Bookswaps

Saturday 28th February 2009, day 224. 14° 05’.51 N, 060° 57’.87 W. Jambe de Bois café, Pigeon Island, Rodney Bay, St Lucia

Cruising sailors live for book swaps (as well as cheap rum, good internet connections, and a fresh ear to listen to their salty tales). In yacht clubs, launderettes, cafés and marina offices you can find piles of books left behind by previous voyagers – available for the simple price of depositing a book of your own. All books have the same value in a book swap: you can put in Barbara Cartland and take out Anthony Burgess; bring a pristine hardback, and leave with a dog-eared, salt water- and coffee-stained Penguin. The quality of the stock is, to put it mildly, variable. Cocooned till now by our lack of reading time, we have lived in the safe world of classics, succès d’estime and recommendations from the books pages of the weekend papers; we had no idea that such a vast quantity of formulaic fiction is published in the categories of romance, thrillers and detective novels.

So we fell on the Jambe de Bois café library with enthusiasm. It has one of the best selections we’ve found, a room full of books of every type: classics, modern novels, a section on hinduism, three shelves of French and German books, a cat to twine itself round your ankles while you browse the shelves … and evidence that some tiny creatures have the same voracious appetite for printed paper as us. One of our chosen books had been bored right through, leaving a trail like a codling moth in an apple; an infestation of metaphorical book worms would be welcome, but we were not quite sure what sort of beast we would be inviting on board – or how fast it would multiply. On the other hand … The Magus, Hotel New Hampshire and I Claudius … not to be rejected lightly.

I took them off the shelves, thumbed them through, shook them out, put them back reluctantly, turned to leave, turned back again, dusted some more fluff off the pages, inspected the cat for obvious fleas, dithered some more, tempted and tormented in equal measure by the anticipated pleasures and the potential horrors lying within

In the end, I couldn’t resist, brought them back, doused them with fly spray and baked them in the oven (10 minutes, 100°C, if you want the recipe). We shall see what is forthcoming.