The Sea Around Us by Rachel Carson

Book Club pushes me right out of my comfort zone...

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The Blurb:

Here is the strange story of the seas - how they were born, how life emerged from them, and the marine world within them. Rachel Carson's writing teems with images - the newly-formed Earth cooling beneath an endlessly overcast sky; volcanic action throwing up huge masses on the ocean floor to create immense mountains and desolate canyons; giant squid battling sperm-whales hundreds of fathoms below the surface.

The Review

I really don't read non-fiction. Reading is a form of escapism for me, so I will always choose for myself books that tell stories. I don't even usually read autobiographies, unless it's someone I really admire (or in one strange unexplainable instance when I read Cheryl Cole's autobiography...) So to say this book is out of my comfort zone is a massive understatement.

However, this is the absolute beauty of book groups. You wouldn't be in one if you didn't want to be taken out of your 'reading comfort zone'. Shout out to Jess for this suggestion, who not only has an excellent name, but is also one of the most well read people I know. I mean, she reads books where sometimes I don't even understand the titles and her GoodReads shelves are more than a little intimidating. But she always suggests books that open my eyes a little wider to the world around me and that can never be a bad thing.

So now I've buttered her up sufficiently, on to the book! As far as books about the science of the Earth and the environment go, this is actually pretty accessible. Carson writes in a very poetic style that reads very differently to what you would normally expect from a scientist. Her passion for the ocean and it's relationship to the life cycle of the Earth is very evident and comes through with every word.

I did have to keep reminding myself that this book is over 60 years old and therefore some of the content is bound to be outdated. It still stands up as a book to be read, but I was continually frustrated that I didn't have to hand any information about what discoveries had been made since the time of this book. Carson would elusively say 'and we could be on the brink of discovering how ......etc' and I wanted to know if we had! (I did try doing some 'googling' but got so hopelessly lost in scientific journal articles that I abandoned that method pretty quickly). It does feel like this could really do with an updated version where at the end of every chapter there is a summary of scientific findings in that area since the book was published.

Also, I hate to say it, but there were some terribly dry sections. There was a long chapter about currents that I tried to read about 5 times before eventually conceding that it wasn't going in. Also, my geography is poor at best and she hops around some pretty unknown places on the globe with such speed that I frequently had no idea where she was talking about.

That said, I found some of the chapters fascinating! I loved the section about the formation of islands and their temporary nature. I had no idea that Islands could appear and then disappear again with some frequency and speed, it was astonishing! The chapters covering the lives of marine animals were also captivating, if a little heartbreaking to hear of just some of the creatures we had managed to extinguish through our early explorations across the waves (and how many more we must have killed off since then).

I was equally fascinated and slightly sickened by the section on extreme ocean phenomena, namely tidal waves/tsunamis (which I now know are not the same thing) and how insignificant we as human beings are against such catastrophic power. (I have a bit of a phobia of water related phenomena - whirlpools, tidal waves etc. so this really was a challenging chapter for me!)

Had I not struggled quite so much through some of the more technical sections, I might have loved this book more, but it just completely left me behind on too many occasions. However, if you're fascinated by the ocean, ecology, evolution and marine life, then you will find this an insightful and educational read.

Thanks once again for getting me out of my comfort zone Jess!

#nature #nonfiction #scientific