I imagine that you, like me, have sometimes wondered what it is like to be an animal (or, I should say, to be another animal, since we humans are animals too). But how far would you go to find out?

I discovered Being a Beast: Adventures Across the Species Divide lying in wait on a friend’s bookshelf, a fox’s eyes staring out at me from the cover. Imagine if someone tried – really tried – to live like another animal, almost to become another animal. Charles Foster did just that – living in a hole in the earth, catching fish with his teeth, trying to ​“see” by smell, joining birds on their big migration – in a quest to find out what it is like to be a badger, an otter, a fox, a deer or a swift.

What did he find out? That even these species, selected to be at least somehow relatable to humans, are so different from us in their senses and ways that we can really only imagine what the world is like to them. But also that our highly developed imaginations – perhaps the most distinctive feature of being human – allow us to understand other animals in remarkable detail, despite the inherent limits of our own abilities and experience.

The book isn’t always an easy read. Foster plunges into some long philosophical musings that, to my mind, often end up being digressions and distractions. I wish he had stuck more closely to the book’s fascinating premise and spent even more time describing the other animals and helping us imagine their worlds. But in the places where he burrows deep into animals’ minds and worlds he offers us a lot to learn, and a lot to wonder at. The natural world is a marvel, never fully fathomable to us yet infinitely rewarding. We often forget that as we get older. There is so much to gain from holding on to the wonder and awe with which we humans typically meet the world on our first encounters with it, as children.

If you’re an older reader, read the book to reignite that earlier curiosity and amazement, and share the parts where Foster tries to ​“be” another animal with the young readers in your life. And, if you’re a younger reader, perhaps get an older reader to help you navigate through it, so you can jump over the philosophising to get to all the fun parts. At the end of it, I think you’ll come out as a better human being.