52 Books Like The Immeasurable World

This book has been stuck in my heart for more than 40 years. While I don’t remember much of its details—I read it as part of a middle school book club—I can still feel this book.

When I was a kid, our family was never able to travel. Abbey’s book instilled in me the deep desire to one day explore our national parks and varied natural spaces, especially desert terrain. And ever since I reached adulthood, that’s exactly what I’ve been doing.

With vivid, dream-like lucidity, these vignettes, stories and fragments describe the life and adventures of a truly extraordinary traveller: the daughter of Russian nihilists who moved to North Africa at the end of the nineteenth century, dressed and lived as a man, drank and smoked kif to excess, had numerous affairs, converted to Islam, was initiated into a Sufi sect, survived an assassination attempt and died in a freak flash flood at the age of only twenty-seven. The writing that survives is as fierce and as gloriously intense as the desert itself.

I bought this because 1) I loved Le Petit Prince, 2) I had no idea that de Saint-Exupery was a pilot and disappeared over the Mediterranean in 1944, and 3) I thought it might give me a window into what my own late dad found in flight and that it might bring me closer to him in a way.

I was not prepared for the excruciating, almost sacred, tenderness of his thoughts on the nature of earth and sea, war, life, death, and the entire human enterprise. If your spirit has ever yearned or fluttered at such thoughts, there is salvation in these essays. Wow! His final essay on Barcelona and Madrid is luxurious beyond words. It took forever to finish it because I regaled myself on every sentence.

When I was young and ambitious and dreamed about politics, when I had studied Greek philosophy and ancient history in graduate school, the life of T.E.Lawrence–Lawrence of Arabia as he became known–a young Englishman who had never been in a battle before led the Arab Revolt which helped bring an end to the First World War, made everything seem possible.

Lawrence had his secrets, but some of them he shared. Two of them seemed to my young imagination everything that was needed. Speaking like Odysseus was one of them, which meant tailoring what you say to the audience you have. The other was to make the strength of your opponent his fatal weakness.

I did not realize until much later that the most important thing I learned from T.E. Lawrence was that what is best remembered is what is written, like this book, with clarity and passion.

So I read this book back in the late 1970s and when the title of a book that I read so long ago still floats through my mind, demanding a re-read, then that is a great suspense mystery read. Yes, as I re-read this recently, the book captures the 1970s prior to cell phones, internet, etc., but it still holds up with the twisty events of a woman haunted by a past she does not remember. You will have a challenge in trying to figure out exactly which character to believe! A young woman wakes up on the desert floor with nothing but the clothes on her back. No clue as to who she is, where she is, how she came to be there and how she can find any of the answers to those questions. So she does the only thing she can do: she walks. She finds a… show more.

This fun book includes plenty of humor and kooky characters as well as desert disasters to be overcome. I love deserts, have traveled as far as the Namib and the Sahara to enjoy them, and included a desert in my own book, so the atmosphere of this story resonated with me. And I’ve been a camp counselor, too—though not in any camp as extreme as the one in this book! The dual narratives, one by 13-year-old Audrey and one by Aaron, coordinate well together and help the reader better feel their shared experience—as well as what they learn from each other. Readers who, like me, enjoyed Holes by Louis Sachar would probably also enjoy this one.

What one reads as a child often makes a powerful impact. While not exactly a haunted house novel, I first encountered this tale of a bedridden young girl who finds that she dreams of what she draws (with a magic pencil) through the legendarily creepy 1972 adaptation, Escape into Night, (of which only black and white videotapes remain) and afterward read it and thought it very atmospheric.

Every attempt by Marianne to ‘correct’ her defective artwork somehow makes the situation more nightmarish, and the house she initially draws is particularly disturbing in the way naïve drawings can be, as are the sinister, crude stone entities that gather around it, imprisoning the boy who she has drawn–and trapped–inside; and the landscape, literal and psychological, is eerily memorable.

Child’s nonfiction account reminds us that nature in her most stripped-down beauty can be found in the deserts of the American West. Childs states in his subtitle, “There are two ways to die in the desert: thirst and drowning.” Thereby skillfully capturing the striking contrasts of these unpredictable, delicate, and beautiful natural environments.

Thesiger was a British military officer, explorer, and writer, who, in the second half of the 20th century, traveled on foot, horse, and by camel across Arabia, the Middle East, and Africa. Rub' al Khali, the Empty Quarter, is the largest sand desert in the world, a desolate, dangerous plane of rolling dunes, with a very limited number of waterholes. At the time of Thesiger’s travels in the late 1940s, this desert had been traveled exclusively by the local Bedu. What makes this book intriguing is the description of the harsh landscape and the people that live in it. Thesiger traveled the desert with a purpose (he wanted to find out more about a locust with some ecological relevance), so he and his guides voyaged huge distances. As the reader turns the pages, the overwhelming sense of adventure and Thesiger’s lust for the unknown become contagious. Many books have… show more.

A formerly comfort-seeking Brit takes a very difficult walk around Baja and learns a lot about himself, and of course, about this “desert place.”

What’s not for me to like in a story like that? There is adventure and struggle, but also plenty of humor, and the thread that binds it all together is the author’s dawning love for a land that became his special place.

Mackintosh is still living much of the time in Mexico and has written five more books about Baja, burros, beer, and even dogs, but this adventurous paean to the peninsula will always have a special place in my heart, because I read it when I was newly in love with Baja myself.