Book Report: The Maine Lobster Book by Mike Brown (1986)

Book coverAs with Karate-dō: My Way of Life:

When I started reading this book, it felt familiar: A book by a man who was the son of a noble family on Okinawa who became a teacher and then brought karate to Japan proper. I thought Oh, crap, I just read this!

Actually, I kid; I “just read” Linda Greenlaw’s The Lobster Chronicles in 2009. The books both cover lobster fishing in Maine, but this book is more straightforward documentation where the Greenlaw book was a personal narrative/memoir of the same thing.

At any rate, it, too, like most of the books I’ve read for the 2025 Winter Reading Challenge, is fairly short, clocking in at 98 pages. It’s condensed from a larger book, The Great Lobster Chase: The Real Story of Maine Lobsters and the Men Who Catch Them. Apparently, the longer book had a lot more discussion about policy, regulation, and legislation which were trimmed for this shorter book which focuses on the lobster, the fishermen, the equipment, the relationship, and the communities in which the fishermen live. The chapters are limned with a bit of humor, a wry but respectful tone that illustrates and informs and makes one greatful to be ashore and indoors when it’s cold outside.

Again, like so many of the books I’ve read for the Winter Reading Challenge and so many of the books in the stacks, it comes from the latter part of the 20th century and not the 21st. But I suppose the sheer proportion of books that have been published come from before now, so I guess that doesn’t make me too much of a fuddy duddy.

So a pleasant, short read to fill the Food category of the book. Is that a stretch? I went looking for a book that I bought some years back, the Dummies Guide to … something food related because I bought it for another food category on another Winter Reading Challenge. And I couldn’t find it. I also couldn’t find anything about peanuts (from a trip to the George Washington Carver historical site some years back), berries or preserving food, or anything like that. A couple general gardening books, but that felt like a stretch. Probably no more than a book about professional hunters/gatherers, but still. And if you ask me in the next couple of days how a lobster trap works, I might be able to answer it. But hurry–I would have expect that Greenlaw covered it, too, but I didn’t really retain it and probably will not again since it’s not a daily practical consideration.

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