Books like Gidget — picked by fans

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.

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… show more.

Chocolates for Breakfast was frequently compared to Bonjour 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.

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.” 

This is one of the best armchair travel books out there. I can’t surf and don’t know the first thing about surfing, but Finnegan’s personal story of chasing waves from continent to continent throughout the 60s and 70s had me nostalgic for a life I’ve never led.

He takes risks and roughs it in ways I never would, but his depictions of places like Madagascar, Hawaii, and Indonesia are so enticing I yearned to hop a plane every time I got to a new chapter. It’s easy to see why Finnegan won a Pulitzer for this autobiography—his writing made for an un-put-downable escape.

The North Shore is surfing’s mecca. I’ve been making the annual pilgrimage since my early teens. It’s a heavy place — the waves, the people, the vibes.

Author Chas Smith throws himself into the task of writing unflinchingly about people, places, and things that most people are afraid to go near. There’s tremendous humor. There’s a sexy, ‘cinematic’ car. I fell in love with Chas as much as I did with the North Shore and its hairball beefiness.

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.

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. 

I’ve always wanted to learn how to surf, and I stumbled upon Diane Cardwell’s memoir Rockaway: Surfing Headlong into a New Life while we were locked down in the middle of the pandemic.

She writes of learning how to surf in midlife and how finding her balance in the ocean led to discovering balance in her life. I marvel at her ability to set her passions above her fear and discovering a home among like-minded people while building a life centered around joy.

She not only embraced but celebrated the unknown, and that led her to discover her true self. After I read her memoir, I booked my first surf lesson, and while I still have a lot to learn, Cardwell’s voice reminds me to get onto a board again.

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.