30-Day Book Meme #1: The Wave

The Wave

The 30-day book meme asked me to talk about the best book I read last year. I don’t really rank my books in “best ever/worst ever” categories. I either didn’t like something, liked it, or loved it enough to read again. One of the books that fit the latter category, was The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks and Giants of the Ocean, by Susan Casey (review here).

This book alternates chapters, speaking with scientists and then surfers about finding the world’s biggest waves, predicting ocean waves and currents, surviving rogue waves, and even seeing waves from space – no really.

It’s a great book to go back to in weeks like this one, when it’s predicted to reach 109 today, and I’m really missing the ocean, but I’d recommend it to anyone who likes the science behind sailing and surfing, and why waves may be getting bigger and more dangerous.

Was it really the best book I read in 2010? Maybe, maybe not. It did, however, inspire me to download a surf report app for my iPhone.

Teaser Tuesdays: The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks, and Giants of the Ocean

The Wave

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

– Grab your current read
– Open to a random page
– Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
– BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
– Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

When I confessed that my favorite birthday present this year was the Kindle my aunt bought for me, a friend of mine asked me “Why do you hate books, Melissa?” but the reality is that I’m spending MORE money on reading material since having the Kindle than I did when I bought only paper books. I mean, we all have either iPhones or ipods, as well, and no one asks, “Why do you hate CDs?” In truth, I still buy paper books, so I can read them in the bathtub.

In any case, my teaser this week comes from the very beginning of my current read, The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks, and Giants of the Ocean, by Susan Casey. As it’s a Kindle book, I can’t tell you the page number, but it’s from location 45-50.

The clock read midnight when the hundred-foot wave hit the ship, rising from the North Atlantic out of the darkness. Among the ocean’s terrors a wave this size was the most feared and the least understood, more myth than reality – or so people had thought. This giant was certainly real. As the RRS Discovery plunged down into the wave’s deep trough, it heeled twenty-eight degrees to port, rolled thirty degrees back to starboard, then recovered to face the incoming seas.