Cool summer reads rated 'Arrrrr'
Cool summer reads rated 'Arrrrr'
The people closest to me are well aware of my position on summer heat.
I am against it. It makes me wilt, and I try to spend as much time out of it as possible. Air conditioning is my sanctuary.
So are cool books that replenish my will to live, when I come home after a long day. The library, too, is my sanctuary.
But whether your temperature tolerance sends you chilling in a cool cavernous abode or basking on the beach, your requisite reading, once you've finished "The DaVinci Code," should definitely be the works of Gideon Defoe.
Defoe, you see, has two titles to his name — 2004's "The Pirates! In An Adventure with Scientists," and its 2005 sequel, "The Pirates! In An Adventure with Ahab." And only two titles, although the back of my library copy of "Ahab" suggests there are many more than there actually are, with fiction titles including "The Pirates! In An Adventure with Chess," "The Pirates! In An Adventure with Catastrophe Theory," "The Pirates! In An Adventure with Lingerie," and "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Pirates."
Ahhhhh. Bask in the thrill of someone who writes great literature simply by doing everything he can to avoid writing even respectable literature. Defoe penned the first book in an effort to convince a woman to stop seeing her boyfriend and go out with him. As the author's description on the inside back jacket woefully affirms, he was unsuccessful in this attempt.
See? You're already chuckling, if not guffawing outright, and we haven't even cracked the inside of the book.
Defoe's pirates are wonderfully goofy, mostly childlike and hilariously inept. Led by the heroic Pirate Captain, a figure for whom no small task is worth doing and no ham worth not consuming, none of the shanty-loving seamen have names, and are instead referred to as "the pirate with a scarf," "the pirate with an accordion," and "the pirate who was always getting nosebleeds."
The plot? They go on adventures. In Defoe's books, the destination is irrelevant; you simply swashbuckle up for the voyage and giggle. A lot.
This is a world in which the Pirate Captain avoids certain sectors of the globe because of the picture of the sea serpent on his map. This is a world where a woman asks John Merrick, a.k.a. The Elephant Man, if he got his powers by being bitten by a radioactive elephant. This is a world where the pirates try to cheer up the "Moby Dick" crew with a plate of mashed potatoes designed to look like the white whale himself. This is a world where the pirates, already disguised as scientists and planning to disguise themselves as women in order to unfurl a nefarious scheme, voice their discomfort about having to throw that costume over the previous layer of costume, which sits on top of their regular everyday pirate get-ups.
This is a world in which I want to live, and you will too, if you have any semblance of a sense of humor and an appreciation for horrible, horrible jokes. I took these books out to a premier Moses Lake restaurant on a day when the heat was particularly atrocious, and probably embarrassed myself by laughing really hard, but the hilarity of the books made me not care. They're that good, to bring one to defy the politer rules of society.
I'll leave you with this telling response from our heroic Pirate Captain after that other figure of great seafaring literature, Captain Ahab, has informed him that a whale is responsible for Ahab's ivory leg:
"A whale made you a prosthetic leg?" exclaimed the Pirate Captain, a little incredulously. "But how? They don't have hands, do they? Just little flippers."
You're feeling cooler already, aren't you?
The pirate with the business and agriculture reporter job, Matthew Weaver, has not yet gone to see the "Pirates of the Caribbean" sequel because he fears a drop in quality from the original movie.
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