SurfWriter Girls Holiday Books 2023

 

A Gondola of Good Reads!

 

Written by SurfWriter Girls Sunny Magdaug and Patti Kishel

This holiday season SurfWriter Girls Sunny Magdaug and Patti Kishel have a featured book to share that’s a heart-felt remembrance of California’s iconic Venice Beach. 

 

Also, three surfing books that will have you ready to paddle out and a spy novel to channel your inner Jason Bourne.

Growing Up Venice, by Donna Lewis Friess, Ph.D., is both the memoir of a person and a place. It paints a vivid picture of growing up in the seaside community that sprang from the dream of millionaire Abbot Kinney in 1905 to create a magical place of canals on the edge of the Pacific Ocean that would be the Venice of America. 

Kinney turned the Ballona Wetlands, a salt marsh south of Santa Monica, into his dreamscape village connected by canals and bridges, complete with Venetian-style gondolas, that became an artists' community and resort.

 

 

Friess, who moved with her family to Venice's Marina Peninsula when she was three, writes her "front gate opened onto a narrow, seashell filled beach." She remembers the sounds of "the rolling surf," catching grunions, the oil fields with their always-pumping derricks "lulling my little sister and me to dream-filled sleep," and horseback riding in the undeveloped marsh land. It was a time when a little girl could roam free and have endless adventures by the sea. 

 

Filled with personal photos dating to Friess’ great-grandparents in the 1880s, the book tells of a semi-wild place centered on oil drilling, fishing, and the beach, and its evolution throughout the 20th Century as land developers, movie stars, tech entrepreneurs, and more discovered Kinney's ocean paradise and made it their own. Along the way, Friess – with a front row seat on it all – did too.    

SurfWriter Girl Patti was excited to read this book because she grew up near Venice in adjacent Culver City. In fact, Patti's sister Eileen Ferris rode horses where Friess did – in a storied place that was and is continually reinventing itself. 

Mindfulness and Surfing: Reflections for Saltwater Souls, by Sam Bleakley, a longboard champion with multiple UK and European surfing titles, explores how riding the waves can be the ultimate meditation, becoming one with the ocean’s salty swells, flow, and peaks, and listening to what the ocean tells us about our place in nature.

 

100 Foot Wave: The Greatest Surfing Story Ever Told, by Milton B. Willis and Michael C. Willis, takes you into the world of extreme big wave surfing. Told by the Willis brothers, two of the few surfers who have ridden the100-foot waves in Hawaii’s Waimea Bay, the book captures the sights, sounds and thrills of these monster waves.    

 

Tombstoning, by PG Robertson, is the first book in an Australian surfing mystery trilogy that has become a sensation Down Under and beyond, blending awesome waves, bad guys, and danger in a writing style that’s been compared to author Don Winslow. The fast-pacing and plot twists will keep you turning the pages.     

The Blonde Identity, by Ally Carter, grabs you from the start when a woman wakes up on a Paris street with no memory, just the pain in her head, blood drops in the snow, and a hot guy yelling to her to run. SurfWriter Girls loved all the surprises as the woman, who’s been mistaken for a spy, goes on the run with the hot guy, tries to figure out what’s happening…and stay alive.  

 

SurfWriter Girls hope you enjoy this gondola of books and that they help to warm your holidays!  

 

SurfWriter Girls

Surf’n Beach Scene Magazine

Sunny Magdaug and Patti Kishel hold the exclusive rights to this copyrighted material. Publications wishing to reprint it may contact them at surfwriter.girls@gmail.com Individuals and non-profit groups are welcome to post it on social media sites as long as credit is given.