British Author Challenge August 2023: Seafaring Stories

Turner, The Battle of Trafalgar

I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,
To the gull’s way and the whale’s way where the wind’s like a whetted knife;
And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover,
And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over.
--from John Masefield's "Sea-Fever"

Horatio Hornblower series by C. S. Forester
Aubrey-Maturin series by Patrick O’Brian
Bolitho series by Alexander Kent
The Pyrates by George MacDonald Fraser
The Lord Ramage Novels by Dudley Pope
Piratica by Tanith Lee
Richard Delancey series by C. Northcote Parkinson
Kydd series by Julian Stockwin
Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
Captain Blood by Rafael Sabatini
Captains Courageous by Rudyard Kipling
The Wreck of the Mary Deare by Hammond Innes
Pirates! by Celia Rees

MOBY-DICK good?

>2 m.belljackson: Well, Melville was not British, sorry to say....but it is a great book.

Yikes! - Well, if my Wild Card proposal doesn't float, my daughter has just found a free audio of TREASURE ISLAND.

I may give Master and Commander another try--I didn't get very far a few years ago, but maybe I wasn't in the right mood. I'm wondering if it will work better for me on audiobook.

One book I can recommend is Dangerous Work: Diary of an Arctic Adventure by Arthur Conan Doyle.

In 1880 Conan Doyle, in a break from medical school, was employed as a ship's surgeon on a whaling expedition to the Arctic. The 2012 edition I read is amazing, with background info, facsimile pages of the diary (including his pen & ink sketches--see the cover above), transcription of the diary and several of his later stories that were inspired by his experiences at sea. Fascinating.

Okay - here's my Wild Card Proposal:

(and, if Doorstopper was not required, I would have gone with
THE WREN by Brit naturalist Edward A. Armstrong...) -

A mild stretch for a 908 page book just started,
The Norton Book of NATURE WRITING from 1990,
published in London and NYC.

Editors state that "It was particularly important, we felt, to place
before American readers the rich and continuing tradition of British nature writing."

Just within the first 117 pages, readers find the leadoff Gilbert White,
then Alexander Wilson, John Knapp, Dorothy Wordsworth, Coleridge,
Charles Waterton, and John Clare...

>6 kac522: ouch!!!!

I love reading journals.

For this month's challenge I have a Alistair MacLean in my sights, The Golden Rendezvous.

>1 amanda4242: I can recommend Captain Blood. I also can recommend Kidnapped. Any Innes book is probably good, but Atlantic Fury was really gripping.

I decided to go with a Viking tale for this month: Henry Treece's Horned Helmet, about an Icelandic orphan who runs off to sea with a band of Vikings. I found the story a little weak, but it's got some nice historical details and the characters are pretty good.

I am reading currently Winchelsea by Alex Preston which is a sort of modern version of Moonfleet (another I would heartily endorse).

So far it is good.

MacLean and Innes are, I agree with Fuzzi, great choices as would be Douglas Reeman / Alexander Kent, CS Forester and Patrick O'Brien.

The September thread is up!

https://www.librarything.com/topic/353268

I completed C.S. Forester's Hunting the Bismark which is sort of the Titanic with the British Navy standing in for the iceberg.