Books like 438 Days — picked by fans

This is a breathless ocean adventure to Mexico, chock-full of international intrigue, a deadly hurricane, and a lovesick whale courting Civil Engineer Hetta Coffey’s yacht.

I laughed out loud at the hilarious antics of zany but lovable characters. Give me a madcap escapade featuring a macho rent-a-Captain with Lucy and Ethel as the crew, on a cruise where whatever could go wrong would go wrong.

I loved the snappy, spicier-than-hot salsa dialogue and snarky banter between sassy Hetta and Jan, her BFF. Add a plot that runs at a breakneck pace, and I bought myself a ticket for a rollercoaster-worthy wild ride that was more fun than whacking a piñata.  

As if a plague of memory loss that eventually makes you forget how to breathe isn’t scary enough, Cutter takes us deep under the ocean, to a lab where something has gone terribly wrong with our potential saviors. This is the most claustrophobic book I’ve ever read. You can feel the crushing weight of the water and the dark just outside the lab’s walls. There’s a wonderful sort of madness to the whole thing, and one scene, in particular, continues to haunt me.

Ben Finney was a surfer, sailor, and anthropologist who spent his career at the University of Hawai‘i and was a founder of the Polynesian Voyaging Society (PVS). The PVS built Hōkūle‘a, a double-hulled sailing canoe modeled on a traditional Hawaiian design but constructed of modern materials.

Finney, then, was part of a team that sailed from Hawai‘i to Tahiti in 1976 without instruments under the leadership of Pius “Mau” Piailug, a renowned navigator from the Micronesian island of Satawal. This book is Finney’s account of that journey and its many challenges.

Hōkūle‘a and the PVS’s experience helped inspire me to write my volume on Anutan seamanship, and Finney wrote the foreword. Later, in 2007, he joined me in a study of Taumako voyaging.

Imagine, if you will: the world’s tallest mountain suddenly appears in the middle of the ocean. Where did it come from? What is its purpose? And what happens when dumb, curious humans (a natural but very dangerous combination) decide to go investigate?

They certainly don’t have fun! But the reader will because this horror novel is so wonderfully weird that I was gobsmacked by the time I finished. You can’t be sad when you’re wondering if there are monsters in the snow…

Tightwads on the Loose is another honest and well-written account of a couple’s ups and downs, in this case while cruising in the Pacific for seven years; only one year less than my husband and I traveled on our sailboat.

This enticing story also has a lot of parallels with my life: the couple’s age, their sense of adventure, their frugal means, their full-time commitment to their boat for many years, their need to make money, and some of the geographical and cultural experiences. Recognizing experiences and personality traits while reading this book made me enjoy it better.

Luckily, Wendy and her partner did not have to endure numerous dramatic life-altering events. Tightwads on the Loose is an easy-to-read sailing memoir that I highly recommend. 

I found this book a very exciting read about sailing alone on the ocean with little or no knowledge about sailing or the ocean. All problems he encountered were of his own making, and survival was largely due to good luck rather than good management.

Little did I realize he painted a more romanticized version of his misadventures.

A true story of love, loss, and survival at sea. The author’s book cover pretty much tells the true story. There you see two lovers, their heads bowed, and below their profiles the wreckage of a dismasted sailboat, a solitary female figure searching the now calm but empty horizon—the aftermath of pounding rain, gigantic seas, and 140-knot winds. One critic wrote, "this book is life-affirming, a saga of human survival, a tale of loss and victory, proof of the resilience of the human spirit." I totally agree. Be ready to shed a tear or two and maybe read all night. Hollywood made a movie of this book, so it must be a good read.

For the uninitiated sailor, the definition of terms at the back matter is excellent, and learn what happens to a 44’ sailboat in a hurricane. It ain’t pretty, but it is inspiring.

A book that falls between Lummis and Steinbeck chronologically is William Francis Butler’s The Wild North Land: Being the Story of a Winter Journey, with Dogs, Across Northern North America, an account of his retracing of the route of the 18th-century Scottish explorer Alexander McKenzie who traversed much of Canada from Lake Chipewyan in Alberta to the Pacific Ocean. Butler had a dog team whose leader was Cerf-Vola, who distinguished himself for his sagacity and strength. Ultimately, Butler retired him from sled duty to dog companion. That relationship did not prevent Butler from giving the dog to an acquaintance when he returned to England, saying that it broke his heart when he had to lay aside his emotions for “the sterner stuff of civilization.”

This book is Thor Heyerdahl’s account of a 4,000-mile voyage, in 1947, on a balsa-wood raft from Peru to French Polynesia. Heyerdahl hypothesized that Polynesia was originally settled from the Americas. When supposed experts responded that Indigenous people lacked the technology to make such a voyage, he set out to prove them wrong. Evidence now makes it clear that Oceania was populated from Asia rather than lands to the east. Nonetheless, Heyerdahl demonstrated that humans can safely traverse the open sea using small craft built from natural materials.

Heyerdahl’s book sold millions of copies, was translated into dozens of languages, and led to an award-winning film. It stimulated interest in indigenous seafaring and inspired generations of researchers to sail with mariners from small, remote island communities and to document their exploits. I count myself among those so inspired.

Beyond the intrigue of scientific study, for me, the sea has always been a place of living poetry – sparkling, changing, and dramatic in equal measure. This mesmerising poetry collection by Nobel Laureate, Pablo Neruda, together with his Stones of the Sky, is an all-time favourite of mine.

In August 1991, I sat on the shores of the Pacific Ocean, across from Neruda’s oceanside home in Chile’s Valparaiso, and watched the most vivid, enchanting colours of a setting sun, fuelled by atmospheric ash still lingering from Mt. Pinatubo’s violent eruption many weeks before in the Philippines. Neruda’s poetry captures such earth and ocean dramas with such vibrancy. For poets and scientists alike, I cannot recommend it highly enough.