Swimming Studies by Leanne Shapton

Sometimes you read reviews and you think the book you just purchased is perfect for you. There are 2 times that I've bought a book based on a review and I was very disappointed.

1 was this book, Swimming Studies. (The other was We the Animals by Justin Torres). I read many different kinds of books, genres, nonfiction and fiction. These two, I almost feel bad giving them away to someone else to read. 

I mailed We the Animals to someone that requested it through an online book swap. Swimming Studies will be placed in a yard sale.

This book had the potential to be a great story about a woman who worked very hard and came close to qualifying for the Olympics but she didn't. It's about how she dedicated her life to swimming, from a very young age. 

The idea of working diligently, hard, persevering, toward a goal, sacrificing to obtain a measure of performance, self-imposed deadline, personal best, or outward expectation to succeed... to do everything right and then to fail... it is in that moment and how you process that situation, those feelings and where to position yourself for future goals is what I had hoped to discover from Shapton and apply. 

I picked this book up when I was struggling in my career. For the first time in my life, I felt I was not good at something, no matter my intention or how hard I tried. Hard work and long hours were not paying off. I felt nothing worked and I was consistently uneasy. 

This feeling came after years of being successful in school, work and at home. I had to psych myself up every day on my way to work and during the day.

I was hoping to gain strength from Shapton's story. I wanted to learn how she did it. How she grappled with striving toward a goal and not quite getting there. 

The book didn't dive into this at all. It mostly explained her early years and time with her husband, the different styles of swimsuits she wore and where she bought them and some abstract artwork that all together felt disjointed and surface-like. 

Here is what I liked:

"Everything about him has intent." pg. 222

"As I wander around the room and look in the vitrines that display his studies and notes..." pg. 222

vitrines - a glass display case

"The idea of specialness occurs to me one night when I can't sleep (or bake). That as good athletes, we defined ourselves as special, then submitted to a routine in which we did exactly as we were told. I think of the limitations that 'specialness' requires doing a series of very unspecial things, very well, over and over, a million times over, so that one special things might happen, maybe,  much later. So - I think to myself in the four a.m. blear, face squashed into my pillow - specialness sanctioned, rigorous unspecialness. An unexpected feeling of relief flew over me. Then dissipates as I start grinding my teeth." pp. 222-223

"There is a quotation from On Directing Film by David Mamet that I underlined in 1993 and have never forgotten: 'Stanislavsky wrote that the difficult will become easy and the easy habitual, so that the habitual may become beautiful.'" pg. 225


Shapton, Leanne. (2012). Swimming Studies. New York: Penguin Group.