Library – Page 73 – Learn to Dive Today Blog

Bookshelf: Oceanography and ocean history books

Are you interested in the physical processes of the earth’s oceans? Currents, waves, and how the oceans got to be the way they are? Fear not, I have just the reading list for you. Dig in!

Oceanography

Ocean: An Illustrated Atlas
The Oceans
Ocean
Encyclopaedia of the Sea
Atlas of Oceans
Sea Change – Sylvia Earle
The Wave – freak waves (popular science)
The Power of the Sea
Moby-Duck
Flotsametrics
Surf Science – oceanography for surfers
Mapping the Deep
The Gulf Stream
The Cloudspotter’s Guide
The Wavewatcher’s Companion

Ocean history

Atlantic
Archaeological Oceanography
The Box – history of shipping containers
The Penguin Book of the Ocean – an anthology of ocean-related fiction and non-fiction
The Log from the Sea of Cortez – John Steinbeck and Ed Ricketts explore the Gulf of California
The Mortal Sea
The Death and Life of Monterey Bay
The Unnatural History of the Sea – one thousand years of overfishing
The Story of Sushi
The Fluid Envelope of Our Planet – the history of the development of oceanography as a science
Bay Between the Mountains – a history of False Bay
The False Bay Story
Sentinel of the Seas – the story of one of America’s most isolated lighthouses
The Outermost House – Henry Beston’s classic account of a year at Cape Cod
Endurance – Shackleton’s incredible Antarctic voyage
Shorelines, Strandlopers and Shell Middens – a stretch to classify it here, but related to the history of our coast!
Sea monsters on Medieval and Renaissance Maps

Bookshelf: Extreme diving

Not for everyone, but definitely fun to read about… Here you will find accounts of dives to great depths, to shipwrecks and into caves, and dives pushing the limits of human physiology. Find a book about extreme diving in this lovely list.

Cave diving

Caverns Measureless to Man – Sheck Exley
Blind Descent – spelunking and diving

Deep diving and technical diving

Raising the Dead – cave diving tragedy at Boesmansgat
Fatally Flawed – reminiscences of deep cave diver Verna van Schaik
Deep Descent – diving the Andrea Doria
Shadow Divers – identifying a WWII submarine in the north Atlantic
The Last Dive – living fast and loose as deep technical divers
Submerged – the memoir of Daniel Lenihan, who has worked around the world to preserve underwater heritage sites
Dark Descent – diving the wreck of the Empress of Ireland

Commercial diving

Freediving

Bookshelf: Photography and art

Do you want to look at pictures of marine life, learn how to take underwater photos, or make your coastal garden pretty (I admit, a bit of a leap)? Here’s a reading list to get you started.

Photographs of ocean-related subjects:

Lighthouses of South Africa
Melting Away – the Arctic and Antarctic

Photographs of marine life:

Great White and Eminent Grey – white sharks in False Bay, South Africa
A Diver’s Guide to Reef Life
Wild Seas, Secret Shores of Africa – South Africa’s varied coastline
Lost World – the Seychelles
Currents of Contrast – the coast of South Africa
Polar Obsession – the ice end of our planet
Shoreline – South Africa’s varied coastline
Beautiful Whale – photographs of whales in mind-boggling detail
Blue Hope – with text by Sylvia Earle, and contributions by the world’s best underwater photographers
Shark – beautiful shark photography with sparse text
South African Coasts

General underwater photography:

The Art of Diving

Art (this book is really unclassifiable!):

Big Fish

Making your surroundings beautiful:

Coastal Gardening in South Africa

Bookshelf: Diving adventures

Here’s a reading list of diving adventures, old and new, spanning all kinds of diving. From Arthur C. Clarke’s chronicles of diving the pristine Great Barrier Reef and Sri Lanka several decades ago, to more modern accounts of wreck diving around the world, you’ll be sure to find something that meets your reading requirements here. Get set for an armchair diving adventure of note!

Travelling divers and interesting lives:

The Coast of Coral– Great Barrier Reef
The Reefs of Taprobane – Sri Lanka
Into The Abyss– memoir of diving Scapa Flow and the North Sea
The Darkness Below – finding, identifying and diving virgin wrecks off Scotland
Neutral Buoyancy – a life of recreational diving (cannot recommend this book highly enough!)
Down the Cayman Wall – Cayman Islands
The Face of the Deep – arcane but beautiful musings on the ocean
The Rapture of the Deep – recollections of a wild diving instructor
Pirate Hunters – the search for a pirate ship in the Caribbean

Maniacs (some admirable!):

Deep Descent – diving the Andrea Doria
Caverns Measureless to Man – Sheck Exley, cave diving legend
Raising the Dead – Dave Shaw’s last dive
Fatally Flawed – how Verna van Schaik became the deepest woman on earth
The Last Dive – a history of mixed gas and cave diving, wrapped in the tale of a family tragedy
Submerged – adventures of a diving archaeologist
Dark Descent – diving the Empress of Ireland
Blind Descent – spelunking and diving