100 books like Cascade

As if a plague of memory loss that eventually makes you forget how to breathe isn’t scary enough, Cutter takes us deep under the ocean, to a lab where something has gone terribly wrong with our potential saviors. This is the most claustrophobic book I’ve ever read. You can feel the crushing weight of the water and the dark just outside the lab’s walls. There’s a wonderful sort of madness to the whole thing, and one scene, in particular, continues to haunt me.

Tightwads on the Loose is another honest and well-written account of a couple’s ups and downs, in this case while cruising in the Pacific for seven years; only one year less than my husband and I traveled on our sailboat.

This enticing story also has a lot of parallels with my life: the couple’s age, their sense of adventure, their frugal means, their full-time commitment to their boat for many years, their need to make money, and some of the geographical and cultural experiences. Recognizing experiences and personality traits while reading this book made me enjoy it better.

Luckily, Wendy and her partner did not have to endure numerous dramatic life-altering events. Tightwads on the Loose is an easy-to-read sailing memoir that I highly recommend. 

A true story of love, loss, and survival at sea. The author’s book cover pretty much tells the true story. There you see two lovers, their heads bowed, and below their profiles the wreckage of a dismasted sailboat, a solitary female figure searching the now calm but empty horizon—the aftermath of pounding rain, gigantic seas, and 140-knot winds. One critic wrote, "this book is life-affirming, a saga of human survival, a tale of loss and victory, proof of the resilience of the human spirit." I totally agree. Be ready to shed a tear or two and maybe read all night. Hollywood made a movie of this book, so it must be a good read.

For the uninitiated sailor, the definition of terms at the back matter is excellent, and learn what happens to a 44’ sailboat in a hurricane. It ain’t pretty, but it is inspiring.

Imagine, if you will: the world’s tallest mountain suddenly appears in the middle of the ocean. Where did it come from? What is its purpose? And what happens when dumb, curious humans (a natural but very dangerous combination) decide to go investigate?

They certainly don’t have fun! But the reader will because this horror novel is so wonderfully weird that I was gobsmacked by the time I finished. You can’t be sad when you’re wondering if there are monsters in the snow…

A book that falls between Lummis and Steinbeck chronologically is William Francis Butler’s The Wild North Land: Being the Story of a Winter Journey, with Dogs, Across Northern North America, an account of his retracing of the route of the 18th-century Scottish explorer Alexander McKenzie who traversed much of Canada from Lake Chipewyan in Alberta to the Pacific Ocean. Butler had a dog team whose leader was Cerf-Vola, who distinguished himself for his sagacity and strength. Ultimately, Butler retired him from sled duty to dog companion. That relationship did not prevent Butler from giving the dog to an acquaintance when he returned to England, saying that it broke his heart when he had to lay aside his emotions for “the sterner stuff of civilization.”

A small lifeboat is spotted off the coast of Chile in 1821, below the gunnels skeletal men cling to a pile of human bones. Nathaniel Philbrick opens his National Book Award-winning story with an almost incomprehensibly brutal scene and rarely takes a breath for the remaining 300-odd pages. Considered to be the inspiration for Herman Melville's Moby Dick, In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex is the true story of a ship stove in by a whale in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, and the harrowing survival of some of its crew. 

Lino Olopai is a Carolinian elder in the community and also a friend. In fact, I ran into him this morning (the very day I write this summary) at about 6:30 am while I was jogging on the beach. The beachfront land beneath Lino's simple home has been in his family for generations, and because of that, he has refused to sell despite offers from corporate concerns and developers. Lino is also of a lineage with privileged knowledge of celestial navigation. He could set sail on nothing but a raft and—using the stars, waves, and movement of sea creatures as signposts—navigate hundreds of miles over the vast Pacific ocean to other islands! The Rope of Tradition is an account and knowledge that must be shared and preserved.

While the early death of Meriwether Lewis is one of the tragic events related to the Expedition, no story is more poignant than that of York, William Clark’s slave, who was one of the twenty-eight men who made the complete journey from St. Louis to the Pacific coast and back. In many ways, this touching book tells the story of slavery itself, covering such topics as York’s fine service on the Expedition, his youth as a slave to the Clark family, his marriage, his falling out with Clark, his demotion from body servant to hired-out slave, his forced separation from his wife, his eventual freedom, and his understandable failure in the freight business—in a world where freed slaves were viewed with considerable suspicion. The sad heritage of slavery thus left its mark on the Expedition, just as it did the entire history of the United States.

It is the dream of many indigenous residents of Saipan, Tinian, and Rota to visit—at least once during a lifetime—the remote "northern islands" of the 400-mile archipelago that comprises the Mariana Islands. High school student Dennis Chan fulfilled that dream as his prize for winning an essay contest. The contest—and the winner's participation in a week-long, first-of-its-kind ocean expedition—was timed to coincide with the Bush administration's designation of a 95,000sqare mile swath of the Western Pacific Ocean as an official Marine National Monument. Dennis, with the help of activist and blogger Angelo Villagomez, chronicled and published Our Northern Islands, an account (with photos) of the team's once-in-a-lifetime adventure!

Edward P. Stafford’s superb “biography” of the aircraft carrier Enterprise (CV-6) captured my attention two years after publication in 1962 because the ship was at war from Pearl Harbor onward. 

I read and re-re-read my paperback copy from high school onward, including a cross-country train trip. It is so well written that Stafford’s style imprinted itself in my subconscious. Thereafter I came to know dozens of “Big E” aircrews and sailors leading up to my own history of “The Fightingest Ship” in 2012.  

Ed Stafford and I agreed that the world needs a new Enterprise book every 50 years!