I must go down to the sea again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship, and a star to steer her by.

— John Masefield

I love ships, love boats, especially old ones. Love wharves and shipping yards, even today when they are little more than towers of containers and acres of imported cars. Love living on an island so every time I go to town I have to take the ferry. There are dolphins sometimes, and Orca, and on Friday evenings the yacht fleets are out for the twilight races, scattered across the harbour.
I don’t come from one of those hearty boating families, all Swallows and Amazons and high tea on the high seas. I didn’t learn to sail until I was 40, but I learned in Sydney Harbour, which made up for the wait.
But I was born in a dockside working town (Port Melbourne), and my grandfather was a wharfie, so I guess it’s in the blood. If there was a big cruise liner shipping on the weekends, we’d go down to Station Pier and wave them off. If the Navy was in port, we’d get sneaked on board and shown around. You might wonder about security – it was strict, even in those days, but it didn’t apply to my grandfather. After he’d retired, the guards still waved him through those gorgeous old wooden gates: “Good onya, Bill. You kids behave yerselves, mind.”
Once there was a tall ship, a gleaming white naval training ship (I think it was Portuguese) and I fell in love.
So now, wherever I travel in the world (well, besides the desert) if there’s a ship or a boat, I’m on it.
I think that demands a post of its own.
In the meantime, here’s my dreamboat: the Star Flyer, on which I sailed from Istanbul to Athens, shot from the ramparts of the Crusader castle in Bodrum. Or did I dream that?
And you wonder why I write books about pirates…

– Robert Musil (1880–1942)

Perhaps this is another twist on Does my brain look big in this?
Bill Scott-Kerr, publisher of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, has told The Times that the book has an “aspirational” appeal:

I guess if you were actually reading the Codex that might be true. I stood and stared at it for hours once (in a museum, of course), and felt infinitely more interesting as a result. I seem to recall it was written back-to-front and in Latin, which might be a splendid idea for Dan Brown’s next blockbuster (a searing and thrilling expose of the secret and previously unknown world of lawn bowls).
But Scott-Kerr also admits he had no idea of the monster he was about to unleash on an unsuspecting world, when a proposal first landed on his desk.

If anyone had said that this was going to be the biggest selling adult book ever, I’d have called for the straitjacket. It’s insane.

Well, it beats me, too. I thought the book was hilarious. Tom Hanks is going to be in the movie, hopefully in his fine A League of Their Own fettle.

Much of writing might be described as mental pregnancy with successive difficult deliveries.

– J. B. Priestley

Sitting on the back seat of my car is the final manuscript of the final book in the Swashbuckler! trilogy, all packaged up (with the galleys of the first book) ready to be sent off to HarperCollins.
I sat and stared at the package last night, feeling relieved and anxious, and with a touch of trepidation.
Now I have to focus on something utterly different, write about new people in unfamiliar circumstances, research the intricate details of other places and times.
I’d best go do that then.
Pirates can sail off into the blue beyond.
I wonder if they’ll ever come back?
I read that Lian Hearn is writing two more Tales of the Otori. I can understand the appeal of it. She’s been so completely immersed in Japanese history and culture it would be difficult to wrest one’s mind free of such a compelling imaginative world (although in her other life she’s written about many other worlds). But, at any rate, as one of her many readers I’m very happy that there’ll be more Tales: it didn’t feel quite complete to me.
But perhaps that’s only because I wished it wasn’t over.

A few days ago, I wrote about the idea of a list of favourite books: how can you possibly decide?
A favourite is something you can’t do without, a book to which you return again and again. Mine is War & Peace, as I said. That’s easy. The Heart of Darkness and The Sun Also Rises had the greatest impact on my impressionable young mind. Pride and Prejudice is a perfect gem of a book, and I read it often, but it doesn’t stir the heart in quite the same way. But after that, I have to break it down much more precisely.
Let’s start with historical fiction (although I have to admit my tastes are quite specific).

Most likely to leave you wondering: Alias Grace
Most likely to make you gasp out loud: Fingersmith
Most romantically bookish: Possession
Most intriguing lead character: Restoration
Most strangely compelling: Perfume
Best Napoleonic fiction: The Passion
Greatest nautical adventure: Ooh, that’s a big call, I think it’s a dead heat between Hornblower and Aubrey.
Most melodramatic swashbuckler: The Sea Hawk
Most gripping World War One novel: Regeneration trilogy
Most fascinating discussion of ethics: The Dream of Scipio
Best ragtime book: Ragtime

Children’s books? (The books that I read when I was young, not those I read now for professional purposes.)

Most heart-thumping pirate adventure: Treasure Island
Scariest shark attack: The Coral Island
Most brilliant swordfighting: Ronald Welch’s Carey series
Most likely to turn a child into a writer: Emily of New Moon (Anne of Green Gables’ far more interesting cousin)
Most likely to turn a child into a recluse: My Side of the Mountain
Most likely to turn a child into an archaeologist: The Eagle of the Ninth

But I have to admit I don’t read a vast amount of fiction nowadays, because it is so often disappointing. So I won’t even start on non-fiction today, except for a few ideas about travel writing:

Book that most makes you want to ride into the mountains on a donkey: The Road to Oxiana or more recently An Unexpected Light
Book that most makes you want to live in Venice and never come home: Jan Morris’s Venice
Greatest letters by a camel-riding Edwardian Englishwoman: Gertrude Bell
Book that most makes you want to climb mountains: Feeding the Rat
Book that makes you want to never climb mountains: Touching the Void

We could start on most over-rated travel writer or most boring camel journey that nobody ever wanted to read about, but let’s save that for another day.
Feel free to leave your own categories and winners in the comments.

More than one in three consumers in London and south-east England admit having bought a book “solely to look intelligent”, a recent survey has found.
I wonder if it works? If only these surveys came with before and after photos, so we could judge the effects for ourselves.
The study also reported that one in every eight young people chose a book “simply to be seen with the latest shortlisted title”.
So getting on an award shortlist really is a great sales boost – but perhaps not always for developing an ongoing readership. Most of the respondents admitted they’d never finished reading the books.
Happily, the Guardian reports:

The biggest group, more than two in every five people, follows the traditional method of choosing their reading; relying on recommendations from close family and friends.

…or blogs.

And you thought that only cyclists and swimmers (not Australians, of course) went in for performance enhancing substances? Think again:
The International Herald Tribune’s Peter Mehlman has outed Philip Roth as a dope fiend whose output must be helped along by something stronger than caffeine:

One writer, who requested anonymity to avoid seeming cranky, whispered, “Since I came out with ‘Bonfire of the Vanities,’ I’ve written two novels. Roth has churned out, what, 12? Do the math.”
Roth’s bulked-up output is not the only factor raising eyebrows. Most notably, his sentence structure has shown no signs of the usual age-related deterioration cited in medical literature.
At 64, some eight to 10 years after most writers betray noticeable passive voice, Roth completed his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “American Pastoral” (1997). One of the book’s astonishing sentences began with the words, “Only after strudel and coffee,” and ended nearly a full page later without even one dangling modifier.
No less a talent than James Joyce (in one of his more piquant observations) said: “By the age of 45, I knew I could no longer start a sentence with a mention of strudel. My fingers would want to do it but my mind just wouldn’t react.”

You can read the whole silly thing here.

There’s a fascinating (and really quite unsettling) review by Rick Perlstein, in the latest LRB, of Jane Fonda’s War: A Political Biography of an Anti-war Icon by Mary Hershberger.
While critical of Hershberger’s sunny Oprah-style conclusions, he’s impressed by her research and that of other historians, delving into the corruption and cynicism of the Pentagon and the Nixon White House during the Vietnam War.
Perlstein outlines the ways in which Fonda’s reputation as some kind of anti-American harpy was consciously created by the White House in order to camouflage its own unraveling war planning, and to counteract the growing disillusion over the war.

Opposing the war, at this particular time, was not a radical thing to do, writes Perlstein. Vietnam was widely recognised across the political spectrum as a disaster… Most Americans opposed the war by the time Nixon started running for re-election; every candidate in 1972, including the dozen or so contenders for the wide-open Democratic nomination was promising to end it. Most citizens, even if they didn’t fully admit it to themselves, knew that America was losing.

This view was held by many GIs, including those POWs Fonda famously visited in prison in Hanoi. So Nixon struck back. It’s since been proven that some claims that POWs were tortured because of Fonda’s visit were blatant lies. Yet she faced death threats, abuse – veterans still spit at her – and it’s no wonder she turned to aerobics.
Fonda arrived in Hanoi, says Perlstein:

as US bombers appeared to be making preliminary strikes against North Vietnam’s system of dikes, which if breached would destroy farmland and starve the population. The Pentagon denied the raids. At a press conference in Paris Fonda presented film proving that they had taken place. That same day, the State Department cancelled its scheduled rebuttal.
One of the diplomats laid low by the humiliation was America’s UN envoy, George H.W. Bush. “I think that the best thing I can do on the subject is to shut up,” he told the press, after promising them evidence of American innocence.

You can read the full review at London Review of Books.