Haunts of the Black Masseur: The Swimmer as Hero

This wonderful and strange book may have launched the sub-genre known awkwardly as the "swimoir," but there is much more swimming than memoir here. You hardly learn more about the author than you do from the thrillingly terse biography at the back of the book: "Charles Sprawson lives in London. He recently swam the Hellespont," but it is clear that Sprawson, a throwback English colonial eccentric, is obsessed with swimming, and his survey of its history is full of off-handedly learned and deliciously surprising tidbits (who knew that Jane Austen loved sea bathing, or that Victorians learned their breaststroke form from frogs kept in tubs?). He is drawn to the beauty of swimming (and swimmers), to its dangers (the title is an allusion to a bizarrely masochistic Tennessee Williams story), and to its immersive otherworldliness, and you will likely want to put it aside and take a summertime plunge yourself.