100 books like Saltwater Buddha

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.

The Dawn Patrol is the first in Winslow’s Boone Daniels detective series. It has many hallmarks of a Winslow novel: a Southern California backdrop (San Diego), a host of morally ambiguous characters, a generally good guy trying to do what’s right, snappy writing, and surfing. This book also presents a surf culture we’ve come to recognize from television and movies, with a language, that while not universally shared by all surfers, is understood as the sport’s lingua franca—dude, gnarly, epic, wipeout. Where this book excels, however, is in capturing surfing’s dualistic nature as both a solitary pursuit and a place of a tight-knit community. Main character Boone Daniels is both the lone wolf and a member of a pack, one that can both have his back in the lineup and turn on him on dry land.

To look at what is written about surfing, it would seem that it’s a “man’s world.” Surfing, like other pursuits and professions, is one where women are often characterized as either anecdotal or exceptional. The truth is so much richer and complex that, as a woman who surfs, I almost don’t want to share our secrets. But Easkey Britton shares some of hers from years of competitive surfing around the world and from the fierce and sustaining waters she calls home on the west coast of Ireland. Britton has surfed waves and conditions that few among us have the desire to tackle. But in discussing all these places and all these conditions, she speaks eloquently about what can be gained through immersion in the ocean that gave birth to our human form and continues to abide by our human trespasses. 

Arguably, this is not a book about surfing. The Silence of the Wave is about an Italian undercover police officer dealing with trauma and guilt. But within this hardboiled story of crisis and the dark and ugly undercurrents of our modern world, Carofiglio beautifully illustrates the lasting impact surfing can have on a person’s life. Like first love, surfing may be in your past, but it is never forgotten and often takes on a mythic quality that at once can feel like a dream and also lead you back to your true self.

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.

I’ve always wanted to learn how to surf, and I stumbled upon Diane Cardwell’s memoir Rockaway: Surfing Headlong into a New Life while we were locked down in the middle of the pandemic.

She writes of learning how to surf in midlife and how finding her balance in the ocean led to discovering balance in her life. I marvel at her ability to set her passions above her fear and discovering a home among like-minded people while building a life centered around joy.

She not only embraced but celebrated the unknown, and that led her to discover her true self. After I read her memoir, I booked my first surf lesson, and while I still have a lot to learn, Cardwell’s voice reminds me to get onto a board again.

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.

Matt George is a larger-than-life character who immerses in his subjects with great fervor, be it the heroic shark attack survivor Bethany Hamilton, or the seven-time world champion Layne Beachley. I loved reading about the Ho family in Hawaii.

I laughed aloud at Matt’s pithy prose. Would I like to go on a surf-chasing boat trip through Indonesia with Matt George? Very much so.

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.