Here are 91 books that Otis and Will Discover the Deep fans have personally recommended if you like
Otis and Will Discover the Deep.
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I am a children’s book author who is awed by the ocean and the creatures that dwell in its depths. I love writing for kids because they’re unabashedly eager, enthusiastic, and curious! To write this book, I dove deep into researching information about the ocean. The more I learned, the more I wanted to know. I kept thinking, kids will love these fascinating facts and they’ll want to learn more. The wonderful books on this list tell amazing tales, take kids on adventures, and turn dry facts into a deluge of fun. These nonfiction stories offer kids opportunities to become immersed in our awesome ocean!
The one and only ocean is cleverly presented as an epically awesome surfer dude who delivers a tidal wave of information in an entertaining way. Ocean describes himself as “a deep, layered soul” which is a really rad segue into the topic of ocean zones.
He invites readers to explore his depths, like hydrothermal vents, volcanoes, and those “totally tubular” tube worms! He briefly and gently reminds readers he needs their help. Ocean is a super cool bro and everyone’s best buddy in illustrations that are bright, colorful, and fun with a just-right watery vibe.
Dude. Ocean is incredible. Atlantic, Pacific, Artic, Indian, Southern - it's all excellent Ocean! Not part of any nation, his waves are for all. And under those waves, man, he holds so many secrets. With characteristic humor and charm, Stacy McAnulty channels the voice of Ocean in this next 'autobiography' in the Our Universe series. Rich with kid-friendly facts and beautifully brought to life by David Litchfield, this is an equally charming and irresistible companion to Earth! My First 4.54 Billion Years; Sun! One in a Billion; and Moon! Earth's Best Friend.
I am a children’s book author who is awed by the ocean and the creatures that dwell in its depths. I love writing for kids because they’re unabashedly eager, enthusiastic, and curious! To write this book, I dove deep into researching information about the ocean. The more I learned, the more I wanted to know. I kept thinking, kids will love these fascinating facts and they’ll want to learn more. The wonderful books on this list tell amazing tales, take kids on adventures, and turn dry facts into a deluge of fun. These nonfiction stories offer kids opportunities to become immersed in our awesome ocean!
I thoroughly enjoyed this book and believe young readers will, too!
It traces billions of years of ocean history from “when the Earth was young and new…so hot, rock melted and boiled,” through millennia of marvelous creatures, to the present day with children exploring the shore. In eminently readable rhyme, it conveys an impressive amount of information in an interesting and accessible way.
One of the best parts of the books is in the back: an ingeniously illustrated timeline. Illustrations are dynamic and dramatic, some literally exploding with color and action. They are a joy to look at and will certainly help kiddos understand the science concepts presented.
The New York Public Library Best Books for Kids List (2023)
A lyrical, spectacular history of the ocean—from its dramatic evolutionary past to its marvelously biodiverse present.
“For millions of years these first bits of life Became more, and then more, and then more.”
Long, long ago, when the Earth was young and new, the world was a fiery place. Volcanoes exploded from deep down below, and steamy, hot clouds rose up high. Rain poured down for thousands of years, filling the world’s very first oceans. There the teeniest stirrings of life began. Earth’s creatures grew bigger and bigger, evolving…
I am a children’s book author who is awed by the ocean and the creatures that dwell in its depths. I love writing for kids because they’re unabashedly eager, enthusiastic, and curious! To write this book, I dove deep into researching information about the ocean. The more I learned, the more I wanted to know. I kept thinking, kids will love these fascinating facts and they’ll want to learn more. The wonderful books on this list tell amazing tales, take kids on adventures, and turn dry facts into a deluge of fun. These nonfiction stories offer kids opportunities to become immersed in our awesome ocean!
I was delighted to discover this short, sweet, sciency book about the ocean.
Written in rhyme and framed by the reassuring phrase “the sea knows,” this book is ideal for the youngest readers. Many of the concepts and creatures presented are opposites. For example, “the sea knows huge,” one blue whale, is paired with “the sea knows small,” a multitude of tiny krill.
The watery world comes to life in bright, colorful illustrations that are cleverly composed to help kiddos understand the concepts introduced in the text. The back of the book is filled with facts about the plants and animals featured in the story.
Dive in and explore the wonders of the ocean and its inhabitants in this lyrical, fact-filled ode to the sea! This beautifully illustrated picture book features extensive nonfiction backmatter for further exploration.
We are young. The sea is old. The sea has secrets to unfold. The sea knows.
In this playful, rhyming celebration of the marine world, readers can explore all of the wondrous things the sea knows. It knows huge whales and small krill; it knows short crabs and tall giant kelp; it knows brightly colored starfish in shallow pools; and in the inky depths it knows the alluring…
A delightful and distinctive picture book biography about Dr. Virginia Apgar, who invented the standard, eponymous test for evaluating newborn health used worldwide thousands of times every day.
You might know about the Apgar Score. But do you know the brilliant, pioneering woman who invented it? Born at the turn…
I am a children’s book author who is awed by the ocean and the creatures that dwell in its depths. I love writing for kids because they’re unabashedly eager, enthusiastic, and curious! To write this book, I dove deep into researching information about the ocean. The more I learned, the more I wanted to know. I kept thinking, kids will love these fascinating facts and they’ll want to learn more. The wonderful books on this list tell amazing tales, take kids on adventures, and turn dry facts into a deluge of fun. These nonfiction stories offer kids opportunities to become immersed in our awesome ocean!
I laughed my way through this book about kids’ favorite ocean inhabitants!
In it, a silly shark presents a boatload of facts in a very funny way. Humor helps kids learn and remember! The story starts with a toothy, “Hey there!” from Great White Shark who introduces himself to readers as “the greatest shark in this book.” But another shark begs to differ—a whale shark who’s as big as a school bus.
Great White decides he must be the smallest shark. Nope. The smartest shark. Nope. The sneakiest shark? Wrong again. Off-the-hook hilarious illustrations make even the scariest shark entertaining and endearing.
What makes the great white shark (one of) the greatest fish in the sea? FIN-d out in this hilarious fish-out-of-water story that's perfect for Shark Week and all year-round!
"Don't miss this one." -School Library Journal, Starred Review
Hi! I am Great White Shark, and if you get this book, you'll read all about ME--the greatest shark in the sea!
Not so fast! Greenland Shark here, and as the oldest shark in this book, that makes me the greatest.
Did someone say fast? I'm Mako Shark, and I'm the fastest shark in this book! Eat my bubbles!
My great interests have been ships and space travel, and if one takes time to consider the similarities the parallels stand out. Ships, especially submarines, travel in a medium and through an environment that is hostile to human life. In space travel, the ‘ship’ becomes the only habitat in which we can survive for any extended period, leaving it without a space suit is a fatal move. I cannot claim to be an expert in closed environments, but it's a subject that has fascinated me throughout my life. Every ‘biosphere’ is unique and incredibly complex and depends on the symbiosis of an enormous number of living creatures right down to bacteria and even viruses.
This is the story that first got me interested in science fiction. Of course, we now recognise some of the flaws in the science, but consider that at the time of its writing steam propulsion was still in its infancy, most ships were still built of timber, and Verne envisaged a ship capable of indefinite travel beneath the ocean surface – something not even possible until the advent of nuclear power almost a century later. Even today Verne’s vision and the story he wove around it can inspire.
First serialized in a French magazine from 1869-1870, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea is an incredible adventure story that popularized science fiction throughout the world.
Professor Aronnax, a marine biologist, joins harpoonist Ned Land in search of a mysterious sea creature in the open ocean, only to discover that the beast is actually a submarine piloted by the enigmatic Captain Nemo. They are taken captive, thus beginning a strange undersea voyage from Antarctic ice shelves to the subterranean city of Atlantis, hunting sharks along the way.
With its sprawling, exotic plot and vivid descriptions, Jules Verne's epic underwater adventure…
My 15 seasons at Grand Canyon inspired me to understand its story of revelation, which led to a fascination with the history of exploration overall. This has resulted in a series of books about explorers, places explored, and a conceptual scaffolding by which to understand it all: a geologist of the American West (Grove Karl Gilbert); Antarctica (The Ice); revisiting the Rim with better conceptual gear, How the Canyon Became Grand; and using its mission as a narrative spine, Voyager: Exploration, Space, and Third Great Age of Discovery. The grand sweep deserved a grand summary, so I’ve ended with The Great Ages of Discovery.
For a while space and the deep oceans were a matched set of explorations – even Arthur C. Clarke wrote parallel novels about space and sea - then they diverged. What space promised, however, the oceans delivered – new maps of the solid Earth, a new geology, new biotas, and life forms.
No comprehensive survey of all that exploration yet exists. But Robert Ballard’s Eternal Darkness gives access to what happened and some of the critical discoveries, even if it grants attention to the sunken Titanic as well as to black smokers. Deep sea discovery doesn’t have a grand narrative akin to the space race to the Moon or Voyager’s mission to the outer planets; instead, it has biographies like that for the submersible Alvin and pioneers like Ballard. A readable introduction, with some thoughtful conclusions.
Until a few decades ago, the ocean depths were almost as mysterious and inaccessible as outer space. Oceans cover two-thirds of the earth's surface with an average depth of more than two miles--yet humans had never ventured more than a few hundred feet below the waves. One of the great scientific and archaeological feats of our time has been finally to cast light on the "eternal darkness" of the deep sea. This is the story of that achievement, told by the man who has done more than any other to make it possible: Robert Ballard. Ballard discovered the wreck of…
What is the most important thing to remember about stargazing? When to do it, who to do it with, what to look for? It’s none of those! This picture book’s spare, lyrical text offers many suggestions for enjoying stargazing – but there’s really only ONE thing you need to remember,…
Megan is a long-time resident of queer fantasy romance and keeps herself busy reading and writing it. She has been doing so for nearly twenty years, and hopes to do it at least another twenty. She is asexual, biromantic, and married to a wonderful woman. When she’s not busy writing, she likes to cook, harass her wife and cats, or watch movies and play video games.
Another great book rife with tension and terror, about a team who go in search of what killed their friends and loved ones, a nightmare recorded on video but hard to believe, a terror buried in the depths of the Marianas Trench. I love this fascinating take on mermaids, how the book keeps you on tenterhooks the whole time, waiting to see what will happen, who is next, and what sort of monsters we haven't even seen yet.
I’ve been fascinated with the ocean starting when I was a kid growing up on the Great Lakes. While I sailed and swam in Lake Erie’s freshwater, I dreamed of and read about oceans. My career as a historian and writer has been dedicated to exploring the human relationship with the ocean, especially the underwater realm so often left out of maritime history and literature. My greatest joy is that other historians have joined my quest. The books I’ve selected include some I used as sources in writing ocean history and others by historians who are themselves plumbing the ocean’s depths.
Ann Elias demonstrates how visual media – photography, film, art, and museum displays – re-cast coral reefs in the early 20th century from dangers to navigation into fantastical but familiar and inviting spectacles. Coral Empire reveals photographers, artists, and scientific explorers as they rendered the undersea modern yet colonial. Using technology, indigenous knowledge, and their own visions, they presented the oceans as wild, untouched spaces full of resources that invited exploitation, conquest, and tourism. Desire-fueled uses of the undersea obscured the destructive nature of human activities on coral reefs, now abundantly apparent, while the power of the visual for imagining and knowing the undersea remains.
From vividly colored underwater photographs of Australia's Great Barrier Reef to life-size dioramas re-creating coral reefs and the bounty of life they sustained, the work of early twentieth-century explorers and photographers fed the public's fascination with reefs. In the 1920s John Ernest Williamson in the Bahamas and Frank Hurley in Australia produced mass-circulated and often highly staged photographs and films that cast corals as industrious, colonizing creatures, and the undersea as a virgin, unexplored, and fantastical territory. In Coral Empire Ann Elias traces the visual and social history of Williamson and Hurley and how their modern media spectacles yoked the…
I have been intrigued by the stranger, lesser-known parts of the natural world for as long as I can remember and have been continuing to explore those themes in my own work. I love that humans haven’t learned all there is to know about the natural forces that have ruled this planet for longer than we’ve been here. I enjoy books that peel back a layer into these mysteries by writers who have an appreciation for their existence, their ingenuity, and their importance. I have dedicated much of my career to synthesizing big topics into accessible, engaging, and fun information that creates curiosity and a desire to understand the world around us.
This book is captivating visually and narratively, and while it’s a nonfiction exploration of early deep sea exploration, it’s also a beautiful tale through the images and artifacts, both personal and scientific, to those involved in the creation of this new way of seeing the ocean world.
I find the deep sea to be such an intriguing, terrifying place, and I have a deep appreciation and reverence for the fact that we know so little about it. That it has the power to maintain mystery and secrets. As part of that, I enjoyed knowing that the people involved in this journey were seeing a minuscule fraction of the ocean’s deep sea creatures in their natural habitat for the first time ever seen by humans. It must’ve been so thrilling and special to experience, and by reading this book, the reader gets to be on that journey with them a little…
A gorgeous account of William Beebe's 1934 Bathysphere expedition, the first-ever deep-sea voyage to the otherworldly environment 3,024 feet below sea level. In the summer of 1934, aboard a ship floating near the Atlantic island of Nonsuch, marine biologist Gloria Hollister sat on a crate, writing furiously in a notebook with a telephone receiver pressed to her ear. The phone line attached to a steel cable that unrolled off the side of the vessel and plunged into the sea, sinking 3000 feet. There, suspended by the cable, dangled a four-and-a-half-foot steel ball called the bathysphere. Crumpled up inside, gazing through…
I have been continuously studying, practicing, and/or teaching architecture since 1984, and my particular focus has been on drawing–why we draw and how we can develop our own practices for drawing, whether it’s related to architecture or not. Even more particular is my focus on drawing by hand–a practice that has had a major resurgence after the initial wave of fascination for digital drawing tools has waned. I am passionate about drawing and want to share that passion with others, partially by recommending books that have been of significant use to me over the years.
Marc Holmes is an extraordinary artist and urban sketcher who has been at the forefront of the global sketching movement over the past fifteen years. In this book, he presents very useful and applicable techniques for building observational drawings using graphite, pen and ink, and watercolor.
Marc’s approach to watercolor, in particular, is lively and expressive—I’ve personally learned much from his work in this popular medium.
Capture the bustle and beauty of life in your town.
Experience life as only an artist can! Join the rapidly growing, international movement of artists united by a passion for drawing on location in the cities, towns and villages where they live and travel. Packed with art and advice from Marc Taro Holmes, artist and co-founder of Urbansketchers.org, this self-directed workshop shows you how to draw inspiration from real life and bring that same excitement into your sketchbook. Inside you'll fi nd everything you need to tackle subjects ranging from still lifes and architecture to people and busy street scenes.…
