Beautiful Swimmers

Watermen, Crabs and the Chesapeake Bay
by William Warner

This book got boring. It's pretty much what the subtitle says: all about watermen, the crabs they catch and local history regarding crabbing on the Chesapeake Bay (also details on oysters, and the herring used for bait, waterbirds and a few other related things). I liked the parts about the life cycle and behavior of the crabs. They seem like fairly smart animals for a crustacean, and some of the details of their lives are pretty interesting. All the other stuff about exactly how the watermen go about catching crabs, whether by pots or trotline, with descriptions of every bit of equipment that left me just as unfamiliar with it as I was before I never knew it existed, started to really dull my brain. Then there's plethora of details on how crabs are processed, how restaurants serve them, how local people cook them in their own homes, etc etc. Really, if you're fascinated by crabbing or by the locale, I'm sure you'd like this book with all its minutiae. But it just lost me on page 187 (a shame, I got so far!). Beautiful Swimmers even won the Pulitzer Prize in 1977, so by no means take my abandonment of it as the last word. It's just not keeping the interest of this reader.

I've had this book on my TBR for ages; not quite sure how it got there. I tried to read it for my TBR challenge but guess I'm going to have to reach for another title.

Abandoned ......... 304 pages, 1976

More opinions at:
Out of the Woods
Words, words words
anyone else?