[Sailor Steve]

I finished Ludlum's Bourne trilogy, then dug into a trio of American classics: Shane, by Jack Schaefer and Zane Grey's Riders Of The Purple Sage and it's sequel, The Desert Crucible (originally published as The Rainbow Trail).

Now I'm back at sea: I stumbled across a copy of Nicholas Montserrat's The Cruel Sea. I'm loving the feel of the book; very few novels have made me feel like I'm really there. Interestingly, I've complained many times of Montserrat's attitude in his introduction to U-boat 977, which is of the "Don't believe a word they say, they were all die-hard Nazis" variety. In The Cruel Sea he goes out of his way to justify the attitude that they were all warriors doing their jobs. His descriptions of riding out gales in a little Flower-class corvette is truly amazing. Picture Das Boot's storm sequences, the major difference being you can't dive to get away from it.

His descriptions of the early convoy efforts are also quite dramatic. They suffer from a constant feeling of helplessness; they very rarely pick up a u-boat with the asdic or see one, mainly they spend their time picking up survivors. I'm currently in the middle of 1941, and so far the book is fantastic.