Consider, for example, the following quote:įor nearly forty million years the first island struggled in the bosom of the sea, endeavoring to be born as observable land. Michener makes history read like a novel (undoubtedly he’s imagined it his own way), and is just as eloquent as his fictionally-inclined contemporaries – if not more so. Anybody who knows me knows that I love boats and shipwrecks and deserted islands and ocean stories, so the first two hundred pages or so were right up my alley. The second book ( From the Sun-Swept Lagoon) was by far my favorite, as it follows a group of thirty or so Bora Borans as they leave their home island and travel 2,000 miles north to an unknown destination IN A FRIGGIN’ CANOE.
Because it’s such a lengthy piece of work, it’s split into six different ‘books.’ Hawaii begins with the prehistoric formation of the Hawaiian islands, and carries the reader all the way through the 1950s (it couldn’t go any farther, because it was written in 1959). When I did grudgingly crack this book open, it didn’t take me long to realize that I should have done so weeks before. I’m always skeptical of non-fiction, because it can be so painfully dry. I had the good fortune to start reading Hawaii while I was actually living on Maui, My mom sent me this book without telling me she had (nice move, Mom), and when it arrived, I was a little bit skeptical.
For every hundred pages of thrilling ocean voyage, there’s another hundred pages on the economy of pineapples. It’s fascinating, it’s captivating, it’s vividly written – but it’s also incredibly dense. It’s a thousand onion-skin pages of tiny, tiny words, crammed full of history and conjecture. That being said, it took me almost a month to finish James A. The unabridged Les Mis is one of my favorites. Let’s be clear: Big books don’t scare me.
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