Month: May 2025

Mutiny on the Bounty and Two Years Before the Mast—rousing sea yarns

Mutiny on the Bounty

By Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall

Published 1932

Read April 2025

Two Years Before the Mast

By Richard Henry Dana Jr

Published 1840

Read Jan 2024

This reader is discussing these two books together because of their similarities, especially as books about sailing vessels and their crews in the era of sextants and the stars as the only instruments. 

Richard Henry Dana Jr spent two years on a merchant ship sailing from Boston in 1834.  This book is a memoir of his journey.  This ship went along the eastern coast of South America and rounded the tip of South America at Cape Horn, and headed north to its destinations—-several ports along the California coast including  San Diego Bay, San Pedro Bay, Santa Barbara Channel, Monterey Bay, and San Francisco Bay. It’s goal: fill the ship with around 40,000 cow hides and deliver them back to Boston.  Getting to and from California was certainly a long adventure, but the ship spent over a year while in California, going up and down the coast gathering hides while some of the ship’s crew, including Dana, worked on land to help gather and process the hides. 

Mutiny on the Bounty is a historical fiction novel that retells the  events of the mutiny against Lieutenant William Bligh, commanding officer of the English ship HMS Bounty in 1789.  This ship’s goal was to retrieve breadfruit plants from Tahiti and return them to England.  The story is told by narrator Roger Byam, an officer, who is loosely based on actual crew member Peter Heywood.  Byam recounts his recruitment, life on the ship, and especially multiple episodes of brutal discipline ordered by Bligh throughout the trip.  Fletcher Christian, second in command of the ship, and several crewmembers took control of the ship while in port in Tahiti, and sent Bligh and eighteen of his officers off in a very heavily laden small ship.  Although odds were very much against Bligh and his small ship making it back to England, they do.  A ship is sent back to Tahiti to capture the perpetrators of the mutiny and bring them to justice.  Most of those actually part of the mutiny left Tahiti on the HMS Bounty with Fletcher and those remaining in Tahiti, including Byam, were not involved in the mutiny.  When the ship arrives in Tahiti, Byam and others volunteer information about the mutiny and were surprised that they were taken into custody, accused of mutiny, and taken to England to stand trial.  The mutiny occurs about 1/3 of the way through the novel, the rest of the novel recounting the situation of the men while they were resident on Tahiti, while they were held in custody, their trials in England, and what happens after these trials.

Both books are based on real events.  Both are told by a first-person narrator.  Both books describe what life is like on these sailing ships including great detail of various jobs of the crewmembers and their daily routines.  Both books recount the discipline ordered by their commanders, the severity of which varied by the specific commander.  Bligh’s approach was clearly must more severe than the two commanders whom Dana served.  Dana’s book provided more details of the costal geography and botanical and animal life.  Both books give information about the peoples and culture of the ports they visited.  Both narrators learned the language of the people resident in the island/coast they visited and provided translation for other ship members. 

These are books that this reader would likely not have encountered except that they were part of the program for her book discussion group.  This reader found the books generally engaging but reading the two books in each of two consecutive reading seasons felt a little repetitive.  As this reader’s son was deployed on a Navy ship, it was interesting to gain some insight about ship life.  Of course, the specific details in 1789/1840 are different than in 2024, many concepts are similar.  Dana’s book also provided this reader with a new understanding of the California coastal history.  By the time Dana was there, Spain no longer held sway, but Mexicans sent to settle the various cities still ruled them.  This reader is satisfied that she read them, but she does not intend to read the two other books in the Bounty trilogy. 

Demon Copperhead–Kingsolver knocks it out of the park with this one

Demon Copperhead

By Barbara Kingsolver

Published 2022

Read Aug 2023

This reader has not always been a fan of Barbara Kingsolver.  While her stories have been interesting, her novels have sometimes felt like a lecture, not unlike the feeling this author gets from Wendall Barry novels.  Hence this reader was a bit reluctant to invest in this novel as it’s a reasonably long one at 560 pages. 

This reader started this novel via an audiobook but was not sure the southern accent of the reader was something this reader wanted to endure.  So an e-book was obtained, and reading was restarted.  This reader eventually got used to the southern accent and moved seamlessly between  the audiobook and the e-book.

There is much comparison elsewhere about the clearly planned parallels with Dicken’s David Copperfield with respect to characters and types of challenges the narrator faces and will leave to others to discuss them in detail.  The primary one of interest to this reader is that both narrators end up orphaned and must endure growing up in the face of the challenges poised by the society of the times.  In this case, one huge challenge was the quagmire faced by many thrown into the foster childcare program of their local county.  In Demon’s case (using his nickname), his stepfather’s unexplained views of the family next door to Demon and his mother combined with their own strained resources and energy meant that Demond is forced into the foster childcare program.  His foster parents are not unlike many—the payment they receive in return for housing the child is a significant portion of their income.  In addition, Demon’s foster parents also rely on him for additional financial support either via his physical labor on their farm or by working outside the home and garnishing his wages.  His case workers’ very heavy caseloads are also not uncommon.

The novel is very engaging although at times heartbreaking.  The reader will hope that his football injury doesn’t lead to opiate addiction.  The reader will hope his relationship with a very troubled girl won’t lead to more difficulties for him.  This reader hoped that since Demon is the narrator, the book wouldn’t be finished by someone else relaying information of his death. 

An interesting aspect of the novel is the distinctions Demon sees between life in his rural community vs life in the big city where his neighbors’ daughter lives.  His neighbors take Demon and their grandson to see their daughter, June Peggot, and her niece, Emmy, where they stay for about a week (during which time Demon’s mother marries his stepfather who turns abusive shortly after the wedding).  The lack of the ability to grow your own vegetables and to just go outside easily are quite noteworthy to Demon.  June, an RN, and Emmy return to Lee County both to enjoy those attributes and to be away from a prejudicial environment against “country hicks”. 

This book is very engaging and generally free from the lecturing tone this reader experienced in some other of Kingsolver’s works.  As someone raised in a rural/small town county, this reader found her depiction of foster childcare was believable, her comments about country vs city lifestyles were appropriate and were not judgmental, and her general depiction of rural/small town life was accurate  .  The devastation of the opiate and general drug crisis, especially in this region of the country, was well described and again non-judgmental or exploitative. 

This reader’s book club found much to discuss and ran out of time to cover all the possible points to discuss.  Since this club meets for 2.5 hours, that’s something.

Lucy by the Sea—Strout’s pandemic novel–a good one!

Lucy by the Sea

By Elizabeth Strout

Published 2022

Read March 2023

By now you may be aware that this reader reads everything by Elizabeth Strout.  This essay’s posting date so long after its reading shouldn’t imply any negative connotations about this reader’s opinion of it—merely the usual problem of reading faster than the essays get written.

This novel continues our interaction with Lucy Barton.  She first appeared in My Name is Lucy Barton (2016) then in Anything is Possible (2017) and again in Oh William(2021).  Now we see Lucy Barton about 20 years after her divorce from Wiliam, her first husband of about 20 years, as a fairly newly widowed from her second husband, whom she adored, and at the very beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic.  William, divorced from his second wife, is a scientist and sees the writing on the wall regarding this new disease.  He convinces Lucy to go to a house he rented in Maine.  She’s reluctant to leave her beloved New York where her children reside.  She plans to take only her iPad, despite being a writer by occupation.  William packs her laptop as he knows this isn’t going to be as short a stay as Lucy imagines.

They settle into this rented house which is near Crosby, Maine, a town Strout readers have visited in other books.  In fact, their house is pretty near Bob Burgess’s place and Lucy and Bob become walking friends.  Other past characters have cameo appearances but reading any of the previous Strout books is unnecessary to appreciate this novel.

This book is definitely about the Covid-19 pandemic—how people approached it, their fears, their reaction to being cooped up in their homes, their longings for family and friends they aren’t seeing, etc.  But it also is a book like other Strout books—about relationships.  In this one, it’s about Lucy mourning her husband David, finding a new friend in Bob Burgess, worrying about her grown kids, and sharing living quarters with an ex-husband. 

It’s classic Elizabeth Strout and this reader enjoyed every word of it. 

Lady Chatterley’s Lover—Who has really read it?

Lady Chatterley’s Lover

By D.H. Lawrence

Published: privately in 1928, 1929, and 1930; edited version in the UK in 1932; first unexpurgated edition by Penguin House in the UK 1960

Read: June 2024

This novel is among those that everyone “knows” about but not so many have read.  Lawrence had to publish it privately to get it into the public’s hands.  A heavily edited version was published in the UK two years after Lawrence’s death.  It wasn’t until 1960 that an unexpurgated edition was published in the UK by Penguin House.  The publishing house was tried in a very public case for publishing obscenity but won and published a new edition in 1961.  The book was banned in many countries, including the US.  The US ban was overturned in 1959 and was read widely in the 1960’s as the US culture was undergoing a significant shift in its view of women and sex freedom. 

What made this book so appalling?  Two quotes found in the Wikipedia article on the book  (1) are quite telling: “I’ve not taken ten minutes on Lady Chatterley’s Lover, outside of looking at its opening pages. It is most damnable! It is written by a man with a diseased mind and a soul so black that he would obscure even the darkness of hell!”  (Senator Reed-Smoot in 1930) and “is this the kind of book “you would wish your wife or servants to read” (Mervyn Griffith-Jones, chief prosecutor in the Penguin House trial, 1960).   As usual, a banned book that hasn’t really been read and a paternalistic comment.  In the US trial, this book apparently established a standard of “redeeming social or literary merit” when assessing material to be banned as obscene. (1)

So what did this reader find when reading this potentially obscene novel nearly 100 years after it was published privately? 

In the opening chapter we learn that the protagonist, Lady Constance Chatterley (at that time just Connie), and her older sister had some sexual interactions with boys while they were teenagers.  So here in the first chapter is the first content considered objectionable—teenage girls having sex.  Not only that, but Connie also considered sex the least interesting aspect of her interaction with her lovers—the dialog with the boy being the most engaging.  And then Connie reflects on the sex act in ways a Senator Reed-Smoot may not have appreciated. 

Connie marries “up” to Sir Clifford Chatterley while he is home on leave and they have a month’s honeymoon.  Unfortunately, the honeymoon does not result in a pregnancy as desired by her father-in-law which is a problem as her husband returns from the Great War paralyzed from the waist down and impotent thus ending their sex life before it hardly started.  They move to his country estate, which is rather isolated, her only other human interactions with people who visit him, and the servants.  In time, her husband decides he would like to have an heir, and he tells her so.  The implication is clear—have sex with someone else—of acceptable class.    She eventually has an unsatisfactory affair with one of them. 

Eventually Connie meets her lover, the estate’s gamekeeper (not the gardener!).  The book does become much more steamy here as she moves from having sex done to her (with permission) to making love with her lover. 

Although this book is quite steamy at times, there is more going on in this book than that including expectations of parents for grandchildren, class issues, what’s right and wrong for men vs women. 

This reader looks forward to an interesting discussion of this book next season.