Here are 100 books that Gidget fans have personally recommended if you like
Gidget.
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People behave rationally and irrationally. Observing and thinking about human nature is the sport of my lifetime. In literature and art, I worship real wit. I thirst for the unusual, the deadpan, the acknowledging of one thing while another slips in unseen. Wit has been, for me, a shield and a tool for good. I try not to use it as a weapon because wit as a weapon often damages a wider target than one intends. I strive to endow my fictional women, my protagonists, with sharp yet understated wit that spares no one, not even themselves. Especially not themselves. The books I recommend here live up to my standards.
I love this book because it’s dark and unsettling. Wait, what? Yeah. Eleven-year-old Harriet roams her city, spying on adults and kids and writing about them in her notebook. Sounds cute, but her personality is pretty damn awful when you really look at her. And this I love. Call me perverse.
I was ten when I first met Harriet, a sneakers-and-jeans-wearing girl who doesn’t know much but wants to know more. She’s not upbeat. She does crappy things to her friends and enemies. Fascinating! I knew kids like that.
Harriet’s wit is based on calculation: If I do X, I might see Y result, and then I might learn Z.
Some readers label Harriet a sociopath. They’re missing it: She’s on a flawed mission to grow up. As was I.
First published in 1974, a title in which Harriet M. Welsch, aspiring author, keeps a secret journal in which she records her thoughts about strangers and friends alike, but when her friends find the notebook with all its revelations, Harriet becomes the victim of a hate campaign.
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
Thirty-five years ago, I bought a dilapidated olive farm overlooking the Bay of Cannes. I was well-known as an actress for such roles as Helen Herriot in All Creatures Great and Small. Moving to Provence, living on the Mediterranean, transformed my life. I became passionate about the landscape, history, art, languages, literature of the region. I spent 17 months travelling solo round the Mediterranean basin, searching out the history and cultures of the olive tree, a mythical plant. I was invited to work with UNESCO to create a Mediterranean Olive Route. I make films, TV programmes, and write books. Almost all my work is set in the south of France.
In my opinion this is one of the great novels about adolescence. What makes it so special is that it is deliciously French and amoral. The story of a French teenage girl, Cecile, and her father. They are a team. You might almost call them a couple. Cecile accompanies her father everywhere including to casinos and bars. She accepts his mistresses. Matters take a more macabre turn when her father invites one of his ladies to holiday with them in the south of France and Cecile learns that he intends to marry this particular woman. Françoise Sagan was eighteen when she wrote this, her first novel. Within months of its publication she became an overnight sensation. The writing is sexy and chic. Sagan perfectly describes the French Riviera in the mid-fifties and a woman’s role in society back then. It was an instant classic and deserves its place in the…
A sensational 1954 French novel that has become a contemporary classic
Set against the translucent beauty of France in summer, Bonjour Tristesse is a bittersweet tale narrated by Cecile, a seventeen-year-old girl on the brink of womanhood, whose meddling in her father's love life leads to tragic consequences.
Endearing, self-absorbed, seventeen-year-old Cécile is the very essence of untroubled amorality. Freed from the stifling constraints of boarding school, she joins her father—a handsome, still-young widower with a wandering eye—for a carefree, two-month summer vacation in a beautiful villa outside of Paris with his latest mistress. Cécile cherishes the free-spirited moments she…
As a feminist and cultural historian, I'm interested in recovering aspects of the past that we have forgotten, especially when the past turns out to challenge our taken-for-granted views. We often have a nostalgic vision of the fifties that portrays our mothers and grandmothers as innocent and naïve. In contrast, we attribute notions of freedom and authenticity to masculine figures like the Beats. When doing research on the film Gidget, and the novel that inspired it, I found myself re-reading these books, all of which suggest in different ways that, long before the sexual revolution, girls were curious, sexually aware, and desiring freedom. These books make me remember how hip those girls could be.
Chocolates for Breakfastwas frequently compared toBonjour Tristesse and Moore was called “the American Sagan.” Like Sagan, Moore was only eighteen when she wrote the bestselling novel. Written in the third person, it tells the story of a young woman’s sexual exploration and her feelings of depression. Courtney, a child of divorce, moves from her posh Connecticut boarding school to Beverly Hills when her depression keeps her from performing at school. She grapples with her mother, a down-on-her-heels alcoholic actress; explores her sexuality with both a gay male actor and an older straight manager in Hollywood; then relocates to New York where she drifts through cocktail parties, having affairs, until her best friend Janet commits suicide. Like Bonjour Tristesse, the novel flirts with existentialism but ultimately adopts a more hopeful tone as Courtney matures and aims to create meaning in her life.
Precocious and shocking when first published in 1956, Chocolates for Breakfast is a candid coming-of-age story of a young girl's sudden awakening to love and desire written by 18-year-old Pamela Moore. Disaffected, sexually precocious 15-year-old Courtney Farrell splits her time between her parents' homes in New York and Los Angeles. When a crush on a female teacher in boarding school ends badly, Courtney sets out to know everything fast-from tasting dry martinis to engaging in a passionate love affair with an older man. Considered an American response to French sensation Bonjour Tristesse, Chocolates for Breakfast is also a tale of…
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
As a feminist and cultural historian, I'm interested in recovering aspects of the past that we have forgotten, especially when the past turns out to challenge our taken-for-granted views. We often have a nostalgic vision of the fifties that portrays our mothers and grandmothers as innocent and naïve. In contrast, we attribute notions of freedom and authenticity to masculine figures like the Beats. When doing research on the film Gidget, and the novel that inspired it, I found myself re-reading these books, all of which suggest in different ways that, long before the sexual revolution, girls were curious, sexually aware, and desiring freedom. These books make me remember how hip those girls could be.
My Lovely Mamá! parodies the decadence and ennui of Bonjour Tristesse. The narrative toys with the sort of decadence Sagan captures, by having Mathilde believe her mother is having an affair and hence attempt, unsuccessfully, to seduce her mother’s lover. The very funny novel hyperbolizes the world-weariness of Sagan’s characters. “I was terribly immature last September,” Mathilde writes, “I’ve aged a lot since then. Inwardly I’m an old, old woman now.” While it parodies certain tropes of teen girl fiction, My Lovely Mamá! nonetheless gives voice to authentic adolescent feelings, especially about sexual desire. When Mathilde receives a marriage proposal, she opts to keep things open-ended, maintaining her freedom: “I was only seventeen and everything was only just beginning, after all.”
First U.S. edition. A near fine copy in a VG- dust jacket. Sticker pull to the jacket's front panel near the upper right corner. Chips/frays to the spine tips and corners. Creasing and some tears to the panels' edges.
The moment I rode my first wave 25 years ago, I fell in love with the raw energy of that swell that traveled all the way across the ocean to share the last bit of its journey with me. My love of surfing became an all-consuming passion. I abandoned graduate school and reorganized my life to spend every possible minute in the water. Hours a day, I sit on my board, watching the horizon for the next wave, anticipating that sublime connection, when wind and water unite with my breath and blood. Out of the water, I seek a similar kind of transcendence in the stories I write.
To look at what is written about surfing, it would seem that it’s a “man’s world.” Surfing, like other pursuits and professions, is one where women are often characterized as either anecdotal or exceptional. The truth is so much richer and complex that, as a woman who surfs, I almost don’t want to share our secrets. But Easkey Britton shares some of hers from years of competitive surfing around the world and from the fierce and sustaining waters she calls home on the west coast of Ireland. Britton has surfed waves and conditions that few among us have the desire to tackle. But in discussing all these places and all these conditions, she speaks eloquently about what can be gained through immersion in the ocean that gave birth to our human form and continues to abide by our human trespasses.
This is an incredibly inspiring exploration of the sea's role in the wellness of people and the planet, beautifully written by Easkey Britton - surfer, scientist and social activist. She offers a powerful female perspective on the sea and surfing, explaining what it's like to be a woman in a man's world and how she promoted the sport to women in Iran, surfing while wearing a hijab. She speaks of the undiscussed taboo around entering the water while menstruating - and of how she has come to celebrate her own bodily cycles. She has developed her own approach to surfing,…
I love adventure—I'm an adventurist. I love escaping—through creative writing and the written word! And, I love the sea—I have served over 30 years in the US Coast Guard at sea and ashore and recently drove Zodiacs in Alaska and Norway for Seabourn Cruise ships. Since publishing my first book, So Others May Live about heroic US Coast Guard rescue swimmers and aircrews (read by Kevin Costner and Ashton Kutcher who both told me they loved my book and used it for their roles in film, The Guardian), I have become a TEDx speaker and coach, award-winning author and rose to the senior rank of captain in the USCG.
This is an adventure! Turn the pages of this book to find waves and many kinds of waves: rogue, freak, and giant waves of the ocean and the people who try to surf them. I am a retired US Coast Guard officer and sailed many ships at sea. As a mariner we know of or have seen waves, some of them tossing our ships in the middle of the night as we try to sail home. Any number of ships have vanished in the ocean, quickly, with no time to put out an SOS call for help. This is a great book to learn more while having an adventure reading it from the safety of your chair.
The have long been mariners' tales of 100-foot rogue waves - gargantuan monsters that sink super-tankers in the blink of an eye.
But waves that high violate the laws of physics, so science has dismissed them as myth. Until now.
In February 2000 the research ship, RRS Discovery, was trapped by a vortex of mammoth waves in the North Atlantic. Amazingly the ship survived and its state-of-the-art equipment registered waves nearing 100-feet. Something scary is brewing in the planet's waters. And with 72% of earth covered by sea, this is serious business.
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
I’ve poured my life into surfing, competed on the ASP world tour through my late teens and early twenties, was the editor of several different surfing magazines through the late ‘90s and aughts, and still write about it, way too much in fact. It’s my love, my life, my burden, my machete. Earlier today, in fact, I was out there riding waves. There were dolphins and whales. And bright, soul-enriching sun.
Matt George is a larger-than-life character who immerses in his subjects with great fervor, be it the heroic shark attack survivor Bethany Hamilton, or the seven-time world champion Layne Beachley. I loved reading about the Ho family in Hawaii.
I laughed aloud at Matt’s pithy prose. Would I like to go on a surf-chasing boat trip through Indonesia with Matt George? Very much so.
A soulful collection of nearly four decades of surf writing. In Deep transports readers into the heart of the surfing world’s culture through the eyes and imagination of a master storyteller. George’s personality profiles, perspective essays, and travel accounts achieve a level of frank articulation that, much like the works of Theroux, Krakauer, and Finnegan, reveal as much about the man as it does his subjects. Peak transcendence and quiet reflection, famous beaches and lost islands, competitive triumphs and personal tragedies; In Deep is a compelling montage assembled by both a seasoned observer and fervent participant in the sublime pursuit…
Early in my life, I developed a keen appreciation of and a strong affinity for the unique culture encompassing the Jersey Shore, a lifestyle that unites infinite waves, distinctive art, soulful music, sand between one’s toes, and the dream of the endless summer. The sea speaks to me, and always has. My appreciation of the ocean and shore living leads me to seek comparable books with hopes of learning from and/or connecting with other writers like me, and it served as the basis of the setting for my novel, Enduring the Waves. I hope you make a similar connection to one of the books on my recommendation list.
I’ve read Jaimal Yogis’ Saltwater Buddha: A Surfer’s Quest to Find Zen on the Sea countless times.
His coming-of-age story recounts his experiences after traveling, rather running away, to Hawaii as a teenager with little money and only a few belongings to learn how to surf. Riding the blue barrel waves and the salty waters, alongside wisdom from his mentor, led to him realizing the science of surfing, the formation of the ocean and its underwater typography, and the quest for enlightenment are forever meshing and melding together.
Yogis helped me to grasp the space between moments is just as important as moments themselves, and the essence of just “being” is sometimes enough.
Fed up with teenage life in the suburbs, Jaimal Yogis ran off to Hawaii with little more than a copy of Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha and enough cash for a surfboard. His journey is a coming-of-age saga that takes him from communes to monasteries, from the warm Pacific to the icy New York shore. Equal parts spiritual memoir and surfer's tale, this is a chronicle of finding meditative focus in the barrel of a wave and eternal truth in the great salty blue.
As an avid trail-runner and mountain-biker who’s done a ton of outdoorsy things, from sailboat racing on the Chesapeake Bay to rockclimbing to backpacking in the Pacific Northwest, I’m convinced that nothing gets you closer to someone’s experience than a well-told first-person account. The best personal narratives make you feel the cold, glow with the exhilaration, and burn with ambition to go, to do, to see for yourself — and can even make you look at the world, and yourself, in a new way. These books, different as they are, have all done those things for me.
Building your own sailboat from scratch, then sailing it from California down to Baja, camping, and surfing along the way: how can that not be a cool story? Christian Beamish manages the perfect blend of introspection and backstory with descriptions of sea, sky, land, and the people he meets along the way.
Christian Beamish, a former editor at The Surfer's Journal, envisioned a low-tech, self-reliant exploration for surf along the coast of North America, using primarily clothes and instruments available to his ancestors, and the 18-foot boat he would build by hand in his garage. How the vision met reality and how the two came to shape each other places The Voyage of the Cormorant in the great American tradition of tales of life at sea, and what it has to teach us.
This book follows the journey of a writer in search of wisdom as he narrates encounters with 12 distinguished American men over 80, including Paul Volcker, the former head of the Federal Reserve, and Denton Cooley, the world’s most famous heart surgeon.
In these and other intimate conversations, the book…
I’ve poured my life into surfing, competed on the ASP world tour through my late teens and early twenties, was the editor of several different surfing magazines through the late ‘90s and aughts, and still write about it, way too much in fact. It’s my love, my life, my burden, my machete. Earlier today, in fact, I was out there riding waves. There were dolphins and whales. And bright, soul-enriching sun.
Matt Warshaw wrote The Encyclopedia of Surfing and he is indeed encyclopedic when it comes to surfing. My impression of this book—written after he completed his epic encyclopedia—is that he was so bursting at the seams with surf history, evolution, movements, and flashpoints that he had no choice but to pen this dance through surfing’s glorious past.
I loved the characters, and I loved Matt’s prose. Did Matt live for many years in San Francisco, pulling into tubes every day at a surf break whose name I shall respectfully not mention? Did tube riding inform his prose? Yes. Matt is eternally barreled, and you can pull into the barrel with him in this fantastic beast of a book.
Matt Warshaw knows more about surfing that any other person on the planet. After five years of research and writing, Warshaw has completed a totally unprecedented history of the sport and the culture it has spawned. With a voice that is definitive, funny, and wholly original, The History of Surfing delivers the ultimate book for surfers everywhere.
