2025 Reading – Book 12

Book 12: Why Fish Don’t Exist by Lulu Miller

Maybe such unruly persistence is beautiful. Maybe it is not mad, after all. Maybe it is the quiet work of believing in Good. Of believing in a warmth, which you know does not exist in the stars, to exist in the hearts of fellow humans. Maybe it is something like trust.

Lulu Miller. Why Fish Don’t Exist_ A Story of Loss, Love (p. 80). (Function). Kindle Edition.

Something interesting seems to be happening in the world of non-fiction or perhaps that is the tenor of the non-fiction I have read this year.

Reading Why Fish Don’t Exist was a great reading experience, one that makes you tumble into a world and you keep going headlong into its stories forgetting about the life around you. I sped through the story of David Starr Jordan, who, as a young boy persevered to become an ichthyologist and later on founded Stanford University. Suffused within his story is a memoir-of-sorts about the author Lulu Miller herself. I buddy read this with my friend SF and I promise you it’s the most fun novel book I have read this year.

Written as riveting fiction Why Fish Don’t Exist is a story about the lives of two very different people, and how lives turn out as they do. In this book, Lulu Miller also talks about positive delusion — the scientific idea that making yourself believe positively in your life’s outcomes, no matter what happens, is the key to live a resilient life. She explores themes of chaos, entropy, and how things always go wrong but you could always bounce back from them. She highlights the multiple times David Starr Jordan was faced with life-changing calamities and yet he kept going (to sometimes questionable ends, but that’s the fun of the storytelling, and I don’t want to spoil it for you).

You know how there are those writers whose writing is buttery smooth? Lulu Miller is one of them. She’s a science journalist who shows great command over the subject matter which starts out as an inspirational story of a budding ichthyologist and ends up being a commentary on one of humanity’s most important topics. She moves through the light and dark with great elan. This is a very readable book, and without sounding hyperbolic, you must read it.

🌟 5/5