Another Great Day at Sea (2014) — Geoff Dyer

Canongate Books | ISBN: 9781782113362 | Condition: Good | Sold by Crappy Old Books

Geoff Dyer is the kind of writer who can make anything funny, awkward, profound, and faintly embarrassing—sometimes all in the same paragraph. In Another Great Day at Sea, he takes his restless curiosity aboard the USS George H.W. Bush, one of the largest aircraft carriers in the world. It’s a steel floating city full of rituals, routines, and jet engines that could swallow a man whole, and into this disciplined universe wanders Dyer, a writer more accustomed to cafés than combat drills.

What follows is a fish-out-of-water chronicle of two weeks at sea: meeting sailors who sleep in bunk beds stacked like sardine tins, observing fighter pilots who roar off the deck with terrifying nonchalance, and trying to make sense of a place where “free time” means queuing for the gym or watching the ocean stubbornly refuse to change. Dyer is irreverent, wide-eyed, and very much himself, which is to say: hilariously unsuited and yet the perfect narrator for such an environment.

Why this copy?

• Condition: Good. The cover is crisp, the pages clean, the corners only slightly rolled—as if someone read it while reclining in a deck chair rather than a cockpit.

• Canongate Books, 2014 edition. A handsome volume, sturdy enough to survive an aircraft-carrier landing, or at least a splash of seawater from your commute.

• From Crappy Old Books. We specialise in books that have lived a little, and this one has the faint aura of jet fuel and institutional coffee, which is exactly as it should be.

Specs at a glance

• Author: Geoff Dyer

• Title: Another Great Day at Sea

• Publisher: Canongate Books, 2014

• ISBN: 9781782113362

• Condition: Good

This is travel writing at its quirkiest: less about the far horizon and more about the claustrophobic charm of life aboard a machine of war. Dyer finds poetry in the routines, comedy in the discipline, and absurdity in his own inability to keep up. You’ll laugh, you’ll learn, you’ll probably thank your stars you’re not stuck in a ship with 5,000 other people and very little privacy.

Warning: may cause daydreams of joining the Navy for about five minutes, followed by the sudden realisation that you really, really like personal space.

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