Starting a Delaware Cape Region book club

Book clubs are everywhere and that’s awesome in my opinion.  People are reading more than ever and hopefully that means they are more informed than ever.  Regardless, reading is a wonderful way to pass time and people in the midst of corona are all over it.  

So, what are you reading that’s good?  Let me know and I’ll tell others.  Drop me a note at dennisforney@capegazette.com.  Tell me what you’re reading, why you like it, and tell me the best book you ever read and why.  Sharing is a good thing.

Right now I’m halfway through a classic from the middle 1800s:  Richard Henry Dana Jr.’s ‘Two Years Before The Mast.’  John might have given me that one.  It looks like something that might have been kicking around a blacksmith shop for a few decades.  Cover falling off and yellow pages. If you like sailing and history you’ll love this book. If you like Scrabble you’ll learn a whole lot of usable new words related to sailing aboard big old sailing vessels. Stuff like steveing - the root of stevedores - and how it relates to maximizing the loading of cured hides - and any other kind of cargo - in the holds of vessels that worked the mid-1800s coastal ports of a developing California.  Top gallants, forecastles, reeving and belaying and flogging.  It’s all fascinating.

Here’s a paragraph  from the book that could be used to market the Cape Gazette. It comes after a packet of letters and newspapers has been brought aboard a ship and distributed to the sailors: 

“No one has ever been on distant voyages and after a long absence received a newspaper from home, who cannot understand the delight that they give one.  I read every part of them – the houses to let; things lost or stolen; auction sales, and all. Nothing carries you so entirely to a place, and makes you feel so perfectly at home, as a newspaper.”

So that’s an old classic I had never read.  Good writing, good reading, good history and good story-telling, in the tradition of sailors spinning yarns.

Becky is reading American Dirt, a recommendation from Jay I think.  She says it’s a great read.  Compelling and engaging. Mexican drug cartels and a personal story thread through that dark world.

Mary sent me Steinbeck in Vietnam for my birthday a while back.  He’s such good writer of course and this is a collection of columns written for a New York newspaper during the Vietnam war.  The columns make for excellent short reads before you fall asleep at night or before you crawl out of bed in the morning.  Illuminating and they show a gradual evolution about his views toward the war as his time in Vietnam wore on.

Albert recommended Tony Horwitz’s A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World, so I read it and learned a helluva lot about the factual, mythical, and not-so-factual stories about the early explorations and development of this nation. 

So, there’s a start. Join the Delaware Cape Region Book Club and let me know what’s good and why.  Always looking for a good read.