Your holiday bag must include a swimsuit, sea-friendly sunscreen, a mask, fins and… a few books to read under the umbrella, on a boat or on a rock. But not just any books, sea books to read after a refreshing swim in the clear Mediterranean waters. Below are 10 titles recommended by the Decade of the Sea team.
We invite you to visit the independent bookstore near your home, the library or second-hand retailers and search among historical essays, fiction and new titles. If you travel light and use a tablet or an ebook, many books are also available in digital format.
1.The Passenger “Oceano”
We couldn’t help but start with “Oceano”, the new The Passenger Magazine published by Iperborea dedicated to the ocean, the protagonist of our planet and our future. The book was published on June 8, World Oceans Day, in collaboration with the United Nations Decade of Marine Sciences for Sustainable Development.
To let us dive and navigate in the deep blue, Iperborea and the Decade team have selected exceptional witnesses including Sylvia Earle, a world icon of oceanography, Kerstin Forsberg, a Peruvian marine biologist specialized in the protection of manta rays, the sailor Giovanni Soldini who tells us – together with the climatologist Antonello Provenzale – how he has seen the ocean change in many years of crossings and Richard Hamblyn, who explains how a wave is born and develops.
The two reports are by Tabitha Lasley, who takes us aboard the oil platforms of the North Sea, and by the Norwegians Eskil Engdal and Kjetil Sæter, who retrace the longest chase in the history of seafaring: the hunt for the Thunder, an illegal fishing vessel, in the waters of Antarctica.
And then, again, we talk about maritime transport with the journalist Rose George, about sea vagabonds with Valentina Pigmei, about whales with the writer and enthusiast Philip Hoare and about the fable of the Hōkūle‘a told by Simon Winchester.
“The Passenger – Oceano” is an active tool of Ocean Literacy – the IOC-UNESCO Ocean Education program – to better understand our best ally in the fight against the climate crisis.
2. Life that shines on the seashore. Rachel Carson
Rachel Carson, a pioneer of the environmental movement and ecofeminist reflection of the 20th century, is best known for her work “Silent Spring”, published in 1962 and still considered a milestone in environmentalism.
Not many people know, however, that her literary career began with the publication of three volumes dedicated to the sea: Under the sea wind, The sea around us and The edge of the sea. The third volume of the series, released in 1955, had never been published in Italian until now.
This year, Aboca Edizioni published this last essay with the title Life that shines on the seashore. In presenting the life forms that populate the coast, the author takes us to explore a tidal pool, an inaccessible cave, to observe a solitary crab on the beach at midnight: thanks to these and other encounters, she offers us not only a very precise study of the ecology of the coast, but also a powerful and evocative story about the fragile balance of life that is found on the seashore.
Enriched by an introduction by Margaret Atwood that celebrates Carson’s foresight in having intuited the crucial role of the ocean for the health of the planet and accompanied by the illustrations of Bob Hines, also present in the original edition, very useful for orienting readers in the recognition of the plants and animals described in these pages.
Life that shines on the seashore is a sentimental guide of extraordinary scientific accuracy for all lovers of the sea and great timeless readings.
3. History of the Sea. Alessandro Vanoli
Alessandro Vanoli, historian and voice of the Mediterranean Sea Decade, has decided to embark on an adventure to tell a story of the sea that holds everything together, humanity and animals. Such a journey intends to be a story, made of faces, images, sounds and colors, with the hope of giving back a bit of that wonder that the depths have always given us.
Published by Editori Laterza, History of the Sea begins in an infinite past, four billion years ago, telling of an ancient geology and the beginnings of life, dinosaurs and primitive fish, disappeared seas and great catastrophes. And then down into the depths, to re-emerge among coral reefs, marshy areas, rocks or sandy beaches.
So of course history. That of the first colonizations, of the means and ancient boats to face the sea and the birth of ports. The history of the great myths, the biblical ones and the Homeric ones. And the civilizations: the Phoenicians, the Greeks, the Romans; and around this the merchants’ routes, the stories of amphorae, of coral; the tales of pilgrims and Vikings in America and of the Chinese in the Indian Ocean.
A history also made up of the most well-known things: the compass, the caravels, Christopher Columbus, Magellan, Vespucci and the pirates of the Caribbean. Without ever forgetting that all this also has to do with whales and sharks, with hidden treasures, with the legends of the kraken, the maelstrom, the Flying Dutchman and everything that has fueled our imagination for centuries.
Up to the present, obviously, to the environmental crisis and the melting of the ice.
As the publisher reports, “Because writing a history of the sea means talking about our deepest dreams, but also reminding ourselves that in the end we are just one species among other species. We are part of the sea and this is perhaps the thing that matters most in this whole thousand-year adventure”.
4. This Submerged Hour. Emiliano Poddi
At one hundred and one years old, Leni Riefenstahl swims calmly on the seabed of the Maldives: it is her last dive, the last time she will be able to capture the creatures of the coral reef with her shots. Right behind her is Martha, a thirty-nine-year-old marine biologist, whose job it is to escort her underwater. In fact, Martha is not there by chance: she has been following Leni for a very long time, albeit from a distance. For years she has collected information on the “Hitler’s director” and has organized it into files divided by subject – quotes, incidents, sexual habits -, all desperate attempts at classification that that enigmatic woman always eludes.
Now Martha has the opportunity to study Leni up close, to go back, to be close to her. To discover, perhaps, why in ’41 she did what she did to her family.
This Submerged Hour stages the confrontation between two women different in age, origins, nature and ethical choices. The first is a painful figure, choosing life over death, biology over history; the second is authoritarian, manipulative, ready to sacrifice anything to aesthetics: both are immersed in a liquid world where breathing and movements follow other laws, where an hour can expand to embrace a century.
5. Ocean, a philosophical navigation. Roberto Casati
We depend on the sea as a resource to breathe, to nourish ourselves, and also to dream. The sea is part of our environment while remaining another world, fearful as well as irresistibly suggestive, a radical elsewhere. But it is precisely this otherness that allows us to rethink it from a new perspective, to understand to what extent it has made us what we are, indicating to us what we should become.
Ocean, a philosophical navigation is a book published by Einaudi that describes the work as «a journey into the open sea, we are a thought in motion. We find ourselves next to the author as he crosses the ocean on a sailboat in the guise of a sailor/philosopher. Because sailing transforms us, indulges our desire for knowledge and opens the doors of perception. Sailing within a space of boundless freedom that dialogues with the sky radically changes our relationship with the environment, with people and even with objects. The boat becomes a school of life that forces us to think everything from scratch to act in a new way. It gives life to a form of active knowledge, built by action: a philosophy of the sea.»
6. The Wisdom of the Sea. Björn Larsson
Sofia Rossi on Youmast described the Scandinavian writer Björn Larsson as «The love for the sea and for sailing, the tormented sentimental events and the passion for the French language and for Paris are elements of his life that Larsson rereads in a single key: that essential need for freedom that gives the title to his work».
Published by Iperborea, in The Wisdom of the Sea the author reflects on life as seen from the cockpit and the deck of a sailing boat. Described by the publisher as a sort of interior logbook kept during the years spent homeless with the boat as his only home, sailing in the Atlantic and the North Sea, between Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Brittany, Galicia and the Hebrides, letting his thoughts follow the mood of the wind and the rhythm of the waves, moved by epic crossings, by anchoring from port to port, by encounters and solitudes, by landscapes and readings, trying to understand why the attraction of the sea is so strong on many that they prefer its risks and discomforts to the comfortable safety of the mainland and what secret harmony there is between its constant motion and the deepest human aspirations.
The need for freedom, for example, from the superfluous and from conditioning, from conventions and from the time clock to be punched, which is the immediate conquest of sailing, of becoming nomads and vagabonds again, tied to the present and to the essential, rediscovering in the slowness of sailing the rhythm of walking, the openness to others, the chats under the stars, the happiness of overcoming one’s own limits with no other witnesses than the elements.
7. The Old Man and the Sea. Ernest Hemingway
A classic literary novel that cannot be missed. Awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1953, it was the last work of fiction written by Ernest Hemingway during his lifetime.
Santiago is an old fisherman who has not managed to catch a single fish for 84 days, and yet, he gathers his strength and goes back to sea for a new fishing trip that has the flavor of an initiation. In the desperate hunt for an enormous marlin in the Caribbean Sea, in the fight almost bare-handed against the sharks that tear his prey away piece by piece, leaving him only the symbol of victory and of the curse finally defeated. In this moment, Santiago establishes, perhaps for the first time, a true brotherhood with the unstoppable forces of nature. And, above all, he finds within himself the sign and the presence of his own courage, the justification of a whole life.
8. The Book of the Sea. Morten A. Strøksnes
The Book of the Sea published by Iperborea is the true story of two friends, Morten Strøksnes and an eccentric artist-fisherman, who with a small dinghy and four hundred meters of fishing line set out to hunt this feared inhabitant of the fjords. But The Book of the Sea is also a reflection on the natural history of man, who has come to map the entire globe and navigate among the stars, and yet seems to retain an obsession with the myth of the monster, perhaps due to an atavistic predatory instinct, or the fear of the unknown that the sea still awakens in us today.
In the depths of the sea around the Lofoten Islands lives the great Greenland shark, an ancestral predator as well as the longest-lived vertebrate on the planet, so much so that today we could come across a specimen born before Copernicus discovered that the earth revolved around the sun.
9. The Mediterranean by boat. Georges Simenon
The famous writer Georges Simenon worked as a reporter between 1931 and 1956 to finance his curiosity. So, on the eve of each trip, Simenon would go to a friend who was an editor in chief and say: “I’m leaving next week. Are you interested in twelve articles?” But precisely because they were conceived for the only activity that was close to his heart, writing – it is no coincidence that he wanted to title the volume that collects them Mes apprentissages (My Apprenticeship) – his journalistic pieces do nothing but reveal another side of Simenon the novelist.
The writer declared: “I have always noticed the difference between a dressed man and a naked man. I mean man as he really is, and man as he shows himself in public, and also as he sees himself in the mirror.”
In this journey through the waters of the Mediterranean – from Porquerolles to Tunisia passing through Elba, Messina, Syracuse, Malta – aboard a schooner, Simenon is not limited to understanding and describing the Mare Nostrum but confirms his true vocation: telling stories.
10. Leviathan or the Whale. Philip Hoare
A work published by Einaudi in 2013, which leads to the discovery of the most intimate secrets of whales and the close relationship between humanity and these incredible mammals.
Starting from an anecdote, a story, a personal memory, a page of an epic or sacred book, a scientific experiment or a geographical exploration, Hoare masterfully reconstructs entire worlds, wonderful discoveries in space and time (and especially in the sea).
Cetaceans were symbols of wealth and power: the British crown was consecrated with whale oil, and a whale tooth decorated with the presidential seal accompanied Kennedy on his last voyage. His wife had bought it as a gift, but the president did not have time to see it and the evening before the funeral Jacqueline placed it in her husband’s coffin. A gesture of affection and strong symbolic value, which harked back to medieval kings buried with symbols of power, like talismans that reflected the value of those who possessed them.
