Coasting is a travel book by Jonathan Raban. It is considered to be one of Raban's best books.
Written as a travelogue, Coasting describes Jonathan Raban's single-handed 4,000 mile voyage around Britain which he made in 1982 (at the age of 40) in an old restored 32-foot sea-going ketch, the Gosfield Maid. An important point is that Raban, as he himself points out, sailed with a chart and a hand-bearing compass "before GPS and fancy electronic sys...
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Coasting is a travel book by Jonathan Raban. It is considered to be one of Raban's best books.
Written as a travelogue, Coasting describes Jonathan Raban's single-handed 4,000 mile voyage around Britain which he made in 1982 (at the age of 40) in an old restored 32-foot sea-going ketch, the Gosfield Maid. An important point is that Raban, as he himself points out, sailed with a chart and a hand-bearing compass "before GPS and fancy electronic systems"; he sailed by the look of the coastline. His story takes various digressions, just as his journey does, as he mulls over his childhood as the son of a vicar in the Church of England, and the current state of Britain under Margaret Thatcher during the time of the Falklands War.
As author himself says, the book's title was an appropriate metaphor for his life, 'For years I coasted from job to job, place to place, person to person. At the first hint of adverse weather I hauled up my anchor and moved on with the tide, letting the reigning...
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