I started climbing and running around the hills in my teens, got into boats, became a professional sailor for twenty years, then took up surfing at thirty and snowboarding at forty. There’s something special about playing with gravity, whether it’s sliding down hills or waves, or defying it on a mountain face. All these books capture the thrill and the dangers.
Sam had given up her Manhattan job and flown off to chase her dream of becoming an investigative journalist. Three months later, alone in a soulless internet café, she’s facing some cold, hard facts; she’s unpublished, unhappy, and broke. And right then, the gorgeous Pete Halland blows into her life – headed for the mythical Powder Burn mountain to write history and blast into legend.
If she throws in her lot with Pete it could rescue her dreams, but he’s holding back some crucial information – the question for Sam is... what? Soon, Sam is up to her neck in snow and the weather is the least of her problems; lost in a secretive Himalayan kingdom with – what could be – a magic sword and a simmering and potentially bloody revolution.
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I discovered this book when I had just started surfing, and it blew me away – so there could be great fiction about extreme sports! I loved the grittiness, the foreboding noir feel, and the unusual setting. It was part of the inspiration for Powder Burn, although they are very different books.
The original – and many of the best – books about extreme sports are mountaineering books, dating back to a time before the phrase was even coined. This is one of, if not the best of the genre. Joe Simpson’s account of his extraordinary fight for survival after a fall in the Peruvian Andes takes no prisoners. It’s brutal and raw and a wonderful piece of writing.
A second mountaineering book for this list, but very different from Touching the Void. Jon Krakauer’s account of a disastrous storm on Mount Everest captured everything for me about why people do these sports and why they shouldn’t – but it also captured the importance of motivation and the conduct of the sport. The controversy about the events depicted and the whole nature of guided mountaineering to big Himalayan peaks still rolls on, this is the original work.
I loved the book because the author’s love for the sport comes across so plainly. The stories from the spiritual home of surfing, Oahu’s North Shore, are wonderful. It’s an essential text for anyone getting into the sport, capturing its soul better than anything else I have read.
Another piece of biography, this time by a man who has taken on most of the world’s best waves. A man who has consistently surfed at breaks whose size and nature require complete commitment. Very few of the people that can do this can also write as well as Finnegan (the book won a Pulitzer), and the descriptions he brings back from the wave face ring with a sonorous truth. He captures the moment and the people beautifully, growing up in the 60s in LA and Hawaii, travelling cheap and light looking for waves in the 70s and 80s. If you surf, it will inspire you to get back out there, if you don’t it will inspire you to try it. Or put you off the idea for life.
5,215 authors have recommended their favorite books and what they love about them. Browse their picks for the best books about surfing, Northern California, and England.
We think you will like Freckled: A Memoir of Growing up Wild in Hawaii, The Voyage of the Cormorant: A Memoir of the Changeable Sea, and The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks, and Giants of the Ocean if you like this list.
From Neill's list on The best memoirs of childhood and youth.
I was attracted to the word “wild” in the title of this childhood and youth memoir. It’s stories by a girl, Toby Neal, whose parents were hippie surfers on the beautiful and empty beaches of Kauai, Hawaii, during the 1960s and 70s. By most people’s standards, they’d be regarded as negligent parents, even more so today. Living day to day, they didn’t care about giving her a proper home or food. But they loved her and gave her great freedom to explore. She learned how to survive, building her life skills. The other thing about Toby Neal’s memoir is that I learned a great deal about the cultures of Hawaii. My parents loved me and my siblings and ensured we had a comfortable home and good food, but they also gave us similar freedom to explore and learn about our strange hometown, which frequently got me into trouble—the stuff of storytelling.
From Patrick's list on The best first-person books about the outdoors that should be better-known.
Building your own sailboat from scratch, then sailing it from California down to Baja, camping, and surfing along the way: how can that not be a cool story? Christian Beamish manages the perfect blend of introspection and backstory with descriptions of sea, sky, land, and the people he meets along the way.
From Chris's list on The best books on the power of the ocean.
A non-fiction deep dive into the power of the ocean and those obsessed with riding the largest waves.
This is a wide-ranging book; exploring a history of wave destruction, some detail on the science of waves; in particular why it is so difficult to predict when freak waves will occur, before giving us a more human story of the big wave riders who constantly push the boundaries of what we think a surfer can do.