Books for Armchair Exploring

“Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken…”
~John Keats, On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer

I still remember the thrill of reading a child’s version of the remarkable true-life adventure of Kon-Tiki: Across the Pacific in a Raft by the daring young Norwegian anthropologist Thor Heyerdahl. Between that heady experience and my early fascination with Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic Treasure Island, it is perhaps surprising that I didn’t run away to sea myself (though that would have been a little tricky for a Kansas girl with limited access to sailing ships, or, for that matter, the sea).

I’ve since gone on to read of other dazzling explorations, added deserts and mountains to my inner landscapes of adventure, and supplemented accounts of physical courage and endurance with adventures of the mind and spirit.

Because sometimes nothing else will do—preferably while comfortably ensconced with a cup of tea before the fire or lounging in a hammock with a lemonade—but a rousing tale of someone else bravely setting out to the edge of the known world, to those places on the map “where there be dragons.”

Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage by Alfred Lansing, and Ernest Shackleton’s own account South: The Endurance Expedition together comprise a breathtaking tale of heroism and survival—and continue my personal literary obsession with sea stories. The British explorer Shackleton set sail on the Endurance in 1914 with a crew of twenty-seven men to reach the South Pole. When the ship became locked in pack ice, and crushed beyond repair, these intrepid men set out on foot to walk across Antarctica. Truly one of the greatest adventures ever written about—or endured.

Two Years Before the Mast is another classic adventure story: a memoir, written in 1840 by Richard Henry Dana, recounting his arduous two-year journey by sea from Boston around Cape Horn to the remote coast of California. Dana embarked on this adventure at nineteen as a common seaman, outraging his aristocratic family by leaving Harvard to do so. Much more than a riveting account of life at sea (complete with descriptions of storms and whales and a mad ship’s captain) Dana’s witnessing of the brutal treatment of sailors and slaves led him to a law career dedicated to eradicating those evils—and ostracized him permanently from Boston society.

Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania by Erik Larson is a gripping nonfiction narrative of the ill-fated Cunard liner that was sunk by a German U-boat in 1915, killing nearly 1200 people and precipitating America’s entry into World War I. Focused less on the actual torpedo strike and the sinking of the ship than on the voyage itself, and the cynical political maneuverings of First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill (who, it now appears, deliberately left the Lusitania unprotected to provoke the attack in order to bring the US into the war), it brings to life a piece of modern history we only thought we knew. 

Moby Dick by Herman Melville is, of course, the mother (or the whale) of all seafaring adventure novels. I reread this classic recently, and realized how little of it I remembered from my college days, and how little I had appreciated the enormous breadth and depth of this strange, gorgeous, unforgettable book. Now among the most famous of American novels, it was poorly received in Melville’s lifetime, and out of print by the time he died. Particularly chilling and apt these days is the horrifying ease with which the mad Ahab persuades the crew to abandon their legitimate whaling duties to pursue his own obsession with hate and revenge. If possible, find an edition with Rockwell Kent’s illustrations.

Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson, I am happy to report, holds up very well to adult rereading. Crafted with the same respect for structural integrity as his family’s famous Scottish lighthouses, this adventure story sails confidently through its dramatic coils of pirate ships and treasure maps and daring exploits. At a level lost on me in my childhood reading are themes of trust and betrayal, cruelty and loyalty, courage and sacrifice. 

Master and Commander and all the rest of the marvelous nautical-historical novels by Patrick O’Brian are in a class by themselves: meticulously researched and brilliantly written against the background of the British navy and the Napoleonic wars, the whole series is also an affectionate narrative of the improbable friendship between Jack Aubrey, ship’s captain, and Stephen Maturin, physician, naturalist (and spy), who comes aboard as ship’s surgeon. Maturin’s sometimes comic ignorance of all things naval and nautical is a clever device for educating the (in this case equally ignorant) reader.

And Not to Yield by James Ramsey Ullman was probably my first introduction to the “white realm” of mountain climbing, and to the Himalayan culture of Nepal. A novel full of the thrill of the high places, and the perseverance of those who long for the summits and the clean thin air, and reach their goal one difficult step at a time.

Coronation Everest by Jan Morris is a superb account of the historic ascent of Everest by Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay in 1953, and also a fascinating glimpse of an old-fashioned journalistic “scoop” as the success of the British expedition was kept secret until the day before Queen Elizabeth’s coronation, in order to celebrate her accession to the throne and stoke the fires of British pride. Written by the special correspondent to The London Times who accompanied the expedition.

Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination by Robert Macfarlane is many things, all of them wonderful: a meticulously researched and beautifully written history of the role of the high places in human imagination and in heroic expeditions, and a kind of ode to the magic of mountains landscapes, the wonder and solace to be found there, the humbling corrective of time spent in the high wild places of the world.

A Story Like the Wind and A Far-off Place by Laurens van der Post are a remarkable pair of novels set in southern Africa at the beginning of the end of colonial rule, drawing on the author’s South African childhood and his study of and admiration for the now-lost world of the Kalahari Bushmen. Part history, part anthropology, part coming-of-age novel, this two-volume narrative presents the adventure of two European orphans, fleeing a massacre, and their Bushmen guides across the Kalahari desert, full of wild beauty and terror and unlikely alliances.

From the Holy Mountain: A Journey Among the Christians of the Middle East by the award-winning travel writer and historian William Dalrymple retraces the steps of a pair of 6th century monks who traveled across the entire Byzantine world. The best kind of travelogue, elegantly written and by turns evocative, witty, and poignant, the remarkable book is both an ode to the slowly dying world of Eastern Christianity and a sobering glimpse of the fractured, fracturing politics of today’s Middle East. 

The Sisters of Sinai: How Two Lady Adventurers Discovered the Hidden Gospels by Janet Soskice is an enthralling true story of middle-aged twin sisters in 19th century Scotland, self-taught in modern and ancient languages, who embarked on a quest to find the earliest known copy of the Gospels in ancient Syriac, the language Jesus spoke. Inspiring, bracing, compelling—these magnificent dauntless women slept in tents, endured bad-tempered camels and overcame the suspicion of monastic librarians and the conventions of the day to succeed in their quest where male scholars and explorers had failed.

Speaking of dauntless early women pilgrims and travelers, Egeria must come high on any list. A 4th century woman pilgrim, she traveled in and around the Holy Land and wrote a long letter describing her adventures to her “dear ladies,” her spiritual community back home with an unparalleled wealth of information about the liturgy of the early church and the first generations of Christian pilgrimage to the holy places. Egeria’s Travels translated with notes by John Wilkinson was published in 1999; in 2018 Anne McGowan and Paul Bradshaw published The Pilgrimage of Egeria: A New Translation of the Itinerarium Egeriae with Introduction and Commentary.

Peter France’s A Place of Healing for the Soul: Patmos is part memoir, part conversion story, part witty travel guide to the tiny, ancient, arid Greek island of Patmos, to which the author (long a popular host of BBC radio and television programs) and his wife began annual visits years ago, and to which they eventually decided to move for good. France weaves together amusing accounts of their struggles to set up housekeeping amid primitive circumstances and eccentric neighbors with thoughtful history of Eastern Orthodoxy generally, and Patmos specifically.

Driftwood Valley: A Woman Naturalist in the Northern Wilderness was first published in 1946, a fascinating account by Theodora Stanwell-Fletcher of the three years she and her trapper-explorer husband spent in a remote and then largely unknown and unmapped part of British Columbia. Wendell Berry has written an introduction to a new edition, describing how he discovered this book as a teenager and for a year or so read nothing else. Full of wonderful detail of twenty-foot snowfalls in the subarctic winters, wolves howling on moonlit nights, the Northern Lights trembling in the sky, and the hardships and improvisations of wilderness survival.

Farley Mowat’s Never Cry Wolf is, like Driftwood Valley, a riveting account by a naturalist who spent time in the subarctic Canadian wilds, among magnificent wolves and a friendly Inuit tribe, “the people of the deer.” First published more than fifty years ago, this book is both serious field study (vindicating the wolves falsely accused of killing arctic caribou) and charming memoir. Made into a remarkable film in 1983, this book is even more important today, as our understanding and respect for wild creatures is diminishing as rapidly as we are destroying their habitat. 

I first read my mother’s copy of The Man Who Killed the Deer: A Novel of Pueblo Indian Life by Frank Waters when I was twelve or so; our family spent quite a lot of time in the American Southwest when I was a child, in Santa Fe and in the neighboring Pueblos and in Navajo country, so I had a bit of context for the plot: a Pueblo deer hunter violates taboo by killing a deer without asking its permission to take its life, and is haunted by remorse. But the book—a heart-wrenchingly lyrical, almost mythical treatment of themes of sin and redemption and cultural identity and the choices we all must make and the way the consequences of those choices reverberate beyond our control—lodged in my mind at a level it took me many years to begin to understand.

I saw the Broadway production of The Miracle Worker, the play based on Helen Keller, rendered deaf, mute and blind by a childhood illness, and her teacher Anne Sullivan, when I was ten. I was completely blown away by the experience, which launched me on a lifelong fascination with both women, and with the whole phenomenon of blindness. Helen and Teacher: The Story of Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan Macy by Joseph Lash is a superb homage to that amazing transformative friendship, and of course Keller’s autobiography The Story of My Life has long been a classic in the annals of inspiration. No list of books about adventures in courage would be complete without them.

And There Was Light: The Extraordinary Memoir of a Blind Hero of the French Resistance in World War II by Jacques Lusseyran is, if possible, an even more astonishing account of living with blindness—it is in fact an astonishing account of living a full and luminous life. Lusseyran lost his sight as a young child in a playground accident. In that sudden and total darkness, he began to be aware of a light inside his mind—a light he lost if he allowed himself to be dominated by anger or fear, but which supported and embraced him radiantly at all other times. This inner light, and his uncanny ability to hear what he called the “moral music” of people’s voices, led him during World War II to be a valued part of the French Resistance. Betrayed to the Gestapo, he was sent to Buchenwald—where again he was sustained by inner light in the heart of darkness—a darkness he actually survived.

Literary Recommendations for All Sorts of Times and States of Mind