Maybe more than I am anything else, I am a reader. Two or three dog-eared books are always close at hand: on my bedside table, tucked into my purse or backpack, lying open next to me on the couch. I read to escape and I read to engage; for education and for entertainment. I read for inspiration and guidance. I read for solace. I read to improve myself and I read to forget myself. There is no genre of book I won’t read or haven’t loved at least a handful of books from. Every time I hook onto a new interest the first thing I do is to read about it. I love books so much that I recently went back to school to become a librarian and an archivist. When I started open water swimming, I checked out all the wild swimming books from the library. Since then I have bought and been gifted many more. Books about water, nature, wildness, sea creatures, and words added to my piles when I started writing the memoir. Here, I’ve gathered all the books that inspired and informed me as I swam and wrote about swimming.

Fiction

The Swimmers by Julie Otsuka

This slim volume brims with beauty and truth. The first section, The Underground Pool, is written as a chorus of voices expounding the magic of swimming to heal and soothe, to bring together, and to transport. The narrators are both individual and collective, general and particular; bringing their unique problems into the shared sanctuary of the pool. Otsuka captures so much of what I love about swimming. 

In the next section of the book, a crack appears in the pool, then another. The community alternatively rallies, ruptures, and splinters. Some reviewers have said this part of the story is an allegory for the pandemic and certainly this section captures the anxiety of the last two years; the uncertainty, conjecture, false narratives, and disruptions. 

The final sections move away from the pool and focus on one of the swimmers, Alice, who is suffering from dementia. The pool was a particular sanctuary for Alice: “And even though she may not remember the combination to her locker or where she put her towel, the moment she slips into the water she knows what to do. Heer stroke is long and fluid, her kick is strong, her mind clear. ‘Up there,’ she says, ‘I’m just another little old lady. But down here, at the pool, I’m myself.'”

Without the pool, Alice’s condition worsens (it would have anyway), and the things she forgets slowly outnumber the ones she can remember. Through her own narrowing vision and then through her daughter’s perspective, we see Alice’s life in flashes of memory and we see her slow stumble into death. It’s an incredibly powerful and beautiful story.

The Swimmer by John Cheever

A short story in which a man decides to swim the eight miles home from a party on Long Island via people’s backyard pools with ever-darkening realizations. It’s the story that inspired Roger Deakin to embark on his swim across Britain, a journey he wrote about in his memoir, Waterlog (see below), which itself continues to inspire wild swimmers everywhere.

The Night Swimmers by Peter Rock

At one point in this novel, the narrator (who is also the author) describes the inspiration for an earlier novel, My Abandonment, “My novel arose out of actual events…In the true story, the girl disappeared and never surfaced again; this bothered me so much that I decided to hypothesize about what had happened.”

My sense is that The Night Swimmers is a similar attempt to imagine the ending of a story that was left, maddeningly, unfinished, except, in this case, the unfinished story is the author’s own. Twenty years earlier, the narrator (author) spends a summer after college living in his parents’ lake house, trying to write, and spending his nights swimming in Lake Michigan. An older woman, recently widowed, begins to join him on these night swims and the two develop an intense relationship that plays out entirely in these dark, silent swims. The novel jumps around in time as the narrator tries to make sense of that long-ago summer and find out what became of his swimming companion. The lines between reality and dreams, fiction and nonfiction are purposefully blurred here as Rock not only tells this story but grapples with philosophical questions around story itself.

I thought this was a beautifully written story, compelling and thought-provoking. It’s fragmented and not big on plot, so don’t read it for that. Read it for the immersive descriptions of swimming; the fascinating musings on memory and the relatability of a character in mid-life, trying to make sense of his past selves.

Memoir

The Chronology of Water and Reading the Waves by Lidia Yuknavitch

Two beautiful memoirs–one published nearly twenty years after the first, both grappling with similar themes of trauma and loss, identity, and resilience, and both containing beautiful writing about swimming. Throughout her life, Lidia Yuknavitch has turned to water for solace and healing and she has some truly transcendent descriptions of the power of water for hurting bodies. Also her essays are amazing. Like this one: I Will Always Inhabit the Water.

Swimming to Antarctica by Lynne Cox

This was the first book I read when I started open water swimming and it blew my mind. I had no idea that people accomplished things like swimming all night through icy waters in nothing but a bathing suit. If you’re looking for insights into Lynne Cox’s life, you won’t get many here: it’s not that kind of memoir. But, for wildly outrageous feats of athletic strength, endurance, and courage, this book is amazing.

Grayson by Lynne Cox

I was so inspired by Swimming to Antarctica that I grabbed everything else written by Lynne Cox. This slim book describes an amazing encounter Lynne had with a baby gray whale in Southern California. The whale had become separated from its mother and attached itself to Lynne who ended up spending five hours in the water swimming the whale back to safety. It probably didn’t need to be a whole book, but it’s sweet and inspiring. 

Waterlog: A Swimmer’s Journey Through Britain by Roger Deakin 
Perhaps the most famous wild swimming chronicle of all, Waterlog by Roger Deakin, originated as the author strove to wrest free of the sadness of the end of a long love and a grown child far away. Compelled by a desire to “break out of the frustration of a lifetime of doing lengths, of endlessly turning back on myself like a tiger in a cage,” Deakin decided to swim across England, following the rain on its meandering journey to the sea. He swam in search of a new perspective and to transcend the confines of a land-locked humanity.

Nine Ways to Cross a River by Akiko Busch
Akiko Busch swam across some of America’s most iconic rivers as a way to take measure of her life: “When it began to feel as though my life had become defined by a series of divides, it seemed to be the time to take a swim.” She had lost a friend, her sons were newly minted teenagers with the attendant mysteries and disconnections, and she was about to turn fifty. Swimming across the Hudson and seven other rivers gave her a way to make sense of it all. This beautiful book is full of rich, descriptive writing about swimming and the particular challenges of navigating wild waterways perceived as risky and laden with complicated histories.

Turning by Jessica Lee
Jessica Lee emerged from a deep depression, “with the bizarre notion that the solution to my problems lay in swimming.” A Canadian unmoored in Berlin, in a year in which she’d changed addresses five times, she sought her place in the world and opted to do so by spending the year swimming in fifty-two lakes. I related to this book in so many ways and loved Jessica Lee’s descriptions of swimming and the unexpected gifts it brings.

Leap In: A Woman, Some Waves, and the Will to Swim by Alexandra Heminsley

This was another book I read at the beginning of my obsession with open water swimming. It’s part memoir and part how-to. 

Books about Swimming

Why We Swim by Bonnie Tsui

It was dumb luck that this book by a beloved local author came out right when I started open water swimming. I soaked in every chapter, each delving into some different aspect of swimming: cultural, sociological, historical, literary, personal. Tsui chronicles swimming stories, swimming heroes, swimming oddities; her tales take place in pools, lakes, and oceans.  

Swim: Why we Love the Water by Lynn Sherr

In this book, Lynn Sherr weaves her personal story of swimming with swimming history. My niece’s sweet boyfriend gave it to me for my birthday and I have only just begun to read it. 

Splash: 10,000 Years of Swimming by Howard Means

A layperson’s history, written in accessible and engaging prose, this book tackles the history of swimming beginning in ancient times (and actually, even earlier by probing into human evolution, our beginnings in water).

Swell: A Waterbiography by Jenny Landreth

Part memoir, part social history of women and swimming.

Reference

Open Water Survival Manual: An Expert Guide for Seasoned Open Water Swimmers, Triathletes and Novices by Lynne Cox

Lynne Cox’s reference book for wild swimming. It is full of useful information for anyone starting out in the open water. 

Winter Swimming by Susanna Søberg 

Part scientific explanation of how our body responds to cold water immersion and part how-to for cold water swimming.

Water Books

Is a River Alive by Robert MacFarlane

Robert MacFarlane is one of my very favorite writers. He writes beautifully about vitally important things and all of his writing reads like the most engrossing novel. You will never look at a river in the same way after reading this book.

Blue Mind by Wallace J. Nichols
Marine biologist, Wallace J. Nichols wrote the bookBlue Mind to make the scientific case for why being near, in, under, or on the water makes us happier. Our brains, he argues, are hardwired to react positively to water. Blue mind, he writes is the antidote to red mind, “which is the anxious, over-connected, and over-stimulated state that defines the new normal of modern life.”