The Central Pacific - Pacific Crossing Notes: A Sailor's Guide to the Coconut Milk Run - page 295

Trash or Treasure? The Sailor's Book
Swap
I was prepared for South Pacific cruising in every way: not only was my sloop low in the
water with weeks of supplies, but my electronic reader was filled to its two gigabyte brim.
Yet I still found myself inexplicably drawn to book exchanges - serendipitous treasure
troves of dusty reading for those long, tropical evenings under a thousand and one stars.
Even Suwarrow boasted a thriving book exchange, despite being a tiny speck of land hun-
dreds of miles from - well, the next tiny speck of land in the vast, watery Pacific. Perhaps
Suwarrow boasts such a well-stocked book swap because of (and not despite) being such
an isolated place.
On second thought, “well-stocked” might not be the best descriptor for a cruiser's book ex-
change. It's more of a mixed bag, in the words of Tom Neale, who brought Suwarrow
minor fame with his memoir of solitary atoll living, An Island to Oneself . Neale took one
glance at the castaway books he found and “decided that half of them were not worth read-
ing at all - a decision I reversed after a year when I was only too glad to read anything .”
Indeed, some of the faded paperbacks on Suwarrow today look as if Tom Neale himself
might have thumbed through them back in the 1950s.
After all, sailors do not abandon their cherished copies of Joshua Slocum to the merciless
pits of book swaps; they ditch the forgettable flotsam and jetsam of the literary world. But
among the outdated cruising guides and marine supply catalogs, a few masterpieces lay
secreted away. Of course, there's a catch: the worthwhile reads are usually in a rather ob-
scure foreign language, such as Ernest Hemingway's classic Hvem ringer klokkerne for
( For Whom the Bell Tolls - in Danish), or Ian Fleming's Dutch bestseller, In Dienst van
Hare Majesteit ( On Her Majesty's Secret Service ).
The jettisoned English-language titles, on the other hand, run the gamut from outrageously
unbelievable spy novels (“a final showdown with an enemy more sinister and deadly than
has ever been seen before”), John Grisham bestsellers (“Just released!” - in 1997), and
gushing romance novels (“Now she must flee - and seek refuge in the arms of a virile and
dangerous stranger”). It's like visiting a public library stocked not by a prim, conservative
professional, but by a hairdresser's miniature poodle.