Chris in Santa Cruz CA
Super Anarchist
You have given me a vein to mine. Thanks.
Any good reading suggestions - Not just sailing
- Thread starter WCB
- Start date
Talchotali
Capt. Marvel's Wise Friend
James Bond's favorite author. I'd recommend starting with Cause for Alarm.
His characters are always ordinary Joe's who get caught up in something way over their head, but prevail.
Steam Flyer
Sophisticated Yet Humble
Yes! I'd forgotten about Eric Ambler, thanks... I've read somewhat less than half of these, time to rummage thru old book sale ...
In other book threads, I've mentioned John D. MacDonald whose best known work is probably the Travis McGee series https://www.goodreads.com/series/52264-travis-mcgee
Don't really have to be read together or in order, always some realistic boat action, kind of period pieces as the America of ~1962 was a very different place from today. Two books of his I'd also like to mention are very different: "Please Write For Details" an ex-pat artist colony goes horribly right in some rather funny but realistic ways; then a non-fiction "Nothing Can Go Wrong" about one of the last ocean liners.
I have tried to get my fiction reading up to about half, but really prefer non-fiction.
Talchotali
Capt. Marvel's Wise Friend
Agree.
Silly me, I forgot about John D. and the color book series (Travis McGee). Concur, first class series. Start anywhere - they span the early 60s to the 80s. What he says(through his character Travis McGee) about Florida and the world in general was true then and is true today. His other books excellent too.
Charlie Foxtrot
Super Anarchist
Empire of the Summer Moon. The Comanche Empire in conflict - riveting history.
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Steam Flyer
Sophisticated Yet Humble
^this^ excellent book, excellent look into an obscure bit of American history and well written
Wet Spreaders
Super Anarchist
Just finished Adrian Tschaikovsky "Children of Time". Sci-fi, but not space opera. Thoughtful and fresh.
A3A
Member
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The Master Mariner by Nicholas Monsarrat might be my all time favorite book. It's actually an unfinished two volume set consisting of Running Proud and the unfinished Darken Ship. The first book is a fantastic story of Matthew Lawe who starts as Sir Francis Drake's coxswain but is cursed by an Irish witch to sail the oceans forever for an act of cowardice against the Spanish Armada. The book then chronicles voyages with Henry Hudson in search of the Northwest Passage and as a buccaneer with Henry Morgan. He works with Samuel Pepys to build the British Navy, watches Cook die on a Hawaiian beach and serves with Nelson.
Monsarrat passed away before completing Darken Ship. the only complete story has Matthew Lawe on a slave ship in 1806 and it's not a pretty story. Fortunately, we are left with an outline of where they rest of the story should go; as a pressed sailor in the Royal Navy of 1813, a foremast hand on Tea and Grain Clippers in 1839, another Northwest passage expedition. Matthew moves to steam on voyages to Australia and India with the likes of Joseph Conrad and Samuel Plimsoll. In WW1 he was a gunner at Gallipoli and Jutland and during the Depression, as a watchkeeper on mothballed hulks before a WW2 convoy to Malta and the Normandy landings. He finally breaks the curse with an act of bravery in a ship fire in Sault St. Marie. I wish a good writer would flesh out the outline to a full book.
A close second favorite is Sterling Hayden's Voyage. It chronicles a New York to San Francisco voyage on a steel clipper carrying coal. Great character development and several storylines of 1890's politics, business and class warfare.
Ken Follett is another favorite, especially the Pillars of the Earth series. As fucked up as our world can be today, it was once much worse.
John Gobbell is both a racing sailor from Newport Beach and an excellent author. I recommend the Todd Ingram series, but his other books are good too.
For light reading I tend to favor Joseph Flynn's Jim McGill and John Tall Wolf series. Interesting characters and quirky plots.
Monsarrat passed away before completing Darken Ship. the only complete story has Matthew Lawe on a slave ship in 1806 and it's not a pretty story. Fortunately, we are left with an outline of where they rest of the story should go; as a pressed sailor in the Royal Navy of 1813, a foremast hand on Tea and Grain Clippers in 1839, another Northwest passage expedition. Matthew moves to steam on voyages to Australia and India with the likes of Joseph Conrad and Samuel Plimsoll. In WW1 he was a gunner at Gallipoli and Jutland and during the Depression, as a watchkeeper on mothballed hulks before a WW2 convoy to Malta and the Normandy landings. He finally breaks the curse with an act of bravery in a ship fire in Sault St. Marie. I wish a good writer would flesh out the outline to a full book.
A close second favorite is Sterling Hayden's Voyage. It chronicles a New York to San Francisco voyage on a steel clipper carrying coal. Great character development and several storylines of 1890's politics, business and class warfare.
Ken Follett is another favorite, especially the Pillars of the Earth series. As fucked up as our world can be today, it was once much worse.
John Gobbell is both a racing sailor from Newport Beach and an excellent author. I recommend the Todd Ingram series, but his other books are good too.
For light reading I tend to favor Joseph Flynn's Jim McGill and John Tall Wolf series. Interesting characters and quirky plots.
Snaggletooth
SA's Morrelle Compasse
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That wase a TV moovie withe Pam Dawbere.....
Mrleft8
Super Anarchist
Nanoo nanoo!
Tacoma Mud Flats
Have star, will steer by
If you like weather, Guy Murchies "The Song of the Sky" is a wonderful read.
It is episodic, so it makes wonderful reading for the toilet.
The Internet Archive has a copy online, but a used copy from Amazon is only $5 and the author-made woodcuts throughout the edition make holding the actual paper book in your hands worth the small price.
It is episodic, so it makes wonderful reading for the toilet.
The Internet Archive has a copy online, but a used copy from Amazon is only $5 and the author-made woodcuts throughout the edition make holding the actual paper book in your hands worth the small price.
The Craft
SHE WAS BUILT like a whale, for cargo and comfort.
Ninety-four feet long and full-bellied, with wide tail flukes that
could ease her nose up or down at the merest nudge of her controls.
Her sinews and nerves were four and a half miles of steel cable
and insulated copper wire. Her brain was a set of instruments
tended by radio waves, inertia, magnetic force, and atmospheric
pressure, and all pivoted on sapphires and crystals of rare hardness.
She was Number 896, one of the original C-54s, the famous
flying freighters designed especially for ocean transport—perhaps
the most widely used long-range weight-carrying airplane to appear
in the decades since man taught metal to fly.
On this night of the fifth of February she floated confidently on
a mantle of black air 11,000 feet deep and bottomed by the angry
North Atlantic ocean. Her wings were of duralumin, styled to cut
the sky at two hundred and forty miles an hour. She rolled slightly
— ever so slightly, like a porpoise sighing in sleep — just enough
to tick the octant bubble from Mizar by the pole.
Inside her lighted hulk the air was at twenty inches of mercury,
or only two thirds the density of sea level. The temperature was
75° Fahrenheit where her crew sat in the cockpit, 52° in the fuel
compartment amidships, and 8° below zero outside. Her four
motors, representing the heft of 5400 horses, breathed the thin
cold air with the aid of superchargers forcing the vital oxygen into
their pipes at a manifold pressure of thirty-one inches. Her gross
weight at this moment was 62,180 pounds — 6200 pounds of it
cargo, priority 1A, battened by rope and steel rods to the cabin
floor: penicillin from Chas. Pfizer & Co., New York City, destined
for London, England, and oxygen cylinders, type F-2, from Fire-
stone Steel Products, Akron, Ohio, marked for Burtonwood, Eng-
land. She had taken off from Stephenville, Newfoundland, amid
snow flurries in the late afternoon. She was bound for Prestwick,
Scotland, 2296 miles away by the great circle.
We men of the crew sat at our stations, going through our
motions, writing words and figures into flight logs, occasionally
dreaming, or talking, or unbuttoning a little with caprice. From
the flight deck we could not see the waves two miles below. There
were dense clouds covering the sea and the sun was deep under the
earth. In the western sky Orion and the gibbous moon swung
downward at fifteen degrees per hour. And as the earth turned
and the planets turned, the galaxy of the Milky Way moved on its
inscrutable course through the black universe of which man knows
not the beginning nor the end.
"What are you doing up here? Why is that octant in your
hand?"
It could have been the wind asking. I was the navigator seated
at my chart table in the airplane's cockpit, gazing into the darkness
beyond the window. The wind —a wind which never existed be-
fore the airplane —was crying in long monosyllables like a Chinese
bird-monger. "Why—wh-h-y— wh-wh-h-h-h-h-h-y-y?" It sprang
full-bom from the Plexiglas nose and exploded upon the duralumin
skin, sprawling backward over the humps of the astrodome and
the engines, tearing itself cruelly on each protruding edge of
cowling, each pitot and spar. It was the invisible substance of
which the sky is made — not just air, not just wind, but a stuff
which is part of the insoluble consciousness of flight.
"Why is that octant in your hand?"
Because I am the navigator. I hold the needle that will pierce the cloud.
I sing the song of the sky..."
Grande Mastere Dreade
Snag's spellchecker
Steam Flyer
Sophisticated Yet Humble
OK, Imma check this out. That was a great book.
I have The Master Mariner in my list, but I always skip it. A friend of mine read this book some time ago, and also recommended reading it. But after reading your post I think I'll for sure read it soon.
And I can recommend The Left Hand of Darkness by writer Ursula K. Le Guin. It's a science fiction novel, and it's one of the best sci-fi books I've ever read.
