KEV67
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Posts posted by KEV67
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I recently finished The Shadow Line by Joseph Conrad. This is extremely atypical for Conrad in that nobody dies. Especially no one dies in a futile and unlamented way. Well, actually someone did die, but not during the course of the story. It was quite good, but my favourite Conrad seafaring tale is still N***** of Narcissus, because that is. so far, the only seafaring tale written from the stand point of the sailors. Nearly every other nautical tale I've read was from the view point of the captain. Moby Dick starts off from the view point of one of the sailors, but gradually shifts more and more on the captain.
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On 22/06/2021 at 12:19 PM, France said:
He undoubtedly had contacts - he was a Scottish earl albeit a very poor one which is why he went to sea. He was also very talented and very daring, I think he hadn't made post when he took the two ships and only had a 28 gunner. The ships he captured were fully sized warships (sorry don't have my biography of him to hand so can't give the full details). It's well worth getting hold of his biography, he was quite a character. He was so tall (very unusual for a sailor) that he had to shave with his head sticking out of the trap on the ceiling of his cabin with his mirror on the deck.
It's interesting, Hornblower does mention him. Seems he was very bold but also got himself into trouble with the Admiralty, but I don't know how.
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I have been trying to understand and even like Shakespeare. I read his sonnets and recognised the one we did at school, Let me to a marriage of true minds..., And also the once sung by Florence and the Machine. We did Macbeth for school. I watched the play years ago. I also wanted the Roman Polanski version. Last year I read Othello in one of those Arden series. I read it because it was one I had not come across before at school, in film or in Shakespeare in the Park type stagings. I found the introduction more interesting than the play. I recently finished another Arden book on Richard II. I was congratulating myself on having understood most of it, only now I am reading the introduction and it seems I hardly understood it at all.
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I've heard of Cochrane. Hornblower mentions him. How did he get to be a captain by 22? He must have had some influential friends. I read a bit about the naval exploits of Jane Austen's brothers. One in particular got up to some capers. However, I think the majority of the Royal Navy was mostly occupied with blockading France, which was very, very boring.
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On 18/06/2021 at 2:22 PM, timebug said:
Alexander Kents 'Richard Bolitho' series are similar to the Hornblower and Jack Aubrey ones, you may like them. Then the older books by Captain Marryat may interest you, as might the CS Forester stuff, mostly maritime and incuding the well known 'The African Queen'. And if you like gentle humour, set onboard a small Glasgow 'Puffer' try 'The Para Handy' tales, three volumes complete! (a favourite of mine which I have re-read many times!)
I looked up Richard Botitho. To me he looks like he may be a bit too similar. One thing I like about seafaring books is that they are quite different to each other, especially when written by ex-sailors. It is partly why I liked The Sea Wolf by Jack London, despite its unpleasantness. Jack London worked on a seal hunting ship, so he knew what he was writing about. Herman Melville worked on a whaler. Joseph Conrad was a sailor. He captained a boat up the Congo once. C.S. Forester was different. He seemed to get most his information from the Naval Gazette. The Patrick O' Brian books covered similar ground but the Captain Aubrey and Stephen Maturin pairing made the books fairly different to Hornblower.
I was wondering whether any modern writer would dare write a book about a slaver. There was Robinson Crusoe, but Daniel Defoe was not a sailor, I don't think. Then I remembered there was one Flashman book (George MacDonald Fraser) set largely on a slave ship. I think it was Flash for Freedom. It had a great character called John Charity Spring, who was the captain of the slave ship.
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This problem of thinking of a suitable term to cover both sea and river stories is still taking up too much of my cerebral bandwidth. When it comes to crime there are lots of subgenres, true crime, cosy crime, hard boiled, even tartan noir to cover Scottish crime fiction. Science fiction has subgenres such as dystopia, first encounter, space opera. Why isn't there a term to cover both fresh and salt water sailing? Nautical, maritime or seafaring covers quite different types of sailing. There are books like the Odyssey and Life of Pi, which are myth and fantasy and not much to do with sailing. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, is science fiction, but it is also set on a submarine. A lot of nautical books are set in the age of sail, but there are also books like Das Boot, HMS Ulysses and The Cruel Sea that are set in metal ships in the Second World War. All these are covered by the terms nautical, maritime or seafaring, but not Huck Finn because that takes place on a river. I thought about 'sailing', but Huck Finn and Jim seem to more drift.
Regarding Joseph Conrad's unwisely titled book, called Children of the Sea in America. I would not say it was a racist book. Nevertheless, quite a number of these sailing books are controversial regarding race. Heart of Darkness was famously criticised for being racist by Chinua Achebe. I had trouble seeing it. I think Achebe thought it was racist, because Africa was used as a metaphor for evil, otherness, primitiveness, etc. Huck Finn does not shy away from tackling race issues, but it does give the American education system a problem because it uses the word ****** over 100 times. Moby Dick has a surprisingly multi-racial crew. I think it was difficult to find good harpoon throwers, so they recruited talent when they found it. Their ship, The Pequod, was named after a Native American tribe that was wiped out. Robinson Crusoe is controversial over Man Friday and the cannibals and everything. I thought the strangest thing was his attitude to slavery. He was on a mission to buy slaves when he was shipwrecked. He spent ages wondering why God was punishing him, and concluded that it was because he disobeyed his father.
Also: Deliverance is reputedly another great river story, although overshadowed by the film. Very different from Three Men in a Boat.
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On 10/06/2021 at 11:25 PM, Hayley said:
That’s interesting! I definitely would have associated ‘maritime’ exclusively with the sea.
There’s a Jack Vance (science fiction) book that’s set on boats called Showboat World. And also one that’s set on a planet that’s entirely covered by water called The Blue World. I suppose they would be a form of maritime by that definition.
It looks like only Wikipedia thinks the word 'maritime' covers fresh water transport. All other definitions I have read say maritime is to do with the sea. That is a disappointment.
I recently finished Flying Colours by C.S. Forester, the seventh in the Horatio Hornblower series, depending how you number them. Plotwise I did not think it was as strong as the others, but emotionally it was. It was all building up to the ending, and I was thinking, given Hornblower's exemplary conduct, how can this not be recognised by his superiors? The ending would have to be contrived or unrealistic, but if the ending's what you think it is than where's the drama? For decades I was put off Hornblower, thinking he was like Biggles on the sea.
I have started reading The Shadow Line by Joseph Conrad, even after I swore off reading him, because he is so miserable. It is supposed to be his best seafaring tale. I am hoping it will get me out of my bookshelf challenge fix, because I still like N***** of Narcissus more than Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, The Old Man and the Sea or The Sea Wolf.
I also bought The Riddle of the Sands, but it will take me a while to get around to that.
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Horatio Hornblower. He does the right thing 99% of the time.
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The Tenant of Wildfell Hall was patchy. The last part was female wish fulfillment, it seemed to me. It did have three really good bits though ( spoilers) :
1) All the terrible behaviour by Helen's husband. It is so vivid. EB must have witnessed it to describe it.
2) The bit when Helen's husband was dying and was wondering about the afterlife. Particularly effecting when the character in question was probably based on Branwell, her brother. They all famously died young. EB was a clergyman's daughter, but this chapter does not follow Christian orthodoxy. At least it admits to doubts about it.
3) The best bit was when to the dude (forgot his name) hits Helen's brother with the stock of his horse whip. He does not know he is her brother. He thinks he is his successful rival who is taunting him, despite being told to back off. It is a shockingly violent act by the hero of the book. The dude goes back to help the man he assaulted, but the victim refuses his help. I thought that was a great description of masculine (although reprehensible) behaviour.
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What is it about vampires that is cool? Many vampires are sexy, but others are not so much.
There is a vampire book named after me. It's called Varney the Vampire, which was a little bit embarrassing when my school friends found a copy in the school library. I doubt any school child read it because it's thousands of pages long. Originally it was a Penny Dreadful, which I think was a forerunner of comics. I gather the quality was not that great.
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I have been watching some science videos on YouTube. Some of them are completely mind bending; others are a bit more comprehensible. I watched one this morning that suggested terra-forming Mars using a gas called Sulphur Hexafluoride, which is a heavy, non-toxic, green-house gas. Imagine reading a sci-fi book with that as a backdrop. The thing is you still need some human drama. You can't just have a story about a bunch of people getting on peaceably on Mars while trying to terraform the planet. There has to be some sort of drama, and if it's the same sort of drama that could happen here and now on planet Earth, what's the point in setting it on Mars?
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I don't know what to make of Tolstoy. The British writer he most reminds me of is George Elliott. The characters are grown-ups. Some are immature. Some are vain. Some are ambitious. Some are capable. Some are not. Some are vicious and small minded. Others want to do good. It is all mixed in with the politics and the high society of the time.
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Homicide by David Simon is a great book. No detective fiction writer could imagine the stories he told. I have also read The Corner by David Simon and Ed Burns. This was written from the POV of the criminal subculture. It is good, but not as entertaining. I know we are not supposed to be entertained by true crime, but Homicide was entertaining as well as incredible. The Corner was more like sociology.
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One thing that makes the book readable, despite its length, is that most the chapters are fairly short. That means you can take as long as you like to read it.
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52 minutes ago, lunababymoonchild said:
who is the translator? I found my copy mundane but it may have been the translatorRichard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. The Times seems to think it's a good translation.
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I am about a third of the way through. I think it is the detail that makes it. Early on there is a battle at Schöngraben. The battle is so fully described. I thought Tolstoy must have been drawing on his own experiences fighting in the Crimean War. I was beginning to think the war bits were better than the peace bits, but I have just read several chapters describing a ball from a perspective of a pretty, sixteen-year-old girl who loves dancing. I have never been a pretty, sixteen-year-old girl who loves dancing, but it seemed like a pretty good stab at describing one.
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Another thing I don't like is when detective fiction piles it on too thick. For example, there's a spree of seemingly unrelated disappearances. It turns out the killer is a taxidermist who's a Shakespeare nut. He's trying to stuff a person to represent each character from a scene in a Shakespeare play. So if there's an Earl of Sussex in the play he murders someone from Sussex. If King Edward III's in the play, he kills a boy called Edward whose father and grandfather are both called Edward. Meanwhile, it turns out the village postmistress is Herman Göring's secret love child, and she is killing fellow members of the parish council she does not like by giving them tea boiled with heavy water from a secret vat her father bequeathed her. Meanwhile, it turns out the gruff detective used to be a woman before she transitioned. She was raped as a girl and the resulting child was put up for adoption. Now the child has grown up and is progressing up the ranks of most notorious organised crime syndicate in the country.
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This is taking up a lot of my thinking time. I have renamed the top shelf from Seafaring to Maritime so I could put Huckleberry Finn in place of N***** of Narcissus. I reckon the boss would be leery of having that book title prominent on a shelf, notwithstanding that the same word is used over a hundred times in Huckleberry Finn. N***** of Narcissus is a shortish story and usually comes bound up with other seafaring tales. There is only so much Conradian misey I would want to inflict on a reader. I've renamed the second shelf and added New Grub Street. I've renamed my third shelf too, and replaced Watership Down with Lionel Asbo. I loved Watership Down as a child, but found it difficult to read as an adult. Lionel Asbo made me laugh out loud.
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| Maritime |
| Moby Dick | Midshipman Hornblower | The Sea Wolf | Master and Commander| Huckleberry Finn |
| Herman Melville | C.S. Forester | Jack London | Patrick O' Brian | Mark Twain |
| British Classics |
| Great Expectations | New Grub Street |Tom Jones | Wuthering Heights | Mary Barton |
| Charles Dickens | George Gissing | Richard Fielding | Emily Brontë | Mrs Gaskell |
| British Literary Fiction |
| I Claudius | Nice Work | Winged Victory | Mr American | Lionel Asbo |
| Robert Graves | David Lodge | V.M. Yeates | George MacDonald Fraser| Martin Amis |
| Food for thought |
| Lamb of God | Eating Animals | Homicide |Why Nations Fail | The Bottomless Well |
| Ralph R. Wilson | Jonathon Safron Foer | David Simon |Acemoglu & Robinson | Mills & Huber |
I am considering taking out Homicide. It is a great book, but I might hold it back for another set of shelves. I might substitute The Sea Wolf too.
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Is there a genre that covers both sea and river sailing? I cannot think of one. I want to move Huckleberry Finn to the seafaring shelf in bookshop staff challenge thread, but a river is not a sea. Maritime means sea. Nautical pertains to the sea. Boating would exclude ships. Sailing would not be accurate for Huckleberry Finn; drifting would be more accurate.
Edit: Wikipedia says maritime pertains to any sort of water transport.
There are several great river stories: Huckleberry Finn, Heart of Darkness, Three Men in a Boat, Wind and the Willows and Death on the Nile. However, I have not read Death on the Nile and I never managed to finish Wind in the Willows. Something about the book puts me off.
I read that The Odyssey counts as seafaring, as does Sinbad the Sailor. Thing is I am not sure how good the sailing is in those books. Joseph Conrad and Herman Melville were both sailors. Jack London was a sailor for a while. I don't think C.S. Forester was, but he spent a lot of time reading back issues of the Naval Gazette.
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I am struggling a bit with my last food for thought book.I am interested in climate change and alternative energy. In that category the books that struck me the most were Sustainability Without the Hot Air by David Mackay, which takes you through the simple maths and physics of coming up with a sustainable energy plan for a nation, and The Bottomless Well by Mark P. Wells and Peter W. Huber. This is a book about energy, and why they think we will never run out. If I cannot decide between those, I could go for Alone in the Universe by John Gribbin. It is why he thinks there may not be much intelligent life out there.
I am struggling with the seafaring books too. If I liked Heart of Darkness more I would have chosen that over the Naughty word of Narcissus (a really rubbish title). The Naughty word of Narcissus is a good seafaring book, but it is not epic enough to be great. Lord Jim is just too miserable. There is The Old Man and the Sea. My father loved that, but I am not sure about Hemingway. I am not sure about The Sea Wolf neither.
I am struggling with Pre-20th century. I want to include New Grub Street by George Gissing, but who would I leave out. Great Expectations and Huckleberry Finn are going nowhere. If I changed it to 19th century classics I would have to leave out Tom Jones, but that is a great book. Wuthering Heights is a great book. It's like a long prose poem. I really like Mary Barton too.
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I read it earlier this year. The thing that struck me the most were how many of the themes would be developed in his later books, particularly in Bleak House and Little Dorrit. I also sympathised with the young man who was rubbish at all sports, and glad he got his young lady.
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Other seafaring books I have read include Robinson Crusoe, Kidnapped, possibly Nostromo, but I don not really consider them seafaring. The best bits of Robinson Crusoe are when he is stuck on the island. The best bits of Kidnapped are when David Balfour and Alan Breck are trying to get from West Scotland to East Scotland without getting captured by the red coats. Nostromo has a little bit of seafaring, but it is mainly about politics in an unstable South American country. I am not even sure Heart of Darkness is seafaring, because the main events take place on a river.
Other seafaring books I would like to get to eventually:
- Treasure Island (Robert Louis Stevenson)
- The Riddle of the Sands (Erskine Childers)
- The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea (Yukio Mishima)
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I would almost consider Persuasion by Jane Austen a seafaring book. Alright, I wouldn't really, but it is the most naval of her books. It is like when Captain Jack Aubrey is back on shore leave and trying to negotiate his romantic, domestic and financial difficulties, but written from Sophie's point of view. I think Jane Austen had two brothers in the Royal Navy and one ended up Admiral of the Fleet.
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On 02/06/2021 at 11:00 PM, Raven said:
I like the idea, but I have been a bit distracted with some moderation issues over the last day or so, so please don't take the lack of a thoughtful reply personally!
(I'm only in the market for drive-by pithy posts as things stand!)
So no change from usual, really...
I meant that I saw there was a challenges forum and I posted this in General Book Discussions, not that no one had replied. Is there any chance it can be moved?
Shakespeare
in Poetry, Plays & Short Stories
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I 've watched one or two bits on YouTube. Ben Wishaw is great, better than all the great British actors from yesteryear if you ask me.