Books for the Armchair Sailor – fiction
Whoever did the cataloguing of sailing books for Amazon.com obviously isn’t a sailor – and isn’t much of a librarian, either. Here are some of the titles I found under Books>Fiction>Sailing:
- Left for Dead: The Untold Story of the Tragic 1979 Fastnet Race – Nick Ward and Sinead O’Brien
- Sailing Alone Around the World – Joshua Slocum
- Sailing the Farm: Independence on Thirty Feet – A Survival Guide to Homesteading the Ocean – Ken Neumeyer
- The boat Who Wouldn’t Float – Farley Mowat
All excellent books, and some of the tales are embroidered enough to make them highly entertaining, but definitely not fiction.
There are several collections of sailing stories, but without buying them I can’t tell you whether their contents are fact, fiction, or a mix of both. That’s supposed to be the job of the person who catalogues them.
Among the genuine fiction, I found some classics that I would recommend, even as repeat reading:
- The Riddle of the Sands – Erskine Childers – often cited as the precursor to the thriller genre
- Yarns – Tristan Jones - some of his tales are real and some are pure invention, but all are believable
