The Hen Who Sailed Around the World by Guirec Soudee is the true story of Soudee’s 3,400-mile sea voyage with his pet hen, Monique. That pretty much sums up the story. There are lots of wonderful photographs of Soudee with Monique. And lots of wonderful photographs of Monique by herself. Not to mention lots of wonderful photographs of some of the friends they meet along the way. And we cannot forget the lots and lots of photographs of ice. Lots and lots of ice. The […]
How to be a bad-ass in 1914
I’ve been reading a lot of grim and/or heavy books lately, or grad school textbooks (snooooore), so Girl Waits with Gun was an excellent reminder that books can be fun. I fell madly in love with Constance by page five, and spent the rest of the book wishing we could be best friends. The three Kopp sisters (Constance, stolid Norma, shallow Fleurette) live on a farm in New Jersey in 1914. It’s unusual at the time for women to be left totally to their own […]
No one will ever know
I have, for whatever reason, a deep fascination with disasters and mysteries at sea. To the point that I’ve even watched several Really Bad™ ocean salvage movies (Ghost Ship [No relation] and Lost Voyage, I’m looking at you). And yes, I also saw Titanic. But that’s not my point. I do not spend a lot of time on the ocean, haven’t been on a boat in years (and haven’t been out of the breakwater on a boat or ship even longer ago than that), and […]
Escape from Shangri-la
I was so bummed when I read badkittyuno’s review last year and realized that, since it was an audiobook, I couldn’t immediately borrow Lost in Shangri-La. “At two o’clock in the afternoon it was time to go. As the passengers lined up outside the Gremlin Special, Prossen told them to expect the tour to last three hours.” In May of 1945 a morale-boosting plane ride crashed over an unexplored Dutch New Guinea valley servicemen called Shangri-la. Three survivors emerged from the crash: a lieutenant whose […]