Literate Matters: New non-fiction marks season's reading highlights

Springtime and the reading is easy. Or something to that effect.

Bad puns aside, there is plenty of good reading in David Grann’s newest non-fiction thriller “The Wager” and Iliana Regan’s memoir “Fieldwork.”

“A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Murder,” Grann’s new book takes up an old tale, the sinking of HMS Wager in 1741 as it attempted to round Cape Horn at the southern edge of South America. Part of a fleet chasing after Spanish gold, the vessel went down quickly, dashed on rocks in the always tumultuous seas.

In Grann’s telling, however, the shipwreck is prologue. Intrigue and accusation follow in the wake of the challenges faced by the crew who survived the wreck, washing up on what has been known since as Wager Island.

That the crew broke into factions is predictable, the ship’s captain David Cheap, a Scotsman “in flight–from squabbles with his brother over inheritance, from creditors chasing him, from debts that made it impossible for him to find a suitable bride” pitted against the ship’s gunner John Bulkeley, “a true seaman,” who’d served more than a decade in the Navy.

Cheap is severely injured in a fall at the very moment the ship is doomed, his shoulder broken, so the ship’s surgeon administers opium, incapacitating Cheap in the crew’s hour of need. Bulkeley steps into this void, directing efforts to abandon ship as well as recover what they might before the boat sinks or breaks up. When some sailors align with Cheap and others with Bulkely, and all attempt to return to England, intrigue follows.

In Grann’s telling, at times enlisting Lord Byron’s “Don Juan,” borrowed from the famous poet’s grandson, a Wager crewman, what captivates is the in-fighting, the conniving, the squabbling. How any of them survived both the wreck and the factionalism is the heart of the story.

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While not shipwrecked in the traditional sense, Iliana Regan’s account of her inn keeping in a remote region of the Upper Peninsula, “Fieldwork” sometimes reads like a tale of rescue, her dangers more family turmoil, ambition, and alcohol.

Following her first memoir, 2019’s “Burn the Place,” Regan here recounts the early days of the pandemic as she and partner Anna struggle to keep their Milkweed Inn afloat on a sea of uncertainty and doubt.

An accomplished Chicago chef who trades her commercial kitchen for the seclusion and sometimes silence of the U.P.’s deep woods, Regan is nonetheless never far from the troubles of her upbringing, haunted still by memories of older sister Bunny who died alone in a jail cell. Regan wonders “all the time about what (Bunny) was thinking the moment she knew she was leaving this earth.”

Of all her sisters, Regan says, “They were so cool with their hues of gold and brown hair … They were lady centaurs in flowy blouses, Levi’s jeans, and cowgirl boots.” In a family of girls, however, Regan knew she was meant to be a boy. And her father knew it too. “Dad said I was a boy because he knew that made me happy. It made him happy too.” What it didn’t do was make adolescence simple.

From her father as well, though “He lied a lot,” she learned foraging, with a particular love for mushrooms and berries. From her mother, who “was nurture,” she learned loyalty. With help from both she made peace with her queerness.

The result, Regan explains is, “I’m just a person who prefers mushrooms to people and trees to tall buildings, a person who spends many hours alone, thinking too much about what I’m thinking.”

Yes, there is plenty of good reading to be had this season, with David Grann and Iliana Regan providing some of the best of what’s new.

Good reading.

This article originally appeared on The Petoskey News-Review: Literate Matters: New non-fiction marks season's reading highlights