12:31N 53:39W

 

daily run 148; miles to go to Barbardos 342

 

One of the luxuries of an Atlantic crossing (ie being stuck on a boat 24/7!) is the ability to read whenever one feels like it.  Such an indulgence!  We are both avid readers but our busy working lives in Marlborough never allowed us much time to read.  A quick few chapters at night.....often falling asleep, mouth open, book on chest, light on......was about it.  Weekends were always taken up with boating, skiing, horses, gardening or working in our vineyard.  Since buying Bandit and setting off we’ve had more time to read and have ravenously enjoyed novels as well as travel books and histories about the places we have been to.  But neither of us is able to actually sit and read for long – there is always too much to do.  This Atlantic crossing has allowed us to read almost constantly – talk about Pulp Fiction!  (wasn’t that a great movie?  Quentin Tarantino I think).  It certainly cured me of my schoolgirl crush on John Travolta (hangover from Grease) when I saw the way he wielded a machine gun. 

 

But back to books.....we thought it would be fun to share with you some of the books we’ve read lately – books brought over from NZ by friends, picked up in Oxfam shops in London, bought in secondhand book shops in unlikely places in the Med, found in marina libraries and swapped with other cruisers.  David’s sister Susi and husband Tim run a fantastic bookshop in Nelson (big plug for Page and Blackmore; 2010 book shop of the year in New Zealand) and we’ve been the lucky recipients of lots of books from them.  Bandit’s lockers literally heave with books – we simply cannot part with them and they add to our collection of “stuff” to be sailed home!

 

My favourite of late was Rohintin Mistry’s A Fine Balance – and I’m about to start on Such a Long Journey.  Both are set in Mumbai which we visited in March during our month long backpacking stint in India and for that reason I also have Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy sitting here.  The 1474 pages of tiny print call for a bit more stamina than I have right now....maybe the Pacific crossing.   We both loved Four Letters of Love by Niall Williams - a beautifully written Irish novel documenting the anguished path of a young boy through to adulthood.  The Philippa Gregory historical novels are such an easy read and we’ve both worked our way through loads - A Respectable Trade (about the slave trade in Bristol) and the Tudor novels – A Constant Princess, The White Queen and The Other Boleyn Girl.  For night watch we like a page turner.  Lee Childs’ Jack Reacher novels fall into that category and lately we’ve read 61 Hours, Worth Dying For and Nothing to Lose.  The plots are totally outrageous but you can knock off one in a night and isn’t Reacher such a cool guy?  I loved Dawn French’s A Tiny Bit Marvellous – made me laugh out loud as did Cock and Bull stories, a hilarious account of Marlborough veterinary life written by good friends Pete Anderson and Pete Jerram.  Jodi Picoult’s House Rules was a vast improvement on the last few I’ve read.  The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (Rebecca Skoot) was eye opening. Right now I am reading Nelson Mandela’s autobiography The Long Walk to Freedom and dipping in and out of is Literary Trips by Victoria Brooks – a fascinating look at the lives and works of respected literature travel writers. 

 

Naturally, I’m an avid newspaper fan and for the last year have collected the Culture tabloid – an insert of lifestyle features, columns, opinion pieces, travel stories and news backgrounders that comes with the Sunday Times (UK) which is printed around Europe. Every few days I bring out a crisp new one and we both work our way through it devouring every single word. We also have a stack of magazines David brought back from New Zealand including Life and Leisure, House and Garden, Horse and Pony (thanks Chick) and Boating NZ...and it’s a treat to pull out a fresh one of those to enjoy.

 

Over to the skipper;

I enjoyed Swan Thieves by Elizabeth Kostova so much that I grabbed her first novel The Historian when I saw it on a friend’s boat, but was disappointed as I do not like sifi or occult. I am constantly referring to several books on board; Nigel Calder’s Boat Owner’s Mechanical and Electrical Guide and all of the Raymarine manuals are invaluable when making various adjustments to the electronics,  The Book of Knots, Jimmy Cornell’s World Cruising Routes and World Cruising Handbook are others regularly thumbed on Bandit.   As for fiction, The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins always gets a lively discussion going between skipper and cook. One Day by David Nichols I really enjoyed and await a viewing of the film, though it has not has rave reviews. Elephants on Acid and Other Bizarre Experiments by Alex Coese was an interesting book on how not to do things...sometimes. I have also reread the reprint of White Water by my aunt, Joyce Hamilton, about the 1960 uprun of the Colorado’s Grand Canyon in Jet Boats.  Atlantic by Simon Winchester was an appropriate read for the start of the crossing. I am now starting A fine Balance but somehow I am struggling still with the thought of India... it is a raw and troubling place.

 

Hasn’t been much time for reading on Bandit the past 24 hours as we lurch our way closer to Barbados, dodging squalls where we can and getting hit by many.  Sails up, sails down, hatches open, hatches closed,  Sleep?  You must be joking!  Right down it’s torrential rain, thunder and the boat motion is really violent (though skipper managed to sleep blissfully unaware the cook was doing battle on deck!). It is often too hard to read so in the late afternoon we opt to hunker down below and watch videos.  Black Swan was a tad too scary for those going on night watch so we switched to Fool’s Gold.  Crappy movie admittedly (has Kate Hudson done anything memorable?) but the motoryacht it was set on is the one Ryan was a deckhand on and took across the Pacific.  He was on board during filming.  Today’s matinee session will be The Wire – a tv series we haven’t quite got into yet but are working on.