Ten books for the sea
A voyage is the oldest plot device in fiction: it puts a character somewhere with no way back. These ten books use ships, rivers and islands to test what people are willing to do when the land is out of sight.
The list
- Moby-Dick — Herman Melville, 1851. A novel that refuses to stay a novel: part adventure, part encyclopedia, part sermon.
Read free at Project Gutenberg · print edition on Amazon - Lord Jim — Joseph Conrad, 1900. Conrad's best full-length novel about shame, and a masterpiece of indirect narration.
Read free at Project Gutenberg · print edition on Amazon - Treasure Island — Robert Louis Stevenson, 1883. The template for every treasure map since, told by a narrator who is allowed to be scared.
Read free at Project Gutenberg · print edition on Amazon - Kidnapped — Robert Louis Stevenson, 1886. A historical adventure with real politics underneath, and one of the best friendships in fiction.
Read free at Project Gutenberg · print edition on Amazon - Robinson Crusoe — Daniel Defoe, 1719. The founding novel of English adventure, and a document of how a solitary mind organises survival.
Read free at Project Gutenberg · print edition on Amazon - Gulliver's Travels — Jonathan Swift, 1726. The cruellest and most inventive satire in English, and still the best argument against complacency.
Read free at Project Gutenberg · print edition on Amazon - The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket — Edgar Allan Poe, 1838. Poe's strange, unfinished sea novel: uneven, influential and genuinely unsettling.
Read free at Project Gutenberg · print edition on Amazon - The Innocents Abroad — Mark Twain, 1869. The funniest travel book of the nineteenth century, and a useful antidote to reverence.
Read free at Project Gutenberg · print edition on Amazon - The Aran Islands — John Millington Synge, 1907. A travel memoir that doubles as a writer's notebook, and the source of Synge's stage language.
Read free at Project Gutenberg · print edition on Amazon - Heart of Darkness — Joseph Conrad, 1899. A hundred pages that changed how English fiction writes about certainty and distance.
Read free at Project Gutenberg · print edition on Amazon
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