The Riddle of the Sands

⚖The case for it

A bored Foreign Office clerk gets a letter from a university acquaintance and ends up on a small yacht in the Frisian shallows with a man who cares about nothing but tides. Carruthers and Davies are the draw, prim against scruffy, and the friction turning into respect carries as much as the plot. Childers sailed that coast himself and kept logs, so the mudflats and channels have documentary weight, with the boat almost a third character. The book changed British naval policy before the war. One reader: “reads like an extended scene from Hitchcock.”

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

The sailing detail runs dense enough that non-sailing readers are “faced with walls and walls of text,” “filled with lots of sailing jargon,” and admit to skimming whole chapters as the price of admission. The opening fifty pages leave readers unsure what kind of book they are in. What follows is heavy on description and light on incident for most of its length, reducible for one reader to “sand, water, mud, cramped living conditions on small boats.” Carruthers and Davies stay thin outside their competence. The early London chapters carry casual imperial condescension.

— the honest librarian

6h

honest hours

9

sittings