I have read a handful of good books this past year. The one currently on my nightstand is The World of Lore: Monstrous Creatures, by Aaron Mahnke. Mahnke also hosts Lore, a popular podcast and now an Amazon Prime TV series. There are now two additional Lore novels – Dreadful Places and Wicked Mortals. It has become a multimedia franchise and it all revolves around real-life stories that are both haunting and terrifying. The content is the stuff of nightmares, made even more horrifying by the fact that these are true stories, albeit mostly unexplainable. From ghosts to gremlins, zombies to Mothman, the book has been a fun and chilling read. I’m looking forward to finishing up the book and exploring the other books, podcast, and Amazon series.
The book prior to that I finished was Pirate Hunters, by Robert Kurson, a non-fiction story about a pair of deep-sea treasure hunters in their search for the elusive Golden Fleece, a pirate ship captained by the infamous Joseph Bannister. The ship was subsequently lost after a battle with the British during the Golden Age of Piracy (seventeenth century) when Bannister and his crew were able to fight off two English warships, an unheard-of feat at the time. The book is a fascinating tale about Bannister, his ship, and the Golden Age of Piracy, but also focuses on the two main divers, John Mattera and John Chatterton, whose own backgrounds and life stories are as compelling as the plot of the story. While I enjoyed Kurson’s first book more, Shadow Divers (which also features Chatterton), this was a great read for anyone who likes adventure and intrigue.
My favorite book of the summer was The Hooker in the Lobby, by Paul Treyvaud. A little backstory to how I even came to obtain the book – my wife and family were in Ireland in the summer of 2017 celebrating my birthday. My wife’s birthday happened to fall on a day when we were in a town called Killarney. That morning, I was looking for a great restaurant to take my wife and the rest of the family to, and I found a place called Treyvaud’s in downtown Killarney. I made a reservation and we dined that night, and it was one of the best meals we had during our trip. The owners of the restaurant are Paul and his brother Mark, the latter taking care of us that night. Before we left, Mark gave me his brother’s book, discovering I was an author after looking up my email address ([email protected]) when I made the reservation that morning. It took me a year to get to the book, but it was a fun, fantastic read – totally stream-of-consciousness, profane, honest, blunt, laugh-out-loud funny, and sincere. It was about Paul’s rise in the hospitality industry after college, and probably a story I would not have picked out myself. But I absolutely loved it, and I need to send the brothers Treyvaud my trilogy as a ‘thank you.’ I recommend their fine restaurant and the book – take it as a package deal, it is well worth it.
This year, I also read Fellside, a novel by M.R. Carey, the same author who wrote The Girl With All the Gifts, which became a major motion picture (I need to read the book and see the movie, both of which I heard were excellent). Fellside is set in a maximum-security prison in the English moors where Jess Moulson, a disfigured inmate who was sentenced to Fellside after starting a fire while high on heroin, killing her 10-year-old neighbor, Alex, finds herself. Alex’s ghost visits her in prison, assuring her that she did not kill him and asking her to solve his murder. Jess must navigate a prison population ruled by a psychopathic inmate and a corrupt prison guard while bestowed the ‘gift’ of being able to walk through other inmates’ dreams in order to solve Alex’s murder. I thought the story was good, although not as satisfying as I hoped at the end, with a couple loose ends never properly tied up. But overall, a pretty entertaining read.
So my best for last. My favorite book I read this past year was The Wave, by Susan Casey. As the subtitle suggests, the author was on a relentless pursuit of the rogue waves and freaks that dominate the oceans and decimate towns and villages. I absolutely loved this book. Casey’s book is exhaustively researched and her story is well-told. It was a book I had a hard time putting down. Casey accompanied extreme surfers such as legendary surfer Laird Hamilton and others to such remote and exotic surf locations as “Jaws” in Hawaii, Teahupoo in Tahiti, “Mavericks” and “Ghost Tree” outside San Francisco, and Cortes Bank near San Diego and Baja Mexico. But what makes this book so outstanding for me was the science behind it – Casey interviewed a myriad number of scientists about the oceans and our changing climate, and how this may only increase extreme waves around the world. Climate change is a focal point of the book, with most every scientist interviewed pointing to climate change as the reason for these extreme events. She even visited Lituya Bay where a 1,740-foot wave destroyed part of the Alaskan coastline in 1958, and Lloyd’s of London, who maintain a comprehensive database of ships lost at sea. For anyone fascinated by the ocean and the science impacting it, surfing, or if you just want a page-turner, this is the book for you. I might have to read it again.