back to writing / back to book nook

We can skip the introduction about how I’m obsessed with water and get straight to business: here are four books I read this summer that were somehow related to swimming or oceans.

  1. Swell: A Waterbiography by Jenny Landreth

I really love reading works where the author is just yapping about something they’re really passionate about. OK, I shouldn’t say yapping. She meticulously put together a publication that combined her own history, experiences and feelings related to swimming with a history of women in water. It’s something that, when you think about it, is obvious — women were generally expected to hide their bodies throughout most of modern history, so swimming as a pastime wasn’t really considered appropriate for them at all. The history part mostly focuses on the UK, where the author is from, and conjures up some lovely images of things like women covered head to toe gingerly lowering themselves into the sea for a therapeutic bathe from a special bathing cabin that was carried into the water by a servant. We’ve only been wearing swimming costumes that actually allowed us to comfortably swim for about a hundred years.

In the more personal chapters, she starts by talking about her body image issues as a teenager, which made it difficult for her to ever enjoy swimming — something I think a lot of us can relate to. She starts to find more freedom and joy in it later in adulthood, when she starts going to pools and lidos and dipping her toes into open water swimming with her friends and, later, her children. I really enjoyed following her journey into loving water and the things her own body is capable of.

  1. Romance in Marseille by Claude McKay

This one’s a bit of a stretch but I wanted to add it since it’s about the coastal city I currently live in. This is a manuscript from 1933 that wasn’t published until 2020, and you can tell while reading it that it’s unpolished — but sometimes that’s okay. I really loved immersing myself in my own city 100 years in the past, with most of the story taking place around the Old Port at the heart of the city (a place I take the metro to anytime I need to relax and look at the water for a bit).

The story itself is about a man who stows away on a ship from Marseille to New York, gets caught and locked in a lavatory for the rest of the trip, arrives frozen and has to get his legs amputated just below the knees. What follows is a legal case that makes him rich, a legally acquired ticket back to Marseille and a chaotic love story between him and the local sex worker who robbed him before he left last time (obviously he can fix her). The book is also notable for having multiple queer characters in it! A wild romp by (and across) the sea.

  1. Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy

This was my favourite on the list. The book starts with a strange woman being washed ashore on a remote island near Antarctica, found just in time by the one family (a father and three kids) who still inhabit it as caretakers. The island is home to the biggest seed vault in the world, but as climate conditions are becoming unmanageable on the island, it is being abandoned in a few weeks and the family’s job is to save as many of the seeds as they can before they have to leave.

It’s one of those books where none of the characters (or at least the woman vs the family) trust each other, and the reader slowly learns each one’s secrets as the pieces start to come together. The chapters are all written from the POVs of the different characters, and they’re all fleshed-out, complicated and lovable in their own ways. My favourite was the daughter of the family, a teenage girl who spends most of her time in the sea and among the seals, more at home on water than on land. It’s a story about family, about grief and about climate change and our relationship with the environment. There’s one scene where two whales (a mother and her calf) wash up on the shore that made me cry. Would highly recommend.

  1. Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt

This was a sweet and heartwarming story about an old woman working as a cleaner at her local aquarium and a very intelligent octopus. We get short chapters from the octopus’s own point of view, but it’s not done in an overly corny way. Grief and family were major themes in this book as well, as the woman lost her son when he was just 17, and has spent her whole life searching for answers on what really happened to him.

At the same time, a young man arrives in town looking for his father. He’s the stereotypical loser/troubled guy type of character, with a good heart and plenty of brains but a bad hand in life. His life starts to turn around in this cute small town where everyone is kind to him and tries to help him, and he soon gets a job replacing the old woman at the aquarium after she has a minor injury. With the help of the octopus, everyone gets a happy ending, and the old woman gives the octopus one, too.

Now it’s mid-September, and while I haven’t fully given up on swimming yet, I’ve put more of my focus towards running and ballet (a new thing for me!!). How lucky I am to have a body that allows me to do the things I want to do. How lucky I am to live by the sea.