Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life

I've never surfed, and I'm not about to start now. But Finnegan's memoir of fifty years of surfing (while building an acclaimed career as a journalist) is a thrilling immersion in both the wonder and obsession of chasing waves and in the haphazard process of constructing a life. Finnegan has watched people as intensely as he has studied the swells and channels of his favorite breaks, and he can sum up both with a simple, unshowy elegance that gives you a hint of how he probably rides a wave. But to surf well you have to engage as well as observe—to know the wave, but then also step out and commit to it—and it's clear Finnegan lives and writes that way too, pushing over the lip into the unknown. His memoir is one of my favorite books of the year.