I like the ocean. Growing up in Surfers Paradise leaves you with two things for life: sun-damaged skin (check) and a relentless yearning for the ocean (check). When people in Melbourne refer to their inner-city beaches, I laugh. Ports aren't beaches, fools. The sea, give me the sea. And ice cream and fish and chips and salty hair and zinc cream on my freckled nose, brand new one-piece speedos, and killer pythons encrusted with sand. Give me youth and freedom.

But you can't give me that can you? No, you can't. All you have to offer me is stagnant port water and games of hide and seek with hypodermic needles, apartment dogs shitting in the sand and dudes with more muscle than brains (or penis).

Thank God for the salvation of books. They bring me the ocean.

Moby Dick sure did – it brought me the ocean and way too much detail of its mammalian marine life. Seriously, such a great book at both the beginning and end - if only that middle part could just be condensed. But the ending! So dramatic, so fast! I loved the book, I did, but it felt strangely similar to the time I fell in love with a man and spent months slowly wooing him, painfully slowly, only to eventually have the most rapid and unsatisfying sex with him that I jumped from my metaphorical Pequod and swam ashore as fast as my asthmatic lungs would power me. Ah, but the sweet beginning, the potential, the thrills.

Speaking of asthmatic lungs and shortened breath – asphyxiation by the seaside anyone? Breath. It was Tim Winton's book, remember the one that was really really popular and won all that stuff and was kind of everywhere? Yeah, well, it was really good. Young surfers, married women, boys leaping from cliffs into the waves below... it reminded me of my youth. Except my asphyxiation was a genetic fault, not a sexual proclivity.

Hemingway was someone I would've got into sexual deviancy over though. Anything he wanted. He was an ass but I loved him. I loved his books anyway and we all know that's just as good as loving the person. The Old Man And The Sea is one of those books I hold dear to my barnacled whale heart. Santiago and the giant marlin. True, it's not a happy story and no marine life comes out of it unscathed, but it's a beautiful story. And it's Hemmingway.

Slain sharks are also a feature in a book I'd never really thought I'd read until it was forced upon me - Jaws by Peter Benchley. While bodysurfing one morning on a quick Gold Coast holiday, my sister told me she'd stayed up late the night before because she'd seen a show called Shark Navigator was on in an hour. She is one of the great lovers of the sea beast. She waded through an hour of reality TV and other monstrosities for her shark show. It turned out that Shark Navigator is actually a vacuum cleaner and it was an hour-long infomercial. She sat through it anyway, too despondent to move. She is the one who made me read Jaws.

Of course, it's the book the film was ever-so-loosely based on, but it's much more thrilling: it has plot complexities and affairs and death and, of course, the sea. Summer and the sea. And the giant killer shark. If you like the film (and what child of the '80s doesn't?) then read the book.

Romy Ash, a girl I know, wrote a book called Floundering. I'm biased because I worked on it and think she's a talent, but never has a book made me feel so salty and sun-kissed. It reminded me of the things of the sea I love and all the parts of summer I hate: hot cordial, burning car seats, relentless heat belting down, bugs, siblings being annoying and parents being irate. You can almost taste the cloying Twisties. I've worked on a lot of books but none have so evocatively recreated so many elements of the Australian summer of my childhood. Go read it.

At the beach the other day, my three-year-old niece spilled the remnants of her Calippo in my lap. It was 40 degrees, she was covered in sugar and sweat, and she looked at me with her great big grin and said, "Feel my tongue, Aunty Caro!" At which point she landed her sticky, cold tongue on my cheek and proceeded to lick my face. The Calippo juice, her cold tongue and sugary saliva – if I didn't loved her so much I would have cast her aside and run for the cleansing tide. But I didn't, I just licked her back and then let her bury me in the sand.

I hope she remembers days like that on the beach with the people who love her when she finally reads books of the sea as an adult. Thanks to slip, slop, slapping she won't have the permanent skin damage but she'll have the water-baby gene. Maybe when she's older she'll be drawn to The Bodysurfers by Robert Drewe or Favel Parrett's Past the Shallows, or she'll be a Helen Garner girl and develop a soft spot for Postcard From Surfers, she might love Lord Jim or The Perfect Storm, The Shipping News, Lockie Leonard or Treasure Island. Whatever it is, I don't doubt every time a book takes her to the ocean she'll be able to smell it and hear it, and she'll yearn for it, the very same way her sun-damaged aunties do.

Lovely pic from here.