The Shorewords! Shelter-in-Place Coastal Reading List: Part 2

October 4, 2020

In perfect time for Memorial Day Weekend!

This Shorewords podcast is the second of two episodes that offer some coastal reading options for SIPers (Shelter-in-Placers) – 19 reading options for Covid-19.  Both lists have some fiction, some non-fiction and each reading option covers some aspect of the coast, the ocean, and often the people who live and work there.  The reading list is provided below; listen to the podcast to understand why these books made the list, and feel free to send me your coastal reading list – lesleycoastal@gmail.com.  If you ever want to hear me read poetry, this is your chance.

To start, here is the second half of the list are:

Prince of Tides – Pat Conroy

Remarkable Creatures – Tracy Chevalier

Sea Change – Sylvia Earle

Shipping News – Annie Proulx

Song for the Blue Ocean – Carl Safina

Travis McGee books – John McDonald

Two Years before the Mast – William Henry Dana III

Waves and Beaches – Willard Bascom

Where the Crawdads Sing – Delia Owens

Lagniappe – The Sea – Pablo Neruda poem


The books covered in the first episode were:

Susan Casey – Devil’s Teeth and The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues

Circe – Madeline Miller

Endurance – Caroline Alexander and The Storied Ice – Joan Boothe

Floating Coast – Bathsheba Demuth

Gifts from the Sea – Ann Morrow Lindbergh

Carl Hiaasen Books – Especially Tourist Season (with Shriners) and Stormy Weather (with Skink)

The Hungry Ocean – Linda Greenlaw

Kem Nunn Books – Surf Noir -- Dogs of Winter and Tapping the Source

Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway

The Perfect Storm – Sebastian Junger

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Show Transcription
This transcription was generated by a computer. Please excuse any errors.
Lesley Ewing

Hello. I’m Lesley Ewing, host of Shorewords!. This podcast combines two of my favorite things – the ocean and books. I learned to swim before I could walk and looked forward each summer to my family’s vacation at Ocean City, Maryland. As a student I was interested in science and engineering and became an environmental engineer before learning that there was something called coastal engineering. Both my 1 st and 2 nd mid-life crises resulted in me going back to school – first for a Masters of Engineering at UC Berkeley and later for a Ph.D. from the University of Southern California. The first crisis also moved me from DC to the SF Bay. The second crisis reminded me how much I liked to read. Getting a Ph.D. while working a 40+-hour/week job meant that my only reading was work reports, text books and technical articles. They were all important and interesting books, but as soon as school ended, I replaced my academic text books with broader literature and realized that the coast was often a character in the fiction and non-fiction that I read. I am still fascinated by every visit to the ocean and remain in awe of what others write about the coast.