Recommended Read: Barbarian Days

I recently finished William Finnegan’s book Barbarian Days, an autobiographical surfing novel. The tome is weighty (400+ pages in hardcover), but that’s not a surprise considering it spans several decades and the bulk of Finnegan’s life. It’s a nomadic tale of waves and foreign lands, something that will certainly appeal to those with an adventurous spirit and wanderlust. Finnegan’s prose is playful, impressively crafted but not flashy. He’s brutally honest at times, but he himself is not exempt from this stark form of assessing his surroundings.

Barbarian Days is a collection of experiences of some of the best waves on the planet. These breaks include Honolua Bay, Kirra, Ocean Beach and Cloudbreak, just to name a few, and there are plenty more. The stories wander from sparse South Pacific accommodations to teaching in Apartheid-era South Africa to dreamy tropical waves to brutal San Francisco winters. The waves may be the stars of the show in many ways, but the characters, many of them surfing companions of the author, enrich the story and humanize it in a way that a protagonist alone often cannot. From childhood friends to adult partners in wave-chasing to family, there is a brilliant spectrum of personalities that glue you to the page. Just as surfing has its lulls, so does Barbarian Days, but they’re short-lived and it’s worth the wait.

There are some fantastic passages in this work, many of which any wave-rider can relate to. “My utter absorption in surfing had no rational content,” Finnegan writes. “It simply compelled me; there was a deep mine of beauty and wonder in it.”

I would certainly recommend this novel to any surfer, and really anyone that has an appreciation for nature and adventurous forays into unknown worlds. You can find Barbarian Days here.

Follow Morgan, founder of Go Left, one Twitter @GoLeftSurf