Ocean & Coast

Jaimal Yogis's memoir of surfing and Zen practice — from Ocean Beach to Indonesia to the monasteries of Burma. A surfer-monk's search for the connection between riding waves and sitting still.

Huw Lewis-Jones's collection of fictional islands from literature, cartography, and mythology. Beautiful maps, wild stories, and a reminder that the impulse to imagine places that don't exist is as old as the impulse to explore places that do.

Chris Burkard's photography book documenting glaciers and the landscapes they've shaped — Iceland, Patagonia, the Alps, Alaska. The images are monumental. The subtext is elegiac: this is what's disappearing.

William Finnegan's memoir is the best book ever written about surfing, and it's not close. Decades of wave-hunting across five continents, from childhood in Honolulu to middle age in New York, rendered in prose that captures the exact texture of water moving over reef. It won the Pulitzer for a reason.

Set in the Pacific Northwest, Before the Wind is a deeply funny fictional account of a lovably maddening family that communicates best through sailing. (Wes Anderson, please option the film rights.) There’s a loudmouth dad—Where’s the wind? No! Those waves are old news!—a try-to-fix-everything middle son, a precocious daughter who can out-sail nearly everyone, and a grandpa who dreams in boat design schemata. Dysfunctional, maybe, but boy can the Johannssens race. If boating is in your DNA, you might recognize yourself here. If you don’t know a thing about boating, you’ll learn a lot—about sailing legends like Joshua Slocum, insight into the siren song of racing, and things to consider before buying that “free” boat in your neighbor’s backyard. Ultimately, the story reminds us adventure is often the best therapy, and that it’s wildly rewarding to trust some of life’s decisions to the wind.

Kerouac's dark, boozy novel about a crack-up in a cabin on the California coast. Not the Beat celebration people expect — it's a book about a man coming apart, and the Pacific Ocean doesn't care. The descriptions of Big Sur's landscape are some of the most visceral he ever wrote.

Wallace Nichols compiles the neuroscience research on why water makes people feel better — calmer, more creative, more connected. The science is real. The writing occasionally drifts toward self-help, but the core argument is compelling: we are hardwired for water.

Daniel Duane's memoir of a year spent surfing in Santa Cruz. Literary, self-aware, and honest about the gap between the surfer he wanted to be and the surfer he was. One of the few surf books that reads as well on land as it does in the water.

James Nestor went to a freediving competition expecting a quirky sports story and came back with a book about the ocean's effect on human consciousness. From sperm whale communication to breath-hold physiology to the deepest places on earth, it's a journey into water and the people drawn to it.

Chris Burkard's photography of remote surf breaks in Iceland, Norway, the Faroe Islands, and other places where the water is cold enough to kill you. The images are stunning — empty lineups, volcanic coastlines, surfers as small figures in enormous landscapes.

Not Lansing's book but Frank Worsley's — the navigator of the Endurance tells his own version of the story. The 800-mile open-boat journey across the Southern Ocean, narrated by the man who navigated it with a sextant and dead reckoning. The seamanship alone is worth reading.

Alfred Lansing's account of the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition is the gold standard of survival literature. When Shackleton's ship Endurance was crushed by pack ice in 1915, he kept 27 men alive through an Antarctic winter, an open-boat crossing of the Southern Ocean, and a traverse of South Georgia Island that had never been attempted. Lansing tells it in prose as spare and relentless as the ice itself.

Gretel Ehrlich traveled to Japan in the aftermath of the 2011 tsunami and wrote about what she found — destroyed coastlines, displaced communities, and a culture's relationship with impermanence. Ehrlich brings a poet's attention to a journalist's subject.

J. Maarten Troost moved to the South Pacific with his wife and wrote about what he found — kava ceremonies, shark-infested waters, colonial history, and the absurdity of a pale Westerner trying to fit in. Funny and self-aware.

Chris Dixon's investigation of Cortes Bank — a submerged island 100 miles off San Diego that produces some of the largest waves on earth. Part surf history, part oceanography, part story of the obsessives who chase waves that could kill them.

Chris Burkard's photography of surfing at the extremes — Arctic breaks, remote Pacific islands, storm swells in Iceland. The images are enormous and cold and beautiful.

Garrett McNamara's memoir of surfing the biggest waves on earth — including his record-setting ride at Nazaré. McNamara's childhood was chaotic and his path to big-wave surfing was unlikely. The waves are the least surprising part of the story.

Searching for a Northeast polar passage from Europe to China, sixteenth century Dutch navigator William Barents and his crew of sixteen made a few attempts to sail through the Arctic, going farther than any Europeans had before. Proving that the third time is not always the charm, in the winter of 1596 they became stranded, stuck hard in the sea ice off of Nova Zembla, two hundred miles north of Siberia. Barents and his men built a cabin from their boat’s salvaged lumber—ominously, their sole carpenter perished before construction had even begun—and hunkered down for a year of desperate survival, keeping the constant threats of polar bears, frostbite, hunger, and one another at bay. Journalist Andrea Pitzer ventured to the Arctic more than once to track this story, studying Barents’ ship log and other direct accounts from his crew. Icebound is an engrossing, bone-chilling history, an open porthole into the dreams and nightmares of the great Age of Exploration.

Nathaniel Philbrick's account of the Essex, the Nantucket whaling ship rammed and sunk by a sperm whale in 1820 — the event that inspired Moby-Dick. The crew's subsequent ordeal in open boats is one of the most harrowing survival stories in maritime history.

As a world record-breaking cave diver and National Geographic filmmaker, Jill Heinerth has plunged into uncharted depths around the globe, from the icy tunnels of an Antarctic iceberg to the cerulean cenotes of the Yucatán Peninsula. Filled with scientific and adventurous firsts as well as claustrophobia-inducing squeezes, Into the Planet is an earnestly told story of life as a professional underwater explorer. Although she didn’t learn how to dive until her late twenties, from a young age Heinerth felt that water gave her a freedom she’d never known on land. She shares the hard-earned euphoria of “swimming through the veins of Mother Earth,” but also the terrifyingly narrow margins for error, as she recounts her own close calls and death after death of colleagues and friends. With the hiss and click of a rebreather, Planet submerges the reader between blackness and light, pausing, every so often, for a heart-stopping view of the sublime wilderness below.

Scott O'Dell's children's novel about a girl stranded alone on an island off the California coast for eighteen years. Based on the true story of the Lone Woman of San Nicolas Island. Simple, devastating, and one of the books that made a generation of readers care about wildness.

Thor Heyerdahl's account of crossing the Pacific on a balsa-wood raft to prove that ancient South Americans could have settled Polynesia. The theory is debatable. The voyage is not — 101 days on the open ocean with five companions and a parrot, armed with a hypothesis and no backup plan.

Through photography, interviews, crew stories, and a foreword by Desmond Tutu, the hardcover Mālama Honua shares the travels of a double-hulled canoe named Hōkūle’a. Built in the 1970s, this sailing canoe was created to revive the art and science of ancient Polynesian wayfinding techniques: understanding the distinct patterns of ocean swells, reading the stars for clues, predicting the weather from animal behavior and wind. No GPS, National Weather Service, or Apple products allowed. Because as one of the book’s modern day navigators says, “If you can read the ocean…you will never be lost.” The book begins in 2014 and covers a multi-year boat journey to communities in New Zealand, Australia, Africa, and South and North America, steered onward by captain Nainoa Thompson, the first native Hawaiian since the 14th century to sail without modern instruments from Hawaii to Tahiti. Visually luscious, educationally inspiring, and totally badass—how many times have you relied upon your smartphone today?—this book is a treasure of hard-won knowledge and experience.

Erin McKittrick's journey around Cook Inlet by foot and packraft — tidal flats, bear country, and the wild edges of Alaska's most populated region.

Solo paddling along the coasts of the Hawaiian Islands — reefs, open crossings, and the kind of self-reliance that comes from decades of doing things alone in the ocean.

A solo kayak journey up Alaska's Inside Passage at age 60-something. No support boat, no satellite phone, no concessions to age. Pure competence and joy.

The first of the Sutherland trilogy — solo paddling along Molokai's sea cliffs, sleeping on ledges, swimming into sea caves. A woman alone with the Pacific, entirely on her own terms.

A solo sailing journey from Seattle to Juneau through the Inside Passage, reading the water and the history simultaneously. The sea as text — tides, currents, and the layers of meaning left by the people who navigated these waters before engines existed.

Gestalten's survey of floating architecture — houseboats, sailing vessels, and structures built on or over water. The aesthetic of life afloat.

Four college-age rowers crossed the North Atlantic in a 29-foot boat. Fifty-seven days, no motor, no support vessel. The youth and audacity are the point.

The first solo circumnavigation of the globe by sail, completed in 1898 in a 37-foot sloop. Understated, self-reliant, and the ancestor of every solo sailing narrative written since.

Gestalten's photography of sailing — blue water, wooden hulls, and the geometry of canvas and wind.

Jaimal Yogis caps off a wild and tumultuous youth by running away to Hawaii, where he chases his dreams of living on the beach and riding warm, tropical waves. But his rebellious adventure soon transforms into an inward-facing journey, as he unexpectedly commits to the study of mindfulness and meditation. In his resulting travels from Buddhist monasteries to infamous surf breaks, Yogis explores the parallels between mindfulness and surfing, and he finds equanimity in the whole-hearted pursuit of both.

The nearly forgotten story of William Willis, who sailed a raft across the Pacific at age 61, then did it again at 73. A character so improbable he makes Heyerdahl look cautious.

The navigator's account of the 800-mile open-boat crossing from Elephant Island to South Georgia — the most dangerous small-boat voyage in history. Where Lansing gives you the panorama, this gives you the tiller.

Raising children in remote Alaska — packrafting with toddlers, bears in the yard, and the daily logistics of a life that most people would consider impossible. The sequel to A Long Trek Home, now with kids.

Shackleton's own account of the Endurance expedition. Less polished than Lansing's version but more immediate — the voice of the man making the decisions, not the historian reconstructing them.

Part science storytelling and part memoir, Spineless takes us around the world and down in deep-sea submersibles to explore the mysteries of jellyfish. Yes, jellyfish. You’ll learn a lot about the world’s oceans and cutting-edge science, yet all the research stays afloat with enthusiasm: “There’s a copepod that says ‘Fooled you!’ when it releases bioluminescent globs of light…” We also meet people who’ve dedicated their lives to the soft-bodied-yet-mighty jelly, and while there’s no red-beanied Steve Zissou, this cast of characters could hold their own in a movie: a Frank Zappa-obsessed Italian marine biologist, engineers infatuated with jellyfish propulsion systems, a quirky inventor of a sting-blocking lotion. Author Juli Berwald, a former ocean scientist, threads in just enough of her personal story to get you thinking about your own shelved dreams. If you grew up wanting to be the next Jacques Cousteau or Sylvia Earle, or even a Wes Anderson oceanographer, this book is for you.

A solo kayak journey through Alaska's Inside Passage — tides, bears, weather, and the particular solitude of traveling by paddle. Quieter and less known than it should be.

Seven years sailing solo around the Pacific on a 40-foot boat, surfing remote breaks, and learning to live without a plan. A young woman's voyage that became a way of life. One of the best adventure memoirs of the last decade.

Having been a marina live-aboard for over three years, I know how many would-be sailors dream of bluewater voyages. But with trip logistics and obligations in the way, even the most dialed boaters rarely leave port. Against the odds, with a combination of good fortune, bartending shifts, and more than a year of hard boat prep, Liz Clark cast off from Santa Barbara in her early 20s and she’s been sailing and surfing the world ever since. Over a decade and 20,000 nautical miles later, Captain Clark brings us Swell, a memoir named after her beloved 1966 Cal-40. It’s a life seemingly so charmed it scarcely seems real, but Clark shares both sunshine and grime, from remote tropical islands and a surf sisterhood to broken-down engines and relationships both damaging and generous. With enchanting illustrations and photos, Swell offers an open-hearted exploration of how to stay aloft from one safe anchorage to the next, navigating the unknown terrain in between.

Meloy's essays about color, landscape, and the sensory experience of being alive in the desert. The turquoise is literal — the stone, the water, the sky — and metaphorical. Nobody wrote about the desert's palette like Meloy.

Burkard's photography of surfing the California coast — from the Oregon border to the Mexican border, every break along the way.

Life on the Farallon Islands — 27 miles off San Francisco, surrounded by the densest population of great white sharks on earth. Casey spent time with the researchers who study them, and her account of shark behavior is both terrifying and awe-inducing.

Willis sailed a raft across the Pacific at 61, then again at 73. The voyages were more dangerous and more improbable than Kon-Tiki, and almost nobody remembers them.

Theroux paddled a kayak through the islands of the Pacific — Melanesia, Polynesia, Micronesia — in his characteristically abrasive, observant, and entertaining style. The kayak was the excuse; the cultures were the subject.

Paulsen's young adult novel about a boy alone on an island in a northern lake. Stripped down and elemental — survival as a form of attention.

Theroux's novel about an American inventor who drags his family to the Honduran jungle to build a utopia. It goes wrong in every possible way. A dark comedy about American arrogance in the tropics.

Amy Liptrot's memoir of returning to Orkney to recover from alcoholism. The islands — their weather, their seals, their silence — become the instrument of her recovery. Sparse, windswept prose that reads like the landscape it describes.

Ed Gillet kayaked solo from Monterey to Hawaii in 1987 — 2,200 miles of open Pacific, no support boat. The most audacious solo ocean crossing by human power ever attempted. Almost nobody knows about it.

The 1991 nor'easter that sank the Andrea Gail and killed six fishermen off the Grand Banks. Junger reconstructs the storm, the boat, and the lives of the men aboard with the narrative intensity of a novelist.

Field sketches from centuries of ocean voyaging — navigators, naturalists, and sailors drawing what they saw before cameras existed. Lewis-Jones curates the art of observation at sea.

London's novel about a literary critic shanghaied aboard a sealing schooner captained by Wolf Larsen — a Nietzschean brute who reads Herbert Spencer between beatings. The Pacific Ocean as a classroom in survival of the fittest.

Two years on the atoll of Tarawa in Kiribati — one of the most remote places on earth and one of the first to disappear from rising seas. Troost is funny about the discomfort and serious about the stakes.

Freeman Dyson designs starships at Princeton; his son George builds a kayak and lives in a treehouse in British Columbia. A book about two kinds of exploration — one into space, one into the wild — and the father-son rift between them.

Beamish built a boat and sailed it down the Baja California coast, surfing the points along the way. Handmade craft, handmade journey. The slowest possible way to cover the distance.

Susan Casey's book about the science and culture of giant waves — from rogue waves that sink ships to the surfers who chase hundred-foot swells — reads like a thriller built on physics. She goes everywhere the big water goes: Nazaré, Mavericks, the open North Atlantic.

The adventure novel that invented the genre. A boy, a map, a one-legged pirate, and an island full of buried gold. Stevenson wrote it for children and created something that adults can't put down either.

A granddaughter returns to Taiwan to trace her family's story through the island's mountains, forests, and coastline. Geology, botany, and memory braided together. Quiet and precise.

Longtime National Geographic photographer David Doubilet has spent more than twenty-seven thousand hours underwater, often in pursuit of the images that have become synonymous with his name: over/unders, above and belows, or, as he calls them, half-and-halfs. Enabled by domed water housings, this technique offers the ability to be in two environments at once, and his first major book in twenty years, Two Worlds: Above and Below the Sea, shows those environments to be stunning in their beauty and fragile beyond compare. A whale shark yawns below fishermen, hoping for a krill handout. In the Caymans, a stingray glides as gracefully as the sailboat above. Tiny and vulnerable, a loggerhead turtle hatchling shelters in tangled golden sargassum. Like many photojournalists, the New York native began as a documentarian and was forged a conservationist by the changing planet. Two Worlds offers one hundred twenty-eight pages of lushly printed photographs, an afterward by astronaut Kathryn D. Sullivan, and Doubilet’s well-earned and plainspoken message: Take a look at all this, and act.

Dana shipped out of Boston as a common sailor in 1834 and wrote the most vivid account of seafaring life in the age of sail. The California coast before the gold rush, described by a Harvard man doing manual labor.

Worsley sailing in Arctic waters — the navigator of the Endurance on his own, in the ice, doing what he was born to do.

Casey on dolphins — their intelligence, their communication, their suffering in captivity, and the humans who are obsessed with them. Part natural history, part investigation into an interspecies relationship we barely understand.

What The Joy of Cooking is to home cooks, Waves and Beaches has been to sea lovers for nearly sixty years. The comprehensive tome is part fundamental instructional and part voluminous love letter to the alchemy of where land meets the sea. Willard Bascom, an engineer, adventurer, photographer, scientist, and cinematographer who pioneered a number of ocean technologies, including being one of the first to suggest neoprene as a wetsuit material, wrote the book in 1963. When Bascom died in a car accident in 2000, oceanographer Kim McCoy, Bascom’s friend and protégé, inherited the beloved manuscript. This third edition reflects both authors and their seventy years of experience on shorelines on all seven continents, as well as an update devoted to the history and effects of climate change. Four hundred pages stuffed with physics illustrations, encyclopedic text, and gorgeous photography makes for essential reading that belongs on the bookshelves of all coastal explorers.

Delia Owens's novel about a girl growing up alone in the marshes of coastal North Carolina is a murder mystery wrapped in a naturalist's journal. The landscape — tidal flats, fireflies, oyster shells — is rendered with the precision of someone who has spent decades in the field.

Combining travel and sports writing with cultural history, Why We Swim is a bracing collection of stories from the world’s untamed waters and community pools, and writer Bonnie Tsui, a near-daily swimmer whose parents met poolside, is the perfect guide to the life aquatic. From the free-diving superpowers of Southeast Asia’s sea nomads to the habits of Olympian world record-holders, she ponders how humans have evolved for land yet been drawn for millennia to water: Neolithic cave paintings featuring swimmers date back ten thousand years. If you’re part selkie—a half-seal, half-human character of North Atlantic folklore—then Tsui might inspire you to try diving two hundred feet down in the ocean, or, if extreme cold is more your thing, joining the International Ice Swimming Association. Even if you’re like me, recovering from a childhood of failed pool lessons, here is the push to cannonball, once and for all, into the deep end.

A chef's love letter to the landscape and food of Newfoundland — wild game, foraged plants, and the connection between cooking and the land the ingredients come from.