I read Watership Down in the ‘80s and enjoyed it immensely. I tried to read it again about a year ago and just couldn’t get through the first ten pages. I guess I’ve changed a lot.
Recently I read Sailing Alone Around the World (1900), by Joshua Slocum. It’s basically Slocum’s journal kept concurrent with his log during his 36-month (1895–1898), 46,000 mile solo circumnavigation in a 37 foot, gaff-rigged yawl: the Spray. He is supposedly the first person ever to successfully accomplish solo circumnavigation of the earth.
At his home in Fairhaven, Mass. between 1892–1894, Slocum rebuilt the former Chesapeake oysterman fore and aft, improved her balance (without mathematics beyond a carpenter’s arithmetic) and rigged her for self-steering. He took pride in the fact that the Spray, with helm lashed, sailed 2,700 miles west across the Pacific (Thursday Island to the Cocos), requiring him to be at the wheel for no more than 3 hours during that 23 day stretch.
This book is a must read among serious blue-water sailors. I was especially interested in reading Slocum’s contemporary accounts of certain Caribbean islands and points on the US east coast; places I’ve been to in the past few years. So one night I pulled it off Project Gutenberg.
Captain Slocum was one helluva sailor, navigator and boat builder, but he was no writer. He took the story of a great voyage and turned it into a truckload of Quaaludes through his flowery, late Victorian journalistic style. No. I can handle late Victorian. This was really bad late Victorian style journalism. I know he couldn’t help it. He was a man of his time and he did the best he could. And it was a literary era infamous for unnecessary filigree and saccharin sentimentalism. But what a buzz-kill. It took me a month to get through the 164 pages.