The most recommended books about the ocean

This book has all the ingredients for an engaging story. I loved the way Mannersly sets the stage, with Dylan, the slightly older supervisor, who’s obviously smitten with the lovely Kyra and the boss’s spoiled son, Max, who seems to have caught her eye as well. 

Using the marine science center in Australia as the setting works perfectly. Identifying and stopping poachers from stealing turtle eggs from their nests puts a nice twist on the usual crime-related stories. Mannersly does a wonderful job of creating realistic and believable characters. Great dialogue and descriptive passages tie this story together.

This is a beautiful story, simple yet profound. It’s about young, innocent, and a wee bit naïve Jamie, led to adventure by troubled but brave Mara.

The adventure takes us to St. Kilda’s, the remotest inhabited Scottish island. The island, the sea, and the quest to explore are used as metaphors for mystery and the pull of the unknown.

It is a fiction based on facts about whales and about what Four Arrows believes they are trying to tell us regarding the pollution of the Oceans that threatens us all. A whale captures a marine biologist and his encounter, feeling almost biblical but very current, reveals their important message to humanity. In this very dramatic story, you’ll also find an ecological treatise, and a call to action so needed at this time.

A wry tale of financial desperation, conceptual art, insanity, infertility, seagulls, marital crisis, jellyfish, organized crime, and the plight of a plastic-filled ocean, JoeAnn Hart’s novel takes a smart, satirical look at family, the environment, and life in a hardscrabble seaside town in Maine. I am proud that Ashland Creek Press (which Midge Raymond and I founded in 2011) published this amazing novel.

I highly recommend this true tale of deep-sea exploration!

The suspense is intense, compelling readers to keep turning pages. In 1930, two intrepid explorers climbed into a 5,000-pound hollow metal sphere and descended 800 feet into the ocean—farther than any human had ever dared to venture. They were amazed to find animals aglow in the ocean’s cold, dark depths.

Young readers (and older readers, too!) will be inspired by Otis and Will’s desire to know more, their persistent problem solving, and this remarkable feat of science and engineering. Over 90% of the ocean is still unexplored! Well-researched pencil, ink, and watercolor illustrations suit the story perfectly.

I’m the daughter of two scientists, and this book was deeply important to me when I first read it. It helped me understand my parents’ passion for and pursuit of botanical knowledge. Many of the characters in this collection (a novella and stories) are fictional botanists, but historical figures appear in several stories. For instance, “The English Pupil” features an elderly Carl Linnaeus and explores themes of botany and regret.

Overfishing may seem like a modern problem. The imperiled oceanic ecosystem inhabited by populations of marine species teetering on the edge of extinction may sound like a relic of recent industrialization, but Callum Roberts shows the story is much older.

According to Roberts the overfishing crisis of today has its origins nearly a millennia ago. Roberts, a marine ecologist by training, takes readers through what historically has been a repeated cycle of discovery, intensive exploitation, declining catches, and ultimately stock collapse that has devastated fisheries around the globe.

But Roberts does not merely give voice to a story of gloom and doom; instead he appeals to readers that more careful stewardship and the ocean’s own regenerative ability may turn the tide back. 

I can think of no other book that so exquisitely inhabits the tension between indigenous knowledge traditions and science than Rae Mariz’s (Indigenous Pacific) marvelous clifi novella, Weird Fishes.

Inspired by marine science and the storytelling traditions of Hawai'i, Mariz’s world is a feast of bubbling colors and more-than-human senses that inspire an extraordinary empathy for all the wondrous beings with whom we share this planet. Weird Fishes reads like a parable and an aquatic mystery, a magnificently crafted voyage that leads the novella’s cephalopod scientist protagonist (Ceph) to the startling discovery that humanity is behind the growing disruptions to marine ecology.

How do we thrive together? Or does the survival one society hinge on the extermination of the other? Is co-existence possible for beings with such radically different natures and senses? These are the questions that will linger in your gills well after the last pages are turned.

I loved this book because it inspired me to keep an adventurous and exploratory attitude. It really made me want to be Edith Widder.

I am completely fascinated by bioluminescence, a large topic in this book, and while I learned a ton, it only drove me to want to learn more and pursue my interests in this field further.

Learning about wondrous creatures and what we are trying to understand about them in the context of conservation allows us the lens to prioritize our work and resources and keep moving forward. I found myself underlining every other line of this book; there is so much to be amazed by.

Trying to write from a non-human perspective is a tricky decision for a writer as I think we find it easier to read and write about our own species.

So I really admire Laline Paull’s non-human stories (like Bees and Pod) and the way she writes from the most difficult first-person point of view. While it is impossible to truly understand what goes on in an animal’s head, Paull does an incredible job of pulling us away from our own narrow window on the world and making us to look at ourselves from the diverse perspectives of the marine animals and the dramatically changing world we’ve forced them to live in.

Be warned though, this book may appeal to younger readers, but it also has some quite confronting scenes.