Around the Year in 52 Books discussion

The second of our multiweek trio "three books related to land, sea, and air"; you can find the other two here:
A book related to land: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...
A book related to air: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

How you connect the book to sea is up to you. Maybe it's a book about marine life, or a book that takes place on cruise, or a book about a ship captain, or maybe there are sea creatures on the cover. Sea-king the connection is part of the fun!

ATY Listopia https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/1...

What are you reading for this prompt?

I plan to read The Seafarers by Nevil Shute. He wrote the novella in the late 1940s but it was unpublished until 2002! I’ve enjoyed his other books.

I have quite a few candidates for this prompt. At the moment I'm leaning toward The Great Eastern.

I am planning to read Dragon Sea: A True Tale of Treasure, Archeology, and Greed off the Coast of Vietnam and A Study in Drowning, apparently set in a house crumbling into the sea.

I am doing character occupations for the land/sea/air prompts.

Farmer for land - Go as a River by Shelley Read
Lighthouse keeper for sea - The Lamplighters by Emma Stonex
Astronaut for air - In The Quick by Kate Hope Day

I'm going with The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder

I can also recommend
The House in the Cerulean Sea
The Starless Sea

I'm going to be reading Bonny & Read by Julie Walker, it's a fictionalised story of two real female pirates.

I have been wanting to read The Death and Life of the Great Lakes for a while now, because I live in the Great Lakes region. This category might finally be the push I need.

Nadine in NY wrote: "I have been wanting to read The Death and Life of the Great Lakes for a while now, because I live in the Great Lakes region. This category might finally be the push I need."

I read it because I live nearby too. It turned out to be one of the most interesting science books I ever read. Ever.

There was also an entertaining bit about Dr Seuss.

I have four possibilities in my TBR for this one:

The Girl Who Fell Beneath the Sea by Axie Oh
The Drowned World by J.G. Ballard
The Far Traveler: Voyages of a Viking Woman by Nancy Marie Brown
Gift from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh

A book I would highly recommend for this category:
The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty

I'm thinking I'll do a theme of animals who live in sea/air/on land and a book with a human interaction with those animals. That might totally change though.

I really enjoyed Remarkably Bright Creatures this year, and am thinking about Sea Change for this prompt.

I'm very much looking forward to The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese since my book club and I really enjoyed his last book (way back in 2009) - Cutting for Stone.

I'm planning to link the 3 related prompts with natural disasters. For this, I'm thinking hurricanes.

Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History
Sudden Sea: The Great Hurricane of 1938

Or if those don't suit me, maybe a shipwreck, Lusitania, Titanic, or I have In Harm's Way: The Sinking of the USS Indianapolis and the Extraordinary Story of Its Survivors

I'm planning to read Circe for this prompt. I have a lot of Greek mythology retellings on my list for next year and I have heard good things about this book. It will be my first book by the author.

How will I narrow it down?!

TOPICS/SETTINGS
- Tidelands by Philippa Gregory (marshy coastline)
- The Outrun: A Memoir by Amy Liptrot (island, sea swimming)
- The Water Cure by Sophie Mackintosh (island, men washing up on the beach)
- Sea Room: An Island Life in the Hebrides by Adam Nicolson (island)
- The Lamplighters by Emma Stonex (lighthouse keepers)
- The Trick to Time by Kit de Waal (seaside town)
- The Salt Path by Raynor Winn (costal path)

TITLES
- Island Beneath the Sea by Isabel Allende
- The House Between Tides by Sarah Maine
- Islands of Abandonment by Cal Flyn
- On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan

COVERS
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I just finished Looking Glass Sound for this prompt. Overall, I enjoyed it. It was a bit confusing at times, but all came together by the end. A very clever book. Slow-moving for me at times, but different than my usual pick, so glad I got out of my comfort zone!

I read The House Across the Lake. I know technically a lake is not the sea, so I'm reading this prompt more as land, water and air.

I definitely did not take it that literally. My 'sea' was the Atlantic Ocean, which they cross on a boat in The Luck of the Bodkins by P.G. Wodehouse.

I read The Woman in Cabin 10 which took place on a luxury cruise on the sea. This was a good mystery, psychological thriller.

I can very highly recommend The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics by Daniel James Brown. Excellent read! I never realized how physically taxing crew was! (The movie adaptation was pretty good, IMO, as well.)

I plan to reread Ship of Fools by Katherine Anne Porter after 54 years! I'm sure I missed much of the nuance of this book at 13! 😋

Gentleman Overboard- Herbert Clyde Lewis ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
The first unplanned book in 2024, but it has been available at my virtual library and so I grabbed it. The short novel about a New Yorker Investment Banker was quite impressive. Since he fell from a ship into the ocean, he overthinks his life and social expectations while waiting to be rescued.

For this prompt, I read:
Sea Wife by Amity Gaige - 4* - My Review

I'm going to read the Bookshop of Second Chances, the bookshop being located on the beach

Finally — I actually read the book I'd planned! The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese. I thoroughly enjoyed it, which is a good thing since it was 775 pages (Kindle page count)!

Ok, now that my longest planned book of the year has been read, maybe I can catch up on being up-to-date with 1 book per week on average (at least).

I've been reading through the Percy Jackson series, and the second book, The Sea of Monsters even has SEA in the title. So that's what I'm using.

I decided to go with a nature/adventure/travel theme for Land, Sea, and Air:

Land: Force of Nature: Three Women Tackle the John Muir Trail

Sea: The Brendan Voyage: A Leather Boat Tracks the Discovery of America by the Irish Sailor Saints

Air: Wind, Sand and Stars

The book I chose for this prompt

short and sweet review: 4.0
I listen to this book in one day. I wanted this book to be great, a book that I can't stop thinking about. It was a good book. This book will hit home for teens and YA, Tilla was a child so I can't say her actions made me mad. She was just a girl who wanted to be loved by her dad. And as a typical man without emotions, he proved her right.

I read The Wager: A tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder by David Grann. Also will use the cover for green or blue spring rainbow when I figure out which color it is

I read The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith. Most of it takes place in a small coastal town in Italy near the beach, with another chunk of the book taking place in Venice.

Because it came up as a group read, I read All Sail Set: A Romance of the Flying Cloud by Armstrong Sperry. It was fictional in the sense that it was about a fictional boy working as an apprentice seaman, but was a real ship--I just wish that the author had included the real navigator since he had the real captain, because it was his wife.

I read:
In Harm's Way: The Sinking of the USS Indianapolis and the Extraordinary Story of Its Survivors by Doug Stanton

BIO: Three books with something in common (All non-fiction)
REJECT: A book related to one of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse (War)

Finished: 04/10/2024
Rating: 5 stars!

A excellent account of a tragic incident from WWll.

Jennifer W wrote: "I'm planning to link the 3 related prompts with natural disasters. For this, I'm thinking hurricanes.


I just finished In Harm's Way: The Sinking of the USS Indianapolis and the Extraordinary Story of Its Survivors and I highly recommend it!

Sea on the cover

✔ - 12Jan24
One Italian Summer – Rebecca Serle – 3***
Katy has always been very close to her mother, Carol, and when her mother dies Katy is left feeling alone, abandoned and lost. At her husband’s suggestion, Katy decides to take the trip to Italy she and Carol had planned. I was fine with this story at the outset, though I thought Katy was very immature for a woman who is thirty. It held my attention, and it was a relatively fast read. But I’m not sure I’d recommend it.
LINK to my full review

I read The Wishing Game. For these mulit week prompts I am going with books where the cover is a fit in some way and the letters of the word are in the title.

For this prompt I read:

Adrift: A True Story of Love, Loss, and Survival at Sea. It was pretty good. It's a true story of a girl in the 80's that got stuck at sea by herself for 41 days. I rated it 3 stars.

I read Florence Adler Swims Forever. It was sad. 4 stars.

I read A Sea-Chase by Roger McDonald for this prompt. The book revolves around a group of friends with a passion for sailing the waters off Sydney & the wider Pacific (Read May 18th; 3*)

I read Secrets Of Hoi An: Vietnam's Historic Port. It was interesting to learn something of the history of Vietnam other than the war. I'm always amazed by how much sea trading went on in the ancient world.

I also read Risingtidefallingstar, a collection of essays about the sea, encompassing whales, poetry, Cape Cod and the southern coast of England.

I am reading The Shipyard Girls by Nancy Revell

I read Holy Island an island separated from the mainland by a tidal causeway. A series fo macabre murders take place there. Their investigation hampered by the tidal nature of the land

I have on order from the library: . I'm so curious about the science of consciousness, and I've picked up the idea (documentary, maybe?) that the Octopus is intelligent. 🐙

For those who like YA, I'd recommend Liberty's Daughter by Naomi Kritzer for this prompt. Set in a "seastead" off the coast of California. It was a 4* book for me, and is also quite a quick read.

Trish wrote: "For those who like YA, I'd recommend Liberty's Daughter by Naomi Kritzer for this prompt. Set in a "seastead" off the coast of California. It was a 4* book for me, and is also quit..."




That looks interesting! I've never heard of that author, but I always find SFF set on floating islands or archipelagos or whatever to be really intriguing. I should probably create a GR shelf for myself just to track this sort of book

I read by Judith Hermann, set at the German North Sea.

Task #28 ~ A book related to sea

~ ♞ ~


The Secret Book of Flora Lea by Patti Callahan Henry
Read ~ 7.11.24
Pages ~ 355
Rationale ~ Flora is presumed drowned in the local river at age six years old. The river is on the cover of the book. Rivers flow to the sea as a general rule - eventually.

Rating ~ ★★★★

I love shipwreck novels. Five stars for the gripping tale of terror on the high seas in The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder by David Grann.

I read The Woman Who Walked into the Sea by Mark Douglas-Home

28. A book related to sea
I absolutely loved my read for the "sea": . Five star ratings are rare for me. This book touched me so. Real characters working through the strife of bigotry. It's a magical world where magical children & people are marginalized. They have to register. They are feared and housed away from others, even confined to suffer. The island is a refuge. And a non-magical man learned how to make a stand! How to believe in his own goodness and the goodness and potential of magical children.

I read the Danish dystopian classic Termush by Sven Holm. It’s set in a seaside resort. The sea is mentioned several times and they go out on it on a yacht.

I read The Islands by Emily Brugman.

This book is mainly set in the Abrolhos islands 80 km off the coast of Western Australia. In the mid 1950's, Omni and Alva migrated from Finland to Australia. Omni took up a cray fishing licence on the island, joining the group of Finnish fishermen who were already there.
The sea plays a major role in this well written debut novel, which was a 5 star read for me.