6 de novembro de 2026

Books for Surfers and Skaters: Culture, History and the Road

A Pulitzer-winning surf memoir, the novel that inspired Point Break, the bible of skateboard graphics and the stories of two teenagers who drove to Central America looking for waves. The books that best explain surf and skate culture, and the ones that make you want to travel.

Este artigo está disponível apenas em inglês por enquanto.

Intro

Surfing and skateboarding are mostly learned by doing, but a lot of their culture has been passed on in print. Magazines carried it month to month, and books have kept it for good.

This is a reading list in four parts: surf culture, surf travel, skateboarding, and reference books to keep on the shelf. Every year, author and fact below has been checked against the sources at the bottom. We do not reproduce cover art here, because covers are protected by copyright.

Surf culture

Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life (2015), William Finnegan

If you read one surf book, make it this one. Finnegan, a staff writer at The New Yorker, tells the story of a lifetime of surfing, from Hawaii as a boy to years of travel through the South Pacific, Asia and Africa. It won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography, which the Pulitzer board described as "a finely crafted memoir of a youthful obsession". It is the book that convinced many non-surfers what the obsession is about.

Gidget (1957), Frederick Kohner

The novel that brought surfing to mainstream America. Kohner, a Hollywood screenwriter, based it on his teenage daughter Kathy Kohner and her stories about the surfers at Malibu Point, at a time when surfing was still a small youth scene. Columbia Pictures turned it into a film with Sandra Dee in 1959, and the beach-movie wave of the early 1960s followed. Read it as a time capsule.

Tapping the Source (1984), Kem Nunn

A dark crime novel set in Huntington Beach, in which a young man goes looking for his missing sister and finds the underside of the surf scene. It was a finalist for the National Book Award and became the basis for the film Point Break (1991) and its 2015 remake. Nunn later wrote more "surf noir", including The Dogs of Winter and Tijuana Straits.

Breath (2008), Tim Winton

Two boys in a small town in Western Australia learn to surf under the influence of an older, reckless surfer. The novel is about fear, risk and growing up, and it won Australia's top literary prize, the Miles Franklin Award, in 2009.

The Wave (2010), Susan Casey

The full title is The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks and Giants of the Ocean. Casey follows two worlds that are both obsessed with giant waves: scientists studying rogue waves that sink ships, and big-wave surfers such as Laird Hamilton, one of the pioneers of tow-in surfing. It pairs well with our article on Nazaré and Mavericks.

Caught Inside (1996), Daniel Duane

Duane leaves a job in Berkeley to spend a year surfing the cold coast around Santa Cruz, reading surf history and talking to locals who organise their lives around waves. A quiet, honest book about what surfing does to your priorities.

Surf Is Where You Find It (2008), Gerry Lopez

Short stories from Gerry Lopez, the Hawaiian surfer best known as "Mr. Pipeline". The book, published by Patagonia, collects 38 stories of one to seven pages each, about surfers, places and lessons from a life in the ocean. Easy to read one story at a time.

Surf travel

Search for the Perfect Wave, Kevin Naughton and Craig Peterson

In the early 1970s, two teenagers from Orange County, Kevin Naughton and Craig Peterson, drove through Mexico and Central America in Volkswagens looking for waves. Naughton wrote and Peterson, who shot photos for Surfer while still in high school, took the pictures. Their stories in Surfer, including a 1973 cover story, made the surf road trip a dream for a whole generation. Later trips took them to West Africa, Morocco, Ireland, France, Spain and Fiji. Their stories have been collected in the book Search for the Perfect Wave, which first came out around 2016.

In Search of Captain Zero (2001), Allan Weisbecker

A road-trip memoir: Weisbecker drives from New York to Central America with his dog, looking for an old friend who used to be his surfing and smuggling partner. Part travel book, part confession, and often called one of the most readable surf-travel books.

The Stormrider Guides

Not literature, but the books that sent thousands of surfers on the road. The first Stormrider Guide Europe came out in 1992, with hand-drawn maps and numbered spot lists. We looked at its Portugal chapter in Portugal in 1992: What the Stormrider Guide Saw.

Skateboarding

The Mutt: How to Skateboard and Not Kill Yourself (2004), Rodney Mullen with Sean Mortimer

The autobiography of Rodney Mullen, the freestyle champion who invented a large part of the trick vocabulary of modern street skating, including the flat-ground ollie. Funny and surprisingly personal about his difficult relationship with his father. If you only know Mullen from video parts, this explains the mind behind them.

Hawk: Occupation: Skateboarder (2000), Tony Hawk with Sean Mortimer

Tony Hawk's own story, from a hyperactive kid in San Diego to the first 900 in 1999. It became a New York Times bestseller, which says something about how far skateboarding had come.

Dogtown: The Legend of the Z-Boys (2000), C.R. Stecyk III and Glen E. Friedman

The book version of the Z-Boys story: Stecyk's original "Dogtown articles" from SkateBoarder magazine and Friedman's photographs of the 1970s pool and street scene in Santa Monica and Venice. Read it with our article on the photographers who framed board culture.

The Disposable Skateboard Bible, Sean Cliver

The standard work on skateboard graphics: more than 1,000 deck graphics from the 1960s to the turn of the millennium, organised by decade, with stories from Tony Hawk, Mike Vallely, Mark Gonzales, Stacy Peralta and others. It first appeared in 2004 as Disposable: A History of Skateboard Art and has since been reissued in a 10th-anniversary edition by Gingko Press. See also our history of skateboard graphics.

The Concrete Wave (1999), Michael Brooke

One of the first full histories of skateboarding, from the clay-wheel 1960s through the urethane boom. According to Surfer Today, it sold more than 40,000 copies. Brooke later founded Concrete Wave magazine.

Skateboarding and the City: A Complete History (2019), Iain Borden

A history of skateboarding written by a professor of architecture and urban culture at University College London. Borden looks at skateboarding as a way of using the city, from the surf beaches of 1960s California to today's street skating and public skateparks. It is the most serious academic book on the subject, but readable.

Reference books to keep

The Encyclopedia of Surfing (2003), Matt Warshaw: about 1,500 entries on surfers, places, boards and slang. Since 2013 it has also been an online archive, which is one of our most-used sources.
The History of Surfing (2010), Matt Warshaw: a big, illustrated history from ancient Hawaii to the modern pro tour.
The Stormrider guides: spot guides by region, still useful for understanding a coast even when the details have aged.

Where to start

If you want…	Read
One surf book only	Barbarian Days
A novel	Tapping the Source or Breath
To plan a trip	Search for the Perfect Wave or a Stormrider guide
Big waves	The Wave
Skate history	Skateboarding and the City or The Concrete Wave
Skate legends in their own words	The Mutt and Hawk: Occupation: Skateboarder
Board art	The Disposable Skateboard Bible

Next, see our lists of legendary surf and skate films and uncrowded surf destinations.