Surf/skate book recommendations?

October 16, 2009 1:18 PM

Are there any great books about surfing or skateboarding?
posted by EnormousTalkingOnion to media & arts (8 comments total)

Fiction?
posted by fire&wings at 1:22 PM on October 16

I don't know if I'd go 'great,' certainly not in that capital-letter Great Books sense, but The Concrete Wave is a pretty good history.
posted by box at 1:31 PM on October 16

Da Bull, the autobiography by Greg Noll, is an amazing recount of the earliest days of the North Shore and big wave surfing by the pioneers. He's a great storyteller.
posted by infinitefloatingbrains at 2:07 PM on October 16

skateboarding in what sense? What do you want to know about it?
posted by mattsweaters at 2:16 PM on October 16

Surf Science: An Introduction To Waves For Surfing is a fantastically engaging explanation for non-physicists of how the sun's energy becomes the waves you ride, and how global and local weather and current patterns and the shape of the beach interact to shape individual waves and sets.
posted by nicwolff at 3:16 PM on October 16

The Answer is Never: A Skateboarder's History of the World is awesome. Skateboarding, Space and the City is academic in tone and might be miles from what you're looking for, but it's truly brilliant and I'm not really exaggerating by saying that reading it set my life on its current course.
posted by carbide at 4:53 PM on October 16

West of Jesus is great. There's also a book about a surfer in Baja in search of a long lost friend, gets into all sorts of interesting trouble and whatnot and for the life of me I can't remember the name. Anybody else know what I'm talking abiut?
posted by iamkimiam at 12:09 AM on October 17

These are great suggestions, guys. Sorry for the ambiguous question, but I kind of wanted it open-ended, since I'm open to pretty much anything - I just realized that they're both sports/cultures I'm very interested in but have never come across, much less read, any great books about them.
posted by EnormousTalkingOnion at 6:49 PM on October 18