Barbarian Days

About 30 pages into this book, I had a brief thought that I didn’t care that the book won a Pulitzer, there was no way I was reading 400+ pages about surfing.

I finished the book. Surfing is the star of probably 90% of the pages in the book. So it’s fair to say it’s a book about surfing. However, it’s also a book about growing up and about making decisions, both good and bad. It’s a travelogue, taking you to places around the globe that you probably never go, because you don’t have a driving obsession with finding the perfect wave. It’s one big metaphor, with surfing standing in for all sorts of other things.

It helps that the author William Finnegan is a talented and well known journalist, so he knows how to write. You’d think there are only so many ways to describe a wave in the ocean. Finnegan will disabuse you of that thought,

It’s a good book. You’ll get invested in Finnegan’s life and want to keep reading to see how it turns out. You might even want to go surfing.