False starts

My pace has slowed and it has been a little while since my last post, for a couple of reasons: I haven't been reading quite so much, and I have had a few false starts with books I simply couldn't be bothered finishing.
The first was Focus: The Future of Your Company Depends on It, by marketing guru Al Ries. This book was recommended to us by our business coach, but both my husband and I couldn't make it past the first few chapters. While the message was quite clear – companies which lose focus on their original business and try to diversify through line extensions suffer – after the 63rd example and still no hint of what is a preferable course of action, I was over it.
The second book was a bit disappointing for other reasons. The Cruise of the Vanadis looked promising – it was the recently discovered diary of a Mediterranean sailing trip taken by Edith Wharton, then in her 20s, her husband and a friend in 1888. It was illustrated with colour photographs taken just a few years ago. And while I loved the idea of tracking such an adventure, and Wharton wrote about their destinations and their history in great detail, it lacked any description of the human aspects of her travels – very little about the people they met along the way, and almost nothing about her travelling companions. So it became a little like reading a guidebook, but without the colour or sense of character. And I had to give up on it too.
Hopefully I'll make it to the end of a book soon - although one of my current reads, at 935 pages, isn't the most likely candidate!

#12. Sole Survivor – Derek Hansen

Just when I thought nobody wrote a book in chronological order any more, along came Sole Survivor. While the blurb on the back kind of paints this as a romance, it is much more of an adventure. Based on a remote part of the New Zealand coastline in 1966, it brings together three quirky characters – Red O'Hara, a damaged veteran haunted by visions of his time on the Burma Railway, Angus McLeod, a retired policeman desperate for a son, and Rosie, an ex-doctor turned market researcher, as they are thrown together in a tough, remote bay. They learn to co-exist and co-operate, bound by a common mission to deter Japanese trawlers from illegal fishing near the shore - and as they did, I became totally drawn along with the story and very attached to the characters... so much so that I have missed them since I finished the book last week.
Most of all, the description of each of the three small bachs, set in bush overlooking the ocean and rugged Wreck Bay on the tip of Great Barrier Island, provides plenty of fuel for sea/treechange fantasies.