68 books like Swimming to Antarctica

In the opinion of many water-lovers, Roger Deakins basically invented the swim memoir or “swimoir.” In the nineties, he set out on a year-long journey through the waterways of Britain, on a quest to experience life in what he called a “feral state.” His primary drive is to get into the water, to fully experience it rather than conquer it, to become part of the water and vice versa. His specialty is distance, rather than speed. Competitive swimmers keep their heads down to maximize speed, but not Deakins. His head is up, looking at his surroundings and the abundant wildlife around him. Waterlog was a major inspiration for my own book, as it’s been for many writers – swimmers or not.

I have returned to many of these stories over and over again through the years—for Cheever’s prose, for his sense of what makes men tick. On one level, I can’t quite relate to white suburban husbands in upstate New York in the 1950s and 60s. And yet, somehow, they seem profoundly familiar. 

Everyone knows who the late Oliver Sacks is, and his extraordinary books have been read by millions. But not many know about Sacks’ great love of swimming, which he first wrote about in “Water Babies,” a beautiful personal essay published in The New Yorker in 1997. I had an “aha!” moment when I first read this essay, in my realization that Sacks and I were kindred water spirits, and that it was possible to write about swimming in a way that would engage readers of all stripes. 

This book is packed with fascinating, dramatic, and sometimes bizarre tales of swimming lore from history and literature. Sprawson is also fascinated with the swimming world’s legacy to Hollywood in the thirties and forties, exploring the careers of “aquamusical” star Esther Williams and Olympic swimmer Johnny Weissmuller, who starred in a dozen Tarzan movies. Sprawson’s reputation as a literary writer about swimming is second only to that of Roger Deakins. What gives the book a strange fascination for many people is the fact that after the publication of Haunts of the Black Masseur, Sprawson never wrote another one.

In this memoir, we meet Kim as a teen athlete and an Olympic-bound swimmer. The book shows the intense training environment of young athletes of this caliber experience, and as I read it, I was filled with both admiration and a deep uneasiness.

She’s so vulnerable to her esteemed coach, as I was to my teacher. Swimming was her life, and her coach held her future in his hands. When the inevitable grooming and seduction began, my heart sank further in outrage and sorrow. Like me, Kim finds her way out, but as with all young girls groomed and betrayed, it is not easy.

I love this book as I used it as a road map of swimming adventures when I moved back home to the West Country after thirty years of living in the city.

I was faced with the challenge of not knowing where to swim, as we didn’t really go in the water when I was a child. The author visits a plethora of favourite swimming spots with a group of friends, and I felt like I was accompanying them on their trips.

I was able to use the book as a guide, to go and visit all the spots Lynne Roper mentions in her diaries, safe in the knowledge I was visiting places that people have swum in for years.

These days Gertrude Ederle is unfamiliar to many of us, but a century ago she was an athletic champion whose celebrity rivaled Babe Ruth’s. In 1926, two years after winning three medals at the Paris Olympics, she became the first woman to swim the English Channel, an amazing feat of endurance and perseverance that took 14 hours and 37 minutes, a time almost two hours faster than the speediest of the five men who had gone before her. Along with recreating Ederle’s harrowing Channel journey in vivid detail, renowned sportswriter Glenn Stout infuses life back into Ederle and shows us why President Coolidge called her “America’s Best Girl.”

I was bowled over by Yusra Mardini’s powerful story when I heard it during the 2016 Olympics, when she was a swimmer on the global Refugee team. As Yusra and her sister were fleeing war-torn Syria and their boat began to sink, the 17-year-old did what she knew how to do best—swim—to help save the lives of everyone aboard. In sparse but powerful words and art, this book shows American children so much about the refugee experience, through a teenager whose life probably looked very much like their own before war struck her country, and who stepped up and saved others with her skill while at risk herself.

My wife and I felt a kinship with Bonnie when we discovered her writing, or maybe she was just the person we wanted to be.

She is a New York Times journalist, a surfer, and a swimmer. Although she lives in San Francisco, she has spent some time living in Australia (Sydney, where we live), and she has experienced some of our local swimming spots, as well as many in California (her locals).

In this book, Bonnie artfully expresses the intangible feelings many of us feel about swimming and water and how we engage with it as humans. The best writers can articulate feelings and experiences in a way that makes you feel seen. This is one of those books for me.  

I feel like I lived this story as a kid. I’ll bet a lot of kids do. A young boy overcomes his fear of the high dive. 

Step by step, Gaia Cornwall takes us through Jabari’s jump. Jabari starts by telling his dad he’s not scared at all. He clearly is. He delays, makes excuses. Dad never pushes. He wants this to be Jabari’s decision, Jabari’s victory. It’s so relatable, the perspective even changes to first person once Jabari is high above the pool. 

Everything rings true. It’s exactly what a scared kid would say and do. It’s exactly what I said and did when I was Jabari’s age trying to summon my own courage on the high dive. Except when I hit the water, my swim trunks fell off.