100 books like Rockaway

I’ve read Jaimal Yogis’ Saltwater Buddha: A Surfer’s Quest to Find Zen on the Sea countless times.

His coming-of-age story recounts his experiences after traveling, rather running away, to Hawaii as a teenager with little money and only a few belongings to learn how to surf. Riding the blue barrel waves and the salty waters, alongside wisdom from his mentor, led to him realizing the science of surfing, the formation of the ocean and its underwater typography, and the quest for enlightenment are forever meshing and melding together.

Yogis helped me to grasp the space between moments is just as important as moments themselves, and the essence of just “being” is sometimes enough.

Bruce is a National treasure. If you’re from New Jersey, you, by law, must love The Boss.

Actually, I didn’t care for his music when I first listened, but on the second, I did. Then, after seeing him live in concert, I was hooked. We Jersey boys have many things in common: we both grew up Catholic, we both play a little guitar, and neither of us holds back from sharing the good, the bad, and the ugly sides of being raised in “God’s Country.”

Bruce’s storytelling is as sharp and as moving as ever in this no-holds-barred memoir. My appreciation and admiration for Bruce grew after reading this book. For me, it was also a trip down memory lane. 

As a lifetime shore resident, I gravitate to books set at the beaches of New Jersey, and such is the case for Katie Runde’s debut novel The Shore.

Her core growing-up memories stemmed from both living at the shore and from her family’s boardwalk/beached based businesses. She used her experiences to craft a deep and moving novel about how Brian Dunne’s wife, Margot, and two teenage daughters, Liz and Evy, come to terms with unimaginable grief and loss.

When I interviewed Runde for an article I wrote for Jersey Shore Magazine, we bonded over shared experiences of transforming grief into writing beautiful stories set at similar shore locations despite very different journeys for our main characters. The Shore helped me to examine my own grief through different lenses.

Dominick Mazzagetti retells the history, culture, and landscapes found along the Jersey Shore in his nonfiction book The Jersey Shore: The Past, Present & Future of a National Treasure.

This book is a well-researched labor of love and discusses how the area from Sandy Hook to Cape May rose from being undeveloped sandy acres of land in the late 1600s to grand tourist resorts in the late 1800s.

I’ve used Mazzagetti’s book as research for articles and other works I write, especially about shipwrecks and Superstorm Sandy’s devastating impact in 2012. His clear voice engages and informs in a way that makes the place I call home come alive.

This is an adventure! Turn the pages of this book to find waves and many kinds of waves: rogue, freak, and giant waves of the ocean and the people who try to surf them. I am a retired US Coast Guard officer and sailed many ships at sea. As a mariner we know of or have seen waves, some of them tossing our ships in the middle of the night as we try to sail home. Any number of ships have vanished in the ocean, quickly, with no time to put out an SOS call for help. This is a great book to learn more while having an adventure reading it from the safety of your chair.

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.

Surfing has been at the center of my life since I was twelve, and no book has ever captured it quite like William Finnegan’s masterpiece. I was gripped by—and related to—his obsession. I felt like I was right there with him, riding that nearly transparent wave off a remote island of Fiji.

And the grappling with how surfing fits into adult life—yes, that too, really hit home.

Matt Warshaw wrote The Encyclopedia of Surfing and he is indeed encyclopedic when it comes to surfing. My impression of this book—written after he completed his epic encyclopedia—is that he was so bursting at the seams with surf history, evolution, movements, and flashpoints that he had no choice but to pen this dance through surfing’s glorious past.

I loved the characters, and I loved Matt’s prose. Did Matt live for many years in San Francisco, pulling into tubes every day at a surf break whose name I shall respectfully not mention? Did tube riding inform his prose? Yes. Matt is eternally barreled, and you can pull into the barrel with him in this fantastic beast of a book.

This novel started it all, creating the character of Gidget who would ultimately appear in three feature films, two TV series, three made-for-TV movies, four more novels, and two novelizations of movies, plus kid cartoons, parodies, songs, and more. Gidget: The Little Girl with Big Ideas is based on the real-life experiences of screenwriter Kohner’s daughter Kathy, who found herself one of very few girls surfing in Malibu. The story is told in the voice of Gidget, nicknamed that because she is a diminutive girl. To be sure, the novel deals with her crush on Jeff, nicknamed Moondoggie, and her burgeoning sexual desire, but the novel does more than titillate. More importantly, the novel emphasizes Gidget’s passion for surfing, and especially the feeling of freedom that surfing provides. In the end, Gidget says her romance with Jeff may have been “a dream” but her romance with surfing is “for real:”… show more.

The North Shore is surfing’s mecca. I’ve been making the annual pilgrimage since my early teens. It’s a heavy place — the waves, the people, the vibes.

Author Chas Smith throws himself into the task of writing unflinchingly about people, places, and things that most people are afraid to go near. There’s tremendous humor. There’s a sexy, ‘cinematic’ car. I fell in love with Chas as much as I did with the North Shore and its hairball beefiness.