Books are ships which pass through the vast seas of time

Books can console us in our griefs, distil the wisdom of the ages, help us understand the world around us - and even make us better people. Books can be monuments to high achievement, can call into question our most fundamental assumptions or suggest ways we can transform our lives. But they can also provide distractions, escapism and pleasures as straightforward and comforting as a bar of chocolate.

Here are two 'bars of chocolate' I found in my favourite "bookshop", Vinnies, when I drove into the Bay yesterday. I simply couldn't resist them as the first deals with one of my favourite writers, Robert Louis Stevenson, and the other tells the story of a French soldier, explorer and statesman who gave his name to an island which left a transforming mark on my life.

The Cruise of the Janet Nichol Among the South Sea Islands: a Diary by Mrs Robert Louis Stevenson

In April 1890 the steamer Janet Nicoll set off from Sydney for a three-month trading voyage through the central and western Pacific. Aboard were seven white men, a crew of forty islanders, and one woman: a short-haired, barefoot, cigarette-smoking American, Fanny Van de Grift Stevenson, wife of the famous novelist Robert Louis Stevenson. The Cruise of the ‘Janet Nichol’ is Fanny’s account of her journey with her husband and grown son through what are today the Cook Islands, Tuvalu, Kiribati and the Marshall Islands.

Storms and Dreams: The Life of Louis-Antoine de Bougainville

Louis-Antoine Comte de Bougainville (1729-1811) is best known for his circumnavigation of the globe from 1766 to 1769. Throughout a long and distinguished life however, he participated in many of the turning points of world history: the birth of the United States, the fall of French Canada, the opening of the Pacific, the French Revolution and the Revolutionary Wars, the crowning of Napoleon and the modernisation of France. Bougainville was also a witty and charming courtier, becoming one of Napoleon′s senators.

A true Man of the Enlightenment, he was gifted in navigation, seamanship, soldiering, mathematics, longitude and latitude - many of the arts that made his age one of most productive and creative in modern history. John Dunmore, a distinguished historian and an expert in French Pacific exploration, brings the man and his era to life in this vivid and elegantly written biography.