Swimming Studies

Leanne Shapton explores, through essays, paintings, and memories, her experiences with swimming, including her years as a high-level competitive swimmer with two trips to the Canadian Olympic trials; vacation swims in various hotel pools, seas, and lakes; and time swimming in Masters' swim programs in middle age. The result is a lovely, if uneven, study of swimming, just as the title suggests. Some of her recollections and evocations of swim practice put me right back to my own years as a (not-at-all high-level) competitive swimmer in early adolescence, and I did so much "yes, that"ing at this whole book. Which is always a wonderful sensation in reading. The unevenness comes from the fact that some of the essays don't quite seem to come show more together and one wonders if they are really for the author alone rather than for an audience. That, of course, is the fine line you walk when you write this sort of thing, and I don't exactly begrudge putting a toe over it once and a while. Recommended to anyone who likes memoir, essay, or contemplation about sport, but most especially to swimmers. show less

What a fascinating book! Shapton describes her life as an elite competitive swimmer as well as swimming's role in her life after she stopped competing. I enjoyed the commonalities with myself, once a striving-for-mediocrity swimmer, and the insights into the experiences of the excellent athletes. I imagine that the parts addressing how swimming, competing, going into the water, etc play out in the rest of her adult life have parallels for anyone who has moved on from an intense pursuit.

But there's more! She's an artist, too, and sheds light and even humor on swimming through her various forms of art, included in the book. I guess it would be impractical to scent the pages with chlorinated water, but the art adds a dimension I've never show more witnessed in a book about sport. For this aspect, it's worth a look by just about anyone.

Her essays are mostly brief, so if you didn't like one, you could just skip to the next and find something completely different. But I found them all worthwhile. show less

Leanne Shapton pens a loving, insightful, and frequently cynical examination of her swimming life. The memoir clearly is anchored in her present as she looks back over the past, but it moves through time fluidly, slipping from childhood memories to college years to her later adulthood and marriage. Nonetheless, the fluctuating book has a flexible sort of order to it, as the remembered memories follow a general chronological order, although with plenty of side trails and tangential memories to break up a truly linear account. She focuses much of the first part of the book on her childhood swimming, the swim teams she joined and the competitions she endured, from an elementary age all the way through high school. From there, she devotes show more several pieces to different events from her college experience, when she was on again and off again with competitive swimming. Finally, she describes her adult years post-college, when she made a transition from competitive swimming to the world of art, met her husband, and traveled.

More important than the form of the book, though, is the beautiful writing that is always submerging itself into water. Every story, every milestone in her life, is associated with water. Swim teams, pools, lakes, oceans, and spas - Leanne Shapton has an affinity for all of the various forms of bodies of water. She may like self-contained structures like pools more than the scary, unfathomable distances of the ocean, but that only makes her challenge herself to swim in the ocean despite her fears. The language uses water-based metaphors and clear, concise descriptions to evoke a swimming life. Although she gave up competitive swimming at the intense level of her younger days, she has never totally lost that mindset or her swimming form, and seemingly never will. Her passion for the pursuit is evident in every portion of the memoir.

I have never before read a book that evoked the water so elegantly. I could feel it running under my arms and legs sometimes. Shapton's writing brought before my mind a type of lifestyle I had never really considered before, and started to make me long for the water myself, an echo of her own intense feelings. Buried among the different memoir pieces are watercolors by the author, and two sets of photographs, all tuned to the theme of swimming (except the pictures of the cars her father collected, although cars are linked to swim meets through her memories). The art complements the writing perfectly, and the whole book is a delightful journey into another person's life. I enjoyed my entire swift read of it. show less

"Swimming Studies" is the kind of book that makes you appreciate swimming, specifically the grueling routine every swimmer goes through. And while it is a memoir on Shapton's swimming experience, there's much more to it than just a pool and water. Loneliness, the meaning of self, observations of what's around you -- those are the themes I took away from this riveting memoir.

Everyone is a swimmer, or rather, everyone has a career or dream that they chase and try to perfect. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. But we still find a way to blend what we learned from an early age and apply it to what we do today. For Shapton, it's art and swimming. Her pieces of art scattered across the book are fascinating and chilling. Highly show more recommend this to anyone interested in swimming or looking for a polished outlook on how life changes after stepping away from something you've known all your life. show less

I loved this book. I found it captivating.
I am a swimmer. I am the mother of a former competitive swimmer (distance). I love swimming in pools, lakes, the ocean, hot springs. I like water, A LOT! Don't even mind doing the dishes! So this book was written as a meditative, contemplative series of sensory vignettes by someone who is also captivated by water. Shapton trained for Olympic trials as a teenager in Etobicoke, Ontario but was caught by the influence of water and the way it pulls her through her life, influencing her art and her writing and her relationships I found very interesting!

Leanne Shapton owns many bathing suits. This is a large, sociological difference between us. I own one bathing suit. When it falls apart, I throw it out and buy another. A whole section of photographs of bathing suits and their accompanying stories fills out the middle of Shapton's Swimming Studies. Then little vignettes: where purchased, why, worn when, why. It felt like floating, as much as reading about buying bathing suits can feel like floating, in a warm pool. One can hear the lap of waves on the tiles at the edge of the pool. Schlap schwap schlap schwap gelap.

The book is all mini-essays, mini-memoirs. There isn't really a story or a plot. Just the idea of being in water by choice. To swim (feet off the ground) versus to bathe show more (feet on). The sound of water, as said, comes through the writing. But for a book with so many pools, I'd expect the smell of chlorine to come through too. It didn't. Maybe Shapton became inured to it after all her hours of swimming practice. I expected it though, the smell, tangy and chemical.

No purpose to the book, but there's no purpose to swimming, racing or not. But we do it. We write, we read, we swim or bathe. The book is like a distillation of the idea of a swim. Like a thread you can show to an alien species to say Here. We do this because of these reasons.

I like swimming. I like swimming more than reading about swimming, but reading about swimming can be okay too.

I had this book on my want-to-read list for a long time. I found it recently on Netgalley. It was published in 2012. Maybe the publisher forgot it was still up there. Maybe it's a reissue. But I found it there, so I downloaded it, then got annoyed that the pictures weren't there, so I took out a copy from the library. A sort of round-about way of getting to read this book.

Swimming Studies by Leanne Shapton went on sale July 5, 2012.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. show less

the adjectives 'delightful' and 'charming' and 'pleasant' often seem to trivialize their subject, but this memoir is all of these without being trivial. I found this a very enjoyable book to read. I liked how she referred to people in her life without any introduction, as though the reader were a friend who would know to whom the author referred. I liked the lack of linearity - not rambling, but event following event by relevance and association - very stream of conscious. I appreciated her revealing her struggles with depression, her brushes with fame/the famous, her uncertainies without making them the focus of her life. I liked that her life - what she's done, who has been with her, her wandering way in the world - were the focus of show more the book. show less