giving her time to muse on hens, turkeys, Angus beef and cats (adopted strays included). Much to love.

My favorites are the previously mentioned essay on chickens (“The It Bird”) and tale of donkeys in Morocco (“Where Donkey’s Deliver”). In the latter essay, she kept asking the donkey owners the names of their animals. She assumed that the donkey owners, like Americans, name their animals.

They don’t – they see the donkeys as tools; naming one would be like naming a wheelbarrow.

Overall it was a disappointment, but there was enough good in there to not mark it as wasted time. Just not up there with collections by E.B. White or Malcolm Gladwell, for example, and I thought Orlean could crack into their level.

One of the interesting aspects of the essays was the drawing at the beginning of each essay. It’s a line drawing – but a single, continuous line – to create the animal the essay addresses.

Here is the one for the essay on tigers:

My brother-in-law is a graphic designer, and when I mentioned these animal icons to him, he was familiar with the process and said there was a special name for it. They would do exercises with the technique in art school.

I did some research; I was expecting a fancy-pants French or Latin word/phrase.

All I could find was “continuous-line” or “single-line” drawing. Not terribly exciting.