50 books
Kevin Fedarko
The Grand Canyon runs two hundred seventy-seven river miles and has no trail from one end to the other, so walking it means about seven hundred fifty miles of route-finding along ledges between the rim and the river, in country…
Jaimal Yogis
Yogis follows Saltwater Buddha here, picking up in his early twenties with a broken heart and no direction. He goes to a monastery in Dharamsala and meets Sonam, a Tibetan refugee, and hatches a half-baked plan to get him to…
Patrick Bringley
Bringley was working a desk job at The New Yorker when his older brother Tom died of cancer in his twenties. After that, he had no taste for a career; he only wanted to stand still. So he took a…
Sally Mann
Sally Mann has been making pictures on the same Virginia farm for fifty years, and this is the book about how the work actually gets made. Not theory. The nuts and bolts of a life spent at it. She’s funny…
William Finnegan
Finnegan covered wars for The New Yorker and spent his whole life not telling people he was a surfer, because it sounded ridiculous coming from a serious reporter. Then he wrote this and won the Pulitzer. It starts with a…
Sarah Wynn-Williams
Wynn-Williams was a New Zealand diplomat who talked her way into a job at Facebook in 2011 because she believed the thing could do some good in the world. She stayed seven years running global public policy, in the room…
Jeremy Collins
Collins was shivering in a cave under Fitz Roy in Patagonia when he got the idea: Go out from home in each of the four directions, climb something new, and fill sketchbooks doing it. He told his friend and mentor…
Jeremy Collins
Jer Collins is a climber and an illustrator and somebody asked him to bring his sketchbook down the Amazon and draw the people living along it. That trip opened the door to mixed-media storytelling, and he kept going — the…
Thomas Hornbein
Hornbein and Willi Unsoeld were on the 1963 American expedition, the one that put the first Americans on top by the regular route. The two of them wanted the West Ridge instead, which nobody had climbed and nobody knew if…
Antoine de Sainte-Exupery
Saint-Exupéry flew reconnaissance during the collapse of France in May 1940, and this is one flight — low over Arras, through flak, to photograph German positions in a sector already lost. Everybody in the squadron knows the mission is pointless.…
Doug Peacock
Peacock came home from Vietnam a Green Beret medic who couldn’t be around people, drove into the Montana and Wyoming backcountry, and started following grizzlies. No gun, just a camera and years of sitting still watching bears he came to…
Helen Macdonald
A goshawk is the falconer’s hard case — bigger, faster, and less forgiving than a falcon, with a reputation for being impossible to keep steady. Macdonald had been a falconer since childhood and she bought one in Scotland for £800,…
Sally Mann
Fine art photographer Sally Mann found boxes in the attic — letters, photographs, court records — and built a memoir out of what was in them. Her father the country doctor and eccentric. Her mother. Gee-Gee, the Black woman who…
Michael Pollan
A skeptical Michael Pollan came to psychedelics late, and in his sixties he took LSD, psilocybin, and 5-MeO-DMT under guides so he could report from inside. Around that he builds the history: The first wave of research in the fifties…
Jon Krakauer
Krakauer was sent to Everest by a magazine to write about the commercialization of the mountain and summited on May 10, 1996, the day a storm caught multiple teams high on the peak. Eight people died that day, including both…
Kate Harris
Harris is one of the few authors whose writing stops me in my tracks (in a good way, of course). She grew up wanting to be an explorer, decided the planet was fully mapped, and went into science instead —…
Yvon Chouinard
Chouinard taught himself blacksmithing to make better pitons, sold them out of the trunk of his car in Yosemite, and then discovered his pitons were wrecking the cracks, so he stopped making the thing his company was built on and…
David Roberts
Written after a cancer diagnosis at seventy-three, and it’s Roberts taking stock of a life of risk and asking what exploration was ever for. He goes through the history — polar travel, the Amazon, the great cave systems, first ascents…
Tove Jansson
For twenty-six years, Finnish artist and writer Tove Jansson and her partner Tuulikki Pietilä spent summers on a bare platter of rock in the Gulf of Finland, a tiny speck called Klovharun, living their dream of art and isolation. Her…
Audrey Sutherland
Audrey Sutherland paddled a nine-foot inflatable kayak up the Inside Passage from Ketchikan, alone, in her sixties, in summer after summer until she’d done the whole eight hundred and fifty miles. No support, no motor, food she’d dehydrated herself, camping…
James Rebanks
Rebanks, the Lake District shepherd who wrote The Shepherd’s Life, went to a bare island off the coast of northern Norway for a season to work with a woman named Anna in her seventies — one of the last of…
Andy Kirkpatrick
Kirkpatrick spent twelve days alone on the Reticent Wall on El Capitan, one of the hardest aid routes in the world, hauling everything himself, sleeping in a portaledge, terrified most of the time. The climb runs through the book pitch…
Chloe Dalton
Dalton was a foreign policy adviser in Westminster, stranded at a country house during lockdown, when she found a newborn leveret alone on a track. Hares aren’t domesticable — they’ve never been tamed, they die of stress in captivity, and…
Andrea Lankford
Twelve years as a National Park Service ranger — Yosemite, Zion, Grand Canyon, Denali — and this is the version they don’t print in the brochure. Body recoveries below the rim, drug busts, car wrecks, search and rescue for people…
Terry Tempest Williams
Two things happen at once. The Great Salt Lake rises to record levels through the mid-eighties and drowns the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge, where Williams has watched birds her whole life. And her mother is dying of ovarian cancer,…
Seth Kantner
Kantner was born in a sod igloo on the Kobuk River to homesteading parents and grew up hunting and trapping among Iñupiaq neighbors in northwest Alaska. This is memoir in photographs and short essays — his father’s pictures and his…
Brendan Leonard
Leonard got sober at twenty-three after an arrest and a night in a cell, and then had to work out what a life looks like without the thing that had organized it. What he found was climbing. The book runs…
Janet Malcolm
Malcolm spent a career taking other people apart in print and refused to write about herself, then in her eighties wrote this — twenty-odd short pieces, each triggered by a photograph from her own boxes. A Czech Jewish family that…
Sanmao
Sanmao was a Taiwanese writer who read one article about the Sahara and moved there, marrying a Spanish diver named José and settling in El Aaiún in the Spanish Sahara in the 1970s. These are her dispatches: Building furniture out…
Robert Finch
Finch wrote Cape Cod for forty years, then started spending summers in a Newfoundland outport called Burnside — known locally as Squid Tickle — population under two hundred, on Bonavista Bay. The book is the accumulation of those seasons: Icebergs,…
Wendy Trusler, Carol Devine
Is it a cookbook? A field journal memoir? A photo album with cool archives, like a scan of a 1912 polar menu featuring “Plum Pouding Union Jack” and penguin? Yes, yes, and yes. But, cooking and cleaning...in Antarctica? Two young…
Amy Tan
Amy Tan started drawing birds in 2016 and kept a nature journal for six years, and this is a facsimile of it — her ink and watercolor drawings with her handwritten notes running around them. The Northern flicker, the scrub…
Patrik Svensson
Who knew there could be an international bestseller all about eels? Turns out, as Patrik Svensson writes, quite a few knew. Centuries of leading thinkers — Pliny the Elder, Aristotle, Sigmund Freud, Rachel Carson — have been captivated by eels…
Anaïs Nin
Set in Paris, 1931 to 1934. Nin is in her late twenties, married to a banker, in analysis, and just beginning to write, and the diary is her real work. This is the volume where she meets Henry Miller and…
Frida Kahlo
This is last ten years of her life in her own hand — a facsimile of the journal she kept from about 1944, reproduced in full color, so you can see the actual pages. There are watercolor and ink drawings,…
Jason Dove Mark
Working as an organic farmer, activist, and editor of Sierra magazine, Jason Dove Mark has spent twenty-five years trying to make the world more livable. In his second book, which weaves memoir with science, he’s concluded the biggest obstacle to…
Monroe Robinson
In 1967, at age fifty-one, Dick Proenneke retired from a peripatetic life as a diesel mechanic, salmon fisherman, and repairman and settled in southwest Alaska, where he spent the next thirty years living intimately with the land. A master craftsman,…
Kim Stanley Robinson
Robinson has been walking the Sierra Nevada since 1973 and has done something like a hundred trips, and this is everything he knows about it in one enormous, wandering book. Route descriptions and gear lists sit next to the geology…
Carrot Quinn
This book stopped me in my, ahem, tracks, and I was obsessed with the idea of excerpting it in Adventure Journal (we did—thanks, Carrot!). Quinn grew up in Anchorage with a mother deep in untreated schizophrenia — no heat, no…
Nicholas Triolo
This is a book about walking in circles, and the obvious question is “why would you walk in circles?” The answer, in the deeply considered view of author Nicholas Triolo, is profound: because it will change your relationship with the…
Mark Boyle
Irishman Mark Boyle does nothing halfway. Exhausted by industrialized, well, everything, he lived without using money for three years. Craving an even more elemental life, he bought land near Knockmoyle, hand-built a cabin, and spent a year with no modern…
Apsley Cherry-Garrard
Cherry-Garrard was twenty-four, half blind without his glasses, and paid to join Scott’s last expedition. The title journey isn’t the pole. It’s the winter trip he made with two others to Cape Crozier to collect emperor penguin eggs, five weeks…
Carrot Quinn
The Pacific Crest Trail, 2,660 miles, told as the daily blog she actually kept — which is why it reads nothing like a reflective memoir. It’s feet, water carries, hunger, weather, town stops, and the trail family that forms and…
Joe Simpson
Simpson and Simon Yates climbed the west face of Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes, the first ascent, and on the way down Simpson shattered his leg. Yates lowered him a thousand feet at a time until Simpson went over…
Richard Henry Dana
Dana was a Harvard student whose eyes gave out, so in 1834 he shipped out of Boston as a common sailor rather than a passenger, rounded the Horn, and spent two years working the hide trade on the California coast…
Roger Deakin
You’ll never regret plunging into the “wild swimming” world of British environmentalist Roger Deakin, who lived in a moated farmhouse. Yes, a moat. You’re already charmed, right? Inspired by a short story, Deakin decided to swim throughout Britain in as…
Julian Brave NoiseCat
NoiseCat’s father, a Secwépemc and St’at’imc carver, left when he was young, and NoiseCat grew up with his non-Native mother in the urban Native community in Oakland, spending time on the Canim Lake reserve in British Columbia. The book is…
Antoine de Sainte-Exupery
Frenchman Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wasn’t just the writer of The Little Prince, he was a pilot who helped pioneer postal aviation in the 1920s, when planes barely had instruments (he lamented that pilots of later, more-advanced planes were little more…
Li Juan
“Later, when I found myself hoisting thirty pounds of snow, tottering across the desert huffing and puffing like an ox, I couldn’t help but sigh: bad idea.” So notes eighty-eight-pound Li Juan in her surprisingly humorous memoir about a winter…
Patti Smith
Patti Smith wrote this in her forties, a short book about being a child in southern New Jersey — the fields behind the house, the woolgatherers she imagined moving through them at dusk, a slaughterhouse, a cloud museum, her brother…
