Riot Recommendation: What Are Your Favorite Books About Pirates?

Vanessa Diaz

Managing Editor

Vanessa is a writer, reader and generally bookish Latina from San Diego. If loving Agatha Christie is wrong, she doesn't want to be right. Vanessa’s penchant for books, travel and tea is rivaled only by her serious addictions to milk, avocado and floral lattes. When not reading books or selling them, she can be found blogging, working on her first novel or cozying up at a library.

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The Anatomist’s Tale by Tauno Biltsted

Born into abject poverty in the British Empire, our narrator aspires to a better life as a ship’s surgeon—until a tyrannical captain provokes a mutiny, forcing him into a life of piracy and eventually to a tropical commune of maroons called New Madagascar. Told through a series of confessions to those who visit the narrator during his imprisonment at Marshalsea, The Anatomist's Tale relates one man’s brush with the heady freedom of outlaws—and the price of returning to “civilization.”

Ahoy, me hearties! These stay-at-home orders have us feeling like landlubbers and we’re jonesing for stories about life back on the high seas. So tell us, mateys: what are yer favorite books about pirates? Whether they be fictional tales or nonfiction accounts, shout those at us on that there Facebook and Twitter, savvy? We’ll be rounding up yer answers and sharin’ the bookish bounty with yer fellow Riot scallywags next week. You best be blowin’ us down with yer picks, so heave ho! We’ll just be here looking up more terrible pirate lingo.