Reading Still Matters

One of my favourite subjects to read about is adventure at sea, from shipwrecks, treasure hunts to voyages of discovery.  I am from the prairies of Canada, so the ocean is always fascinating.  And so Neptune's Fortune: The Billion-Dollar Shipwreck and the Ghosts of the Spanish Empire by Julian Sancton was exactly the kind of book I like to pick up.  Neptune’s Fortune is a non-fiction page turner that tells the story of Roger Dooley’s a 30-year obsession to find the San José. Buy it on Amazon:  https://amzn.to/4vHbxGQ The San Jose was a Spanish galleon that sunk in 1708 off the coast of Colombia near its destination port of Cartagena. And it was loaded with a massive treasure of silver and gold extracted from the mines and people of south America by force. The San Jose was that Spanish treasure ship that every explorer wanted to find. Basically, this ship was the holy grail of treasure ships.   Rumored to be full of gold and silver at the time it sailed, the ...

So I just completed my second Erik Larson book - the first being Dead Wake . And honestly, I was pretty excited to read Devil in the White City because I did enjoy Dead Wake quite a lot, and I had heard a number of good things about Devil in the White City . The questions for me were whether I would like Devil in the White City and whether I am going to enjoy reading all of Larson's book. My logic is simple - if I enjoy the first two books of his that I read then I am going to enjoy them all.  Buy it on Amazon:  https://amzn.to/4eaoOjV So Devil in the White City was an excellent work, I really enjoy his compelling but clean writing style. He is often compared to novelists, and I think that's fair. What he really does well is put the reader in the shoes of the people he is writing about. Now, the fact that he does this well may not be something everyone likes. For those history purists who don't like the liberties of imagination that are necessary to write this way may...