Safe As Milk

Upon arriving at the beach a couple weeks ago, I picked up my pre-ordered copy of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell. I haven’t finished it. If/when I do, I’ll let you know what I think. My intial impressions are that it’s big and written in a very “English” style. Not ye olde Enflish or anything like that. Just that the sentence construction is more British than American. It’s not an easy read.

Anyway, I started it on Saturday and was only 100 pages in by midday Tuesday. I realzied that I likely wasn’t going to finish it at the beach and that wouldn’t do. I have to finish something when I spend a week at the beach. Last year I came to the beach halfway through Harry Potter 3 and finished it, three other books, and started a fourth & fifth.

So I set JS&MN aside and picked up Shadow Divers by Robert Kurson. It had received strongly favorable reviews in the NYT and the Post. It’s nonfiction about some recreational shipwreck divers who dive to an unknown object 60 miles off the coast of New Jersey. The object is very deep, deeper than 98% of divers can reach. They find an unidentifiable U-Boat that, according to the American and German governments, shouldn’t be there. The book is about the divers’ quest to identify the wreck.

It’s a great book. It has all the prequisites for a good fiction drama, with the added bonus of being true. There’s conflict, despair, death, and redemption. And in the end, the book wasn’t what I thought it was about. Not in an M. Night Shymalan “gotcha” way or anything like that. I just realized halfway through that I was reading a different story than I had expected. And it’s a great story. I’ll leave the nature of the true story up to you.

It’s well-written and interestingly structured. The author tells you what you need to know about deep wreck diving, but writes it for the layman. I definitely recommend it.