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Nonfiction We’ve all had dates like that THE SOUL OF AN OCTOPUS By Sy Montgomery 272 pp. Atria Reviewed by Marty Carlock Visitors at Boston’s New England Aquarium watch staffers handling an octopus. An incredulous man asks them, “Does it know you?” The answer is yes. The octopus not only knows them, it plays with them. It knows who it likes and dislikes, who feeds it and who doesn’t, who smells good and who smells like medicine. The octopus gets so bored that its friends give it toys to play with – plastic Easter eggs to screw and unscrew, jars to open, rubber toys. The octopus’s friends have to be ingenious to keep it from escaping, because it is curious about everything and has a tendency to want to go exploring. Such an excursion is usually fatal. Naturalist Sy Montgomery likes to write about unlikely animals. An earlier book of hers, The Good Good Pig , was a biography of a porcine named Christopher Hogwood, who lived with her and her family for 18 years. Octopuses, to her dismay,...