My ‘Must Read’ Book Recommendations for Surfers This Year
I have to say, 2022 was such a chaotic year for me. Finishing college, finally; living and working and surfing in Portugal, a lot; moving to Wales and starting university; fun times in hospital, and all the mental health shiznick in-between. Basically, I took a lot of time to read last year - reading being one of my ‘mindful’ activities. And, boy, did I read some bangers! I’ve created a little list of favorite books from last year that I definitely recommend reading. We’ve got some travel, some science, some biography, a bit of history, some poetry, both fiction and non-fiction and plenty of beautiful stories. Have a read through this list of books perfect for surfers in 2023…
Barbarian Days - William Finnegan
This book is William Finnegan’s memoir of an obsession, a complex enchantment. Surfing only looks like a sport. To beginners, it is something else entirely: a beautiful addiction, a demanding course of study, a morally dangerous pastime, a way of life. Being raised in California and Hawaii, Finnegan started surfing as a child. He has chased waves all over the world, travelling for years through the South Pacific, Australia, Asia, Africa. A bookish boy, and then an incredibly adventurous young man, he went on to become a distinguished writer and war reporter. Barbarian Days takes us deep into unfamiliar worlds, some of them right under our noses—off the coasts of New York and San Francisco. It immerses us in the camaraderie of close male friendships forged in challenging waves.
Women on Waves: A Cultural History of Surfing - Jim Kempton
Over the past 200 years, and especially the past five decades, the surfing lifestyle have become the envy of people around the world. The perception of sun, sand, surf, strong young women and their inimitable style, has created a booming lifestyle and sports industry—and the sport that is set to made its Olympic debut in Tokyo 2021. A massive shift from when colonizers tried to extinguish all traces of Native Hawaiian surfing and its sacred culture.
Women on Waves is filled with phenomenal athletic performance, breakthrough female achievements, and plenty of inspiration and fun to see us through until the time when we can next hit the waves!
The Mercies - Kiran Millwood Hargrave
After a sea storm has killed off all the island's men, two women in a tiny 1600s Norwegian coastal village, named Vardø, struggle to survive against both natural forces and the men who have been sent to rid the community of alleged witchcraft. The Mercies is a beautiful story of female relationships and friendships in the face of isolation and survival.
Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design - Charles Montgomery
Happy City is the story of how the solutions to this century's problems lie in unlocking the secrets to great city living
As author Chares Montgomery reveals, it's not how much money your neighbors earn, or how pleasant the climate is that makes the most difference. Journeying to dozens of cities - from Atlanta to Bogotá to Vancouver - he talks to the new heroes of the happy city to explore the urban innovations already transforming people's lives.
Drawing on the lessons from their stories, from brain science, and from the fascinating realm of urban experimentation, Happy City offers solutions we can all use to improve our lives and shows that simple changes can make all the difference!
home body - Rupi Kaur
Rupi Kaur is an author that embraces growth, and in home body, she walks readers through a reflective and intimate journey visiting the past, the present, and the potential of the self. home body is a collection of raw, honest conversations with oneself – reminding readers to fill up on love, acceptance, community, family, and embrace change. Illustrated Rupi Kaur herself, themes of nature and nurture, light and dark, rest here.
A Line in The World: A Year on the North Sea Coast – Dorthe Nors
Dorthe Nors chronicles a year she spent traveling along the North Sea coast—from Skagen at the northern tip of Denmark to the Frisian Islands in the Wadden Sea. In fourteen expansive essays, Nors traces the history, geography, and culture of the places she visits while reflecting on her childhood and her family and ancestors’ ties to the region as well as her decision to move there from Copenhagen.
Through a deep, personal engagement with the landscape, A Line in the World accesses the universal. Its ultimate subjects are civilization, belonging, and change: changes within one person’s life, changes occurring in various communities today, and change as the only constant of life on Earth.
Swimming with Seals - Victoria Whitworth
Victoria Whitworth began swimming in the cold waters of Orkney as a means of temporary escape from a failing marriage, a stifling religious environment and a series of serious health problems. Over four years, her encounters with the sea and all its weathers, the friendships she made, the wild creatures she has encountered, combined to transform her life. This book is a love letter, to the beach where she swims regularly and its microcosmic world, to the ever-changing cold waters where the North Sea and the Atlantic Ocean meet, and to the seals, her constant companions.
The Lido - Libby Page
Rosemary has lived in Brixton all her life, but everything she knows is changing. Only the local lido, where she swims every day, remains a constant reminder of the past and her beloved husband George. Kate has just moved and feels adrift in a city that is too big for her. She's on the bottom rung of her career as a local journalist, and is determined to make something of it.
So when the lido is threatened with closure, Kate knows this story could be her chance to shine. But for Rosemary, it could be the end of everything. Together they are determined to make a stand, and to prove that the pool is more than just a place to swim - it is the heart of the community.
The Uninhabitable Earth - David Wallace-Wells
The slowness of climate change is a fairy tale, perhaps as pernicious as the one that says it isn't happening at all, and if your anxiety about it is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible, even within the lifetime of a teenager today.
Over the past decades, the term "Anthropocene" has climbed into the popular imagination - a name given to the geologic era we live in now, one defined by human intervention in the life of the planet. But however sanguine you might be about the proposition that we have ravaged the natural world, which we surely have, it is another thing entirely to consider the possibility that we have only provoked it, engineering first in ignorance and then in denial a climate system that will now go to war with us for many centuries, perhaps until it destroys us. In the meantime, it will remake us, transforming every aspect of the way we live-the planet no longer nurturing a dream of abundance, but a living nightmare.
Questions of Travel: William Morris in Iceland - Lavinia Greenlaw
The great Victorian designer and decorative artist William Morris was fascinated by Iceland and wrote a book documenting his travels there. He gets caught up with questions of travel, noting his reaction to the idea of leaving or arriving, to hurry and delay, what it means to dread a place you’ve never been to or to encounter the actuality of a long-held vision. He is sensitive to the emotional landscape of his band of travelers and, above all, continuously analyzing and fixing this “most romantic of all deserts.”
Lavinia Greenlaw follows in his footsteps, and interposes his prose with her own “questions of travel.” The result is a new and composite work that brilliantly explores our conflicted reasons for not staying at home.
Mindfulness and Surfing - Sam Bleakley
Mindfulness and Surfing casts a fresh perspective on this popular sport, and explores how riding the waves can be the ultimate meditation. Engaging author Sam Bleakley takes us on a soulful journey across the tideline of his personal and philosophical travels. Through lunar cycles and river surfing to the Taoism of nature, he reveals an acute awareness of what the oceans can tell us about our place in the natural world. Meditating on one of nature’ s greatest elements – its salty swells, flow and peaks – he shares life lessons in mindfulness that will be relished by surfer and non-surfer alike.
Let me know what books you like the look of and which you have already read! I personally have read and loved each one of the above. Please send me any good book recommendations that you have, you can write them in the comments or send me an email. I hope the start of your year has been fulfilling and given you many new experiences already!
Florence x