Books like Sea of Cortez — picked by fans

I sought out this book after watching the documentary that brought me to tears: My Octopus Teacher.

This book was every bit as inspiring. The narrator recounts her interaction with octopuses at an aquarium as she begins to recognize aspects that mirror human traits: curiosity, warmth, individuality, and humor. But the author never anthropomorphizes the octopuses; they remain a mysterious, complicated species.

This book happily left me with more questions than answers, which is why I love it and why I will never eat octopus.

If you have a teenager wanting to be a marine biologist, this is the book to read! It is a coming-of-age book but also one of great charm and devotion to marine life. The tale and the writing are irresistible. It is so rare for an author to personalize marine biology, especially for teenagers.

This book does a remarkable thing. I loved it because it was a great story about teenagers who somehow managed to connect their love for the shoreline, and it even managed to give us a lot of great biology. Children often want to be marine biologists but their love is usually not very well connected to the real worlds of the ocean.

This book is a really great Natural History book. It puts teenagers in the mud, collecting clams, and doing things marine biologists do. Yet it has a heart—a really great book.

Great children's books about the ocean are very rare. Pagoo is a hermit crab, and Holling brings the shore and Pagoo to life. As a marine biologist and parent, I was overjoyed to see how an author and illustrator could produce such a wonderful and literate book that reached out to children so well.

Holling is at the very peak of children’s adventure writing, and he filled his books with magnificent illustrations.

I was particularly attracted to this book because it was one of the first works to provide a timely reminder of the fragility and centrality of the ocean and the life that abounds within it.

This enduring work, published over six decades ago, makes an important case for the primacy of the ocean. I was first exposed to this book at a relatively young age, and its profound influence shaped my future endeavors in ocean science.

The book captures the excitement of Steinbeck's research expedition with biologist Ed Ricketts to the remote Sea of Cortez, with all its hardships, failures, and thrills of discovery.

I felt that I was onboard the vessel, feeling the rhythmic rocking of the boat, the daily oppressive heat and humidity, and the mind-numbing routine of taking myriad samples and observations. I found myself nodding along with Steinbeck's assessment that though marine exploration can be tedious, the rewards lift up the human spirit.

Unlike the books I’ve recommended above, Citizens of the Sea is packed with gorgeous four-color photographs by some of the world’s top underwater photographers. The close-ups are downright amazing. National Geographic made a brilliant call in having Nancy Knowlton write the text. Not only is she a renowned coral reef biologist and the former Sant Chair for Marine Science at the Smithsonian National Museum for Natural History, she also writes so lucidly and engagingly that even her articles for peer-reviewed journals make engrossing reading. 

This book is claustrophobic, unflinching, and horrifying, so I can’t watch videos from seafloor subs, drones, or observatories. I’m used to sci-fi that takes place in the cold black isolation of a spaceship, but here we have the cold black isolation of the seabed, which triggers all the thalassophobia. Add the meticulous routines of a crew surviving in a place where humans shouldn’t be and, above all, the awful psychological pull of the void, and you get deliciously potent nightmare fuel.

But maybe more than that, I love that Watts is one of those authors, like Richard Morgan, who creates spec-fic characters with questionable morality, who can and do alarm the reader. Everyone I know who’s ever read this book has never forgotten it, shudders when I mention it and knows who Lenie Clark is. 

Imagination + humor. The opening line of this books is one of my favorites – “Kidnapping children is not a good idea. All the same, sometimes it has to be done.” – Ibbotson was a genius at combining fantastical settings with humor. This book in particular spoke to my childhood fantasies of taking care of strange animals and visiting exotic locales. It’s a whole lot of fun, like all her books.

This book introduces some basic facts about sharks in an original, laugh-your-pants-off kind of way. The misunderstood shark derails jellyfish’s live TV broadcast with his questionable behavior. Readers will be left to debate the shark’s actual intentions and to discuss the cool shark facts they learned along the way. The supporting characters in the book also have fantastically funny dialogue. Every inch of this book is fun! And again, kids will be laughing and learning at the same time.

I must have read this book aloud to children at least fifty times, and I never got tired of reading it. The words have such a wonderful cadence to them. The children will get caught up in the rhythm and rhyme.

I loved the message of not only being able to change your life by changing your attitude, but also the way another fish helps him see that. I think that it’s sometimes hard to be kind to grumpy people, and this book shows that it’s worth the effort.