Fiction

Shōgun by James Clavell
Prologue
Chapters 1-2

A more successful "let's try this" than the last one (coincidentally, both begin with an adventure at sea; this one's more entertaining, despite the other author's acclaim for exactly that). Shogun is a damn long book, though (the edition I'm reading is 1,210 pages of fairly small text), and I don't have a good track record with those, so we'll see...