Here are 93 books that My Life of High Adventure fans have personally recommended if you like
My Life of High Adventure.
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I didn’t really take up hiking until I was in my 30s, but outdoor adventures have become a way of life. I love walking along a trail, marveling at my surroundings and wondering what new delight I’ll discover around the next bend or over the next hill. Upon turning 70, I tackled my most challenging walk yet – trekking over 250 miles along the spectacular South West Coast Path in Cornwall, England. I found the immersion in focusing solely on walking each day to be both meditative and uplifting. The books on this list reflect my love for the outdoors, with some inspiring me to try something new, while others I prefer to experience vicariously.
This fascinating history about hiking the Appalachian Trail spotlights a woman who demonstrated that age and gender aren't barriers to remarkable physical feats. Or should I say "feet"?
Grandma Gatewood was a pioneer, not only for women trekking alone, but for people of any age who set out on a journey others say isn’t possible for them. I was inspired by her story to take on a journey I thought would be marvelous, but beyond my capabilities. And I made it happen!
2014 National Outdoor Book Award Winner in History / Biography
Emma Gatewood told her family she was going on a walk and left her small Ohio hometown with a change of clothes and less than two hundred dollars. The next anybody heard from her, this genteel, farm-reared, sixty-seven-year-old great-grandmother had walked 800 miles along the 2,050-mile Appalachian Trail. By September 1955 she stood atop Maine’s Mount Katahdin, sang “America, the Beautiful,” and proclaimed, “I said I’ll do it, and I’ve done it.”
Driven by a painful marriage, Grandma Gatewood not only hiked the trail alone, she was the first person—man…
The Victorian mansion, Evenmere, is the mechanism that runs the universe.
The lamps must be lit, or the stars die. The clocks must be wound, or Time ceases. The Balance between Order and Chaos must be preserved, or Existence crumbles.
Appointed the Steward of Evenmere, Carter Anderson must learn the…
In my early 50s, I thru-hiked the Ice Age Trail, one of just 11 National Scenic Trails in the U.S. The experience was so rewarding—in many different ways—that I vowed to hike the other 10. To date, I’ve thru-hiked six of the 11 and am in the midst of section-hiking two more. My enthusiasm for long-distance hiking and its numerous benefits also inspired me to transform my freelance writing business to one centered around hiking, whether that’s penning fitness articles for CNN, giving talks on long-distance trails, or writing articles I hope will inspire others to lace up their hiking shoes.
This one scared me. Who wants to think about dying during a hiking trip?! Yet, while I’d never wanted to conquer Mount Everest, I did long to undertake other (less extreme) adventures.
Reading Jon Krakauer’s account of his Everest experience inspired me to continue to dream big about other outdoor excursions more suited to my personality. I credit this book as one reason I wasn’t afraid to start hiking and backpacking long-distance trails—mostly solo—when I was in my 50s.
#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The epic account of the storm on the summit of Mt. Everest that claimed five lives and left countless more—including Krakauer's—in guilt-ridden disarray.
"A harrowing tale of the perils of high-altitude climbing, a story of bad luck and worse judgment and of heartbreaking heroism." —PEOPLE
A bank of clouds was assembling on the not-so-distant horizon, but journalist-mountaineer Jon Krakauer, standing on the summit of Mt. Everest, saw nothing that "suggested that a murderous storm was bearing down." He was wrong.
By writing Into Thin Air, Krakauer may have hoped to exorcise some of his own demons…
I love to read. I always have. I also love to write mysteries that, hopefully, keep my reader guessing until the end of the book. I look for books that not only provide me with a mystery to solve but also inform me of situations and/or places I would otherwise never learn about. I have found all the books on my list to fill that need. They are just an example of the many I have found and read.
I found this book suspenseful and couldn’t put it down. I was kept on the edge of my seat as to the fate of the characters until the end.
The fact that one of the characters was a Vietnam veteran and it affected his life interested me. I also found the setting of Alaska in the 1970s interesting and informative.
In Kristin Hannah’s The Great Alone, a desperate family seeks a new beginning in the near-isolated wilderness of Alaska only to find that their unpredictable environment is less threatening than the erratic behavior found in human nature.
#1 New York Times Instant Bestseller (February 2018) A People “Book of the Week” Buzzfeed’s “Most Anticipated Women’s Fiction Reads of 2018” Seattle Times’s “Books to Look Forward to in 2018”
Alaska, 1974. Ernt Allbright came home from the Vietnam War a changed and volatile man. When he loses yet another job, he makes the impulsive decision to move his wife and daughter…
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
I'm a nature writer and poet who lives, writes, and tends his modest grapevines on a small farm in the highlands of northern Michigan. My study and my work delves into the mysterious connections between all living things. I've sailed the world's lakes and oceans and lived on the land from Alaska to California to the Caribbean. The natural world cannot just be described but must be experienced – all the writers on my list have taken this approach – as I've followed the lead of these great writers but in my own unique way. I would enjoy a day on a secluded river with each of them in search of the elusive brook trout.
A classic American story following Lewis and Clark and the Corps of Discovery from Virginia to the Pacific Coast and back again in the very early 1800s.
This book needs to be read not only by those interested in history but by all who would understand the origins of our nation. The complex personalities of Lewis, Clark, and Thomas Jefferson, who envisioned the journey come through in living color.
In 1997, I was hired by the Northwest Youth Corps as a trail crew leader. That season, and across five more seasons, I built trails across the Pacific Northwest and Desert Southwest, including in many national parks. Since then, I have been in love with backpacking trails (including hiking the Long Trail and Colorado Trail), building trails, and writing about trails (Crosscut: Poems). I now live in Vermont with my wife and daughter. We have a trail we built that weaves through our woods.
Dirt Work: An Education in the Woodsis a memoir about Byl’s experience as a trail builder in Glacier National Park and Cordova and Denali, Alaska. All too often, books about physical labor highlight a male perspective. It is wonderful to have Byl’s perspective on her life as a trail builder. Byl so stunningly weaves vignettes about a life working in the woods. Her stories teach us about physical and intellectual labor and do so beautifully.
A lively and lyrical account of one woman’s unlikely apprenticeship on a national park trail crew—and what she discovers about nature, gender, and the value of hard work
Christine Byl first encountered the national parks the way most of us do: on vacation. But after she graduated from college, broke and ready for a new challenge, she joined a Glacier National Park trail crew as a seasonal “traildog” maintaining mountain trails for the millions of visitors Glacier draws every year. Byl first thought of the job as a paycheck, a summer diversion, a welcome break from “the real world” before…
I’m a political scientist who specializes in US foreign policy. I’ve been interested in war and peace – and avoiding the former – for as long as I can remember. More than anything else, I wish I could convince Americans of how safe they are, relatively speaking, and how safe they can remain if only we make wise decisions moving forward. The future is brighter than we think.
This controversial book was a Rorschach Test for the security community.
Some read it as a critique of the United States; others saw it as a call for pacifism; others saw it as an attack on Franklin Roosevelt or Winston Churchill. In fact, it was none of those things and all of them. Baker is a novelist who purchased a newspaper archive from the 1930s and 1940s and simply reprinted some of the stories contained therein. He offers little additional comments or interpretation.
The book is an anecdote to the idea that the Second World War was somehow the “good war.” Like all others, it was barbarism; unlike all others, it was barbarism on a scale never seen before or since. And like all wars, it was, at its root, the story of common people victimized by their governments.
At a time when the West seems ever more eager to call on military aggression as a means of securing international peace, Nicholson Baker's provocative narrative exploring the political misjudgements and personal biases that gave birth to the terrifying consequences of the Second World War could not be more pertinent. With original and controversial insights brought about by meticulous research, Human Smoke re-evaluates the political turning points that led up to war and in so doing challenges some of the treasured myths we hold about how war came about and how atrocities like the Holocaust were able to happen. Baker…
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
While a graduate student and then an army interpreter in Germany, I listened to reminiscences from both Third Reich military veterans and former French resistance fighters. Their tales picked up where my father's stories of pre-war European life always ended, and my fascination with this history knew no bounds. On occasion I would conceal my American identity and mentally play the spy as I traversed Europe solo.A dozen years later upon the death of my father, I learned from my mother his great secret: he had concealed his wartime life as an American spy inside the Reich. His private journals telling of bravery and intrigue inspire each of my novels.
As the first in his series of novels on the 1930sin Europe, Alan Furst's Night Soldiertends to earn the most critical praise, but Dark Starremains my personal favorite. Furst masters the noir ambiance and moral ambiguity of Europe as war approaches, where everyday people are drawn into the world of espionage and intrigue. His settings often lie outside the main urban centers of Paris and Berlin in the remote reaches of Eastern Europe. Furst's novels are impeccably researched for accurate detail-one of my must-haves in historical fiction-and each book will draw you to read the next in his series.
Andre Szara, survivor of the Polish pogroms and the Russian civil wars, is a journalist working for Pravda in 1937. War in Europe is already underway and Szara is co-opted to join the NKVD, the Soviet secret intelligence agency. He does his best to survive the tango of pre-war politics by calmly obeying orders and keeping his nose clean. But when he is sent to retrieve a battered briefcase the plot thickens and is drawn into even more complex intrigues.
Szara becomes a full-time spymaster and as deputy director of a Paris network, he finds his own star rising when…
With a graduate degree in Writing Popular Fiction (seriously, someone gave me a degree for writing an urban fantasy book), I know that genres are nothing more than marketing terms that tell bookstores which shelves to put the books on. As an author, combining genres and subverting their topes allows me to stretch their potential and tell fresh stories that might not find an easy home on a single shelf, so it’s also important for me to read and support those making the same attempts. Stories that adhere to strict reader expectations will always find a home, but I’ve always had way more fun exploring the other possibilities.
I did my best to put together a list of alternate history books that didn’t feature either the American Civil War or World War 2, but this book was too interesting to leave out (and also, it doesn’t involve the Nazis winning the war in yet another veiled attempt at white supremacism fanfic). It does fit within my list in how Tregillis also flips many of the tropes of the genres explored here, especially regarding the main character’s role within the plot. And lest you think all alternate history stories with a healthy dose of fantasy must feature a romantic element, Tregillis’ unflinching take on the horrors of war (but add magic and make it equally horrifying) should more than make up for it.
Raybould Marsh is a British secret agent in the early days of the Second World War, haunted by something strange he saw on a mission during the Spanish Civil War: a German woman with wires going into her head who looked at him as if she knew him. When the Nazis start running missions with people who have unnatural abilities - a woman who can turn invisible, a man who can walk through walls, and the woman Marsh saw in Spain who can use her knowledge of the future to twist the present - Marsh is the man who has…
We are the Paper Lantern Writers, an author collective focused on historical fiction of all eras. From Medieval Europe to the Gilded Age (and beyond), in locales around the world, from romantic to tragic and back again, our books will take you on the journeys of a lifetime. There’s a story to be told every where you look and we'd love to be your tour guide. Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube, and join our Facebook group SHINE.
This book features stories by different authors who envision the crowds of people passing through Grand Central Station in New York and choose to tell ten stories of people returning from Europe at the end of World War II. It’s a time of upheaval and great change in the world and in their lives. I love when the macrocosm of the world can be distilled down to a single person’s story.
Ten bestselling authors inspired by New York City's iconic Grand Central Terminal have created their own stories, set on the same day, just after the end of World War II, in a time of hope, uncertainty, change, and renewal….
A war bride awaits the arrival of her GI husband at the platform…A Holocaust survivor works at the Oyster Bar, where a customer reminds him of his late mother…A Hollywood hopeful anticipates her first screen test and a chance at stardom in the Kissing Room…
On any particular day, thousands upon thousands of people pass through Grand Central, through the whispering…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
I am an aviation historian and writer, a defense analyst, and a retired, combat-experienced, Marine Corps fighter pilot. I am one of the lucky ones. Since early childhood, I wanted nothing more than to become a fighter pilot. It was a combination of good fortune, hard work, and a bit of talent that made it possible for me to realize that dream. I was inspired by the memoirs and recollections of World War II fighter pilots, and I read every book on the topic that I could find. Following my military service, I transitioned from a reader to a writer; my experience as a military pilot helps to make my books real and credible.
The archetypal combat flying story, this is an easy, fun, and eye-opening book that Scott wrote only months after returning from the war. Scott clearly loved to fly and had done so since the early 1930s after graduating from West Point. Resourceful and tenacious, he received command of a fighter group in China after having been officially told the previous year that he was too old (at the ripe old age of 33) to fly fighters. This is a rollicking read that will be enjoyed by readers of all ages.
This book was issued during World War II, in conformity with all government regulations controlling the use of paper and other materials (so stated on copyright page). The author, Colonel Robert L. Scott, Jr., consistently scheduled himself as a pilot on all possible missions. He led all types of combat missions, but specialized in the most dangerous, such as long-range flights to strafe from minimum altitudes Jap airdromes, motor vehicles, and shipping deep in enemy territory. Colonel Scott’s group of fighters always operated against greatly superior numbers of the enemy. Often the odds were five to one against them. This…
