Here are 100 books that The White Road fans have personally recommended if you like
The White Road.
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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…
Liddy-Jean Marketing Queen and the Matchmaking Scheme
by
Mari SanGiovanni,
Introducing the irrepressible Liddy-Jean Carpenter, a young woman who has learning disabilities but also has a genius plan.
While Liddy-Jean spends her days doing minor office tasks with nobody paying attention, she sees how badly the wand-waving big boss treats the Marketing Department worker bees. So, she takes lots of…
I am an astrophysicist with a passion for narratives that stare unflinchingly at the inherent hostility of outer space. Professionally, I study graduate astrophysics and research the ways high-energy celestial objects impact cosmic evolution. Creatively, I use my training to write science fiction horror exploring the spookiest things the universe has to offer. I particularly love stories that throw wrenches in the best-laid plans of star-faring protagonists, and will never get tired of a good old space mission gone terribly and tragically awry.
Deep space can be scary, but I consider deep caves to be much more terrifying.
The Luminous Dead has an eerie mission to the depths of a cave on a distant exoplanet—the worst of both worlds! This book follows a non-regulation diver on a dangerous job shrouded in secrets and the enigmatic, untrustworthy voice in her helmet guiding her through the darkness.
Unsurprisingly, it doesn’t take long for the characters to descend into antagonism and uncertainty about whether the other things lurking in the cave are figments of paranoia or dangerously real. If you like feeling queasy, secondhand claustrophobia, The Luminous Dead is for you.
"This claustrophobic, horror-leaning tour de force is highly recommended for fans of Jeff VanderMeer's Annihilation and Andy Weir's The Martian." -- Publishers Weekly (starred review)
A thrilling, atmospheric debut with the intensive drive of The Martian and Gravity and the creeping dread of Annihilation, in which a caver on a foreign planet finds herself on a terrifying psychological and emotional journey for survival.
When Gyre Price lied her way into this expedition, she thought she'd be mapping mineral deposits, and that her biggest problems would be cave collapses and gear malfunctions. She…
I've often lived around the fringes of nature, from late-night cross-country road trips through forested backwoods, to living off-grid in New Mexico's high desert. As much as I've lived in the shadow of mountains and extreme environments, I've never dared to venture up into them – and I'm endlessly fascinated by the people who do. What is it that drives people toward extreme sports and outdoor challenges, even understanding the risks? Why do people risk life and limb to venture into places where man isn't meant to be? It's a question I don't think I'll ever stop finding fascinating.
A meticulously researched retelling of the Donner Party tragedy, Katsu's book is a slow-spooled tragedy and creeping horror of intense claustrophobia and distrust.
And that's before the supernatural elements take hold! This book is meaty, with a lot to chew on and a ton of character drama packed into its relatively brief word count, but you'll leave it thinking quite differently about the forces that shaped our American frontier...
"Deeply, deeply disturbing, hard to put down, not recommended reading after dark." - Stephen King
After having travelled west for weeks, the party of pioneers comes to a crossroads. It is time for their leader, George Donner, to make a choice. They face two diverging paths which lead to the same destination. One is well-documented - the other untested, but rumoured to be shorter.
Donner's decision will shape the lives of everyone travelling with him. The searing heat of the desert gives way to biting winds and a bitter cold that freezes the cattle where they stand. Driven to the…
Liddy-Jean Marketing Queen and the Matchmaking Scheme
by
Mari SanGiovanni,
Introducing the irrepressible Liddy-Jean Carpenter, a young woman who has learning disabilities but also has a genius plan.
While Liddy-Jean spends her days doing minor office tasks with nobody paying attention, she sees how badly the wand-waving big boss treats the Marketing Department worker bees. So, she takes lots of…
I've often lived around the fringes of nature, from late-night cross-country road trips through forested backwoods, to living off-grid in New Mexico's high desert. As much as I've lived in the shadow of mountains and extreme environments, I've never dared to venture up into them – and I'm endlessly fascinated by the people who do. What is it that drives people toward extreme sports and outdoor challenges, even understanding the risks? Why do people risk life and limb to venture into places where man isn't meant to be? It's a question I don't think I'll ever stop finding fascinating.
Malfi is an expert of cold-weather horror, and he doesn't disappoint with this journey through the Himalayas.
Extreme sports enthusiast Tim Overleigh joins a once-in-a-lifetime expedition to Godesh Ridge in Nepal. But Tim, mourning his dead wife and still in recovery from a serious climbing accident, has a lot of mental baggage to unpack.
Worse, the people he's with – and the forces on the mountain – aren't what he thought he was signing up for. Part survival story, part murder mystery, this is a page-turner that kept me white-knuckled all the way through to the finale.
After the death of his ex-wife, successful sculptor Tim Overleigh trades in his lucrative career for the world of extreme sports, but when a caving accident nearly ends his life, Tim falls into a self-destructive depression. On the cusp of madness, an old friend convinces him to join a team of men climbing the Godesh ridge in Nepal. When this journey of mythical and spiritual discovery rapidly turns deadly as the climbers fall victim to a murderer within their group, the remaining survivors begin to wonder if any of them will escape the mountains alive.
I love the challenge of taking a headline, a photo, or a curious little footnote in someone else's history, and fleshing out all the details to make it a full-blown story. Here are five books where I think this task has been taken to entirely other levels.
George Mallory’s disputed ascent of Everest hardly qualifies as “little known history,” but I couldn’t do a top 5 list on historical fiction and not include it. You can tell from the details that Ridout is obsessed with this story. Mallory’s efforts on the climb are perfectly juxtapositioned against his wife’s less glamourous but no less difficult task of holding the family together in his absence. The novel thrives as an exploration of the intense pressure that Mallory’s final Everest attempt placed on both.
Above All Things is a heart-wrenching novel about George Mallory's fatal attempt to conquer Everest, from debut author Tanis Rideout.
In the Himalayas two climbers strike out for the summit of the Earth's highest mountain - aiming to be the first to the top.
In Cambridge, a wife collects the milk, gets three children out of bed and waits for a letter, a telegram - for news of her husband.
It is 1924 and George Mallory and Andrew Irvine are attempting to be the first to conquer Everest. They face inhuman cold and wind, but putting one foot falteringly after…
I know all too well that finding a diagnosis and treating a chronic health condition can be like unraveling a mystery—maybe that’s why characters dealing with these issues make natural detectives. As a mystery writer with chronic illness, I love reading about sleuths who embody the difficulties of living with health challenges yet show the tremendous capacity we still have to contribute. Many of the sleuths on this list are confined to their homes and unable to work, so solving a mystery not only adds suspense. It gives us the satisfaction of seeing these characters find their way back into the world and rediscover their sense of purpose.
No mystery I’ve read has better captured how a chronic condition can redefine your sense of self better than The Black Hour.
This book hooked me on the first page, where we are introduced to Amelia, a sociology professor who is returning to work after being shot by a student the previous year. We witness her struggling to walk up a hill she used to climb without a second thought, and now it’s Mount Everest. She’s simultaneously vulnerable, determined, defiant, and just plain in pain.
Having a chronic illness myself, what makes this book resonate with me is the way Amelia constantly compares her post-injury self to her pre-injury self and must come to terms with the distance between those two versions.
For Chicago sociology professor Amelia Emmet, violence was a research topic--until a student she'd never met shot her. He also shot himself. Now he's dead and she's back on campus, trying to keep up with her class schedule, a growing problem with painkillers, and a question she can't let go: Why? All she wants is for life to get back to normal, but normal is looking hard to come by. She's thirty-eight and hobbles with a cane. Her first student interaction ends in tears (hers). Her fellow faculty members seem uncomfortable with her, and her ex--whom she may or may…
I love computers, and especially computer systems. I’m interested in how different pieces of hardware and software, like processors, operating systems, compilers, and linkers, work together to get things done. Early in my career, as a software security tester, I studied how different components interacted to find vulnerabilities. Now that I work on compilers, I focus on the systems that transform source code into a running program. I’m also interested in how computer systems are shaped by the people who build and use them—I believe that creating safer, more reliable software is a social problem as much as a technical one.
This isn’t a technical book, but it gets to the heart of why so much software is fragile and insecure. This book examines spectacular failures of all sorts, from nuclear meltdowns to plane crashes to oil spills, but I loved it because its message resonated with my own experience writing and debugging code. It argues that complex, tightly coupled systems involving hidden interactions and close coordination between lots of different parts are more likely to fail catastrophically. It also talks about strategies to make those systems safer, like doing “premortems,” getting advice from outsiders, and building diverse teams.
My big takeaway? Technical solutions alone won’t make software (or other complex systems) safer. We need to change how we build and how our organizations work, too.
A groundbreaking take on how complexity causes failure in all kinds of modern systems—from social media to air travel—this practical and entertaining book reveals how we can prevent meltdowns in business and life.
A crash on the Washington, D.C. metro system. An accidental overdose in a state-of-the-art hospital. An overcooked holiday meal. At first glance, these disasters seem to have little in common. But surprising new research shows that all these events—and the myriad failures that dominate headlines every day—share similar causes. By understanding what lies behind these failures, we can design better systems, make our teams more productive, and…
I embarked as a teenager on an overland journey from Europe to Nepal, and have made a career out of returning to the Himalaya as often as possible. My research and photographic expeditions to the mountains over the many decades have led me into some of the most exquisite landscapes and cultures on the planet. In all cases, I seek to combine the physical experiences with aesthetic and spiritual ones, and the books I tend to read about the region also move me in those directions.
I’ve read a slew of books about climbing the big Himalayan summits and this is one of the best. It chronicles the first ascent of Mount Everest by an American team and in doing so provides a thrilling account of the climb itself, of the natural majesty of the mountain, and of the eccentric personalities of the team’s members.
In the midst of the Cold War, against the backdrop of the Bay of Pigs fiasco, the space race with the Soviet Union, and the Vietnam War, a band of iconoclastic American mountaineers set off for Mount Everest, aiming to restore America's confidence and optimism. Their objective was to reach the summit while conducting scientific research, but which route would they take? Might the Chinese have reached the top ahead of them? And what about another American team, led by the grandson of a President, that nearly bagged the peak in a bootleg attempt a year earlier?
I write mysteries set in England and Scotland. That might not seem unusual, but I’m an American, born in and living in Missouri. I’ve loved Britain since my childhood, though I didn’t know why. It wasn’t until a decade ago that I discovered I have many centuries of Scottish, English, Welsh, and Irish in my ancestry. Perhaps that contributed to my choices of reading material (history and mystery novels) as well as the series I write that is based in Derbyshire, England⎯The McLaren Mysteries. Despite my passion for writing, I need police procedural help. I get that from police detective friends in Derbyshire.
This book concerns vacationers at a small hotel in the Scottish Hebrides. A murder is committed. Due to the island and the hotel’s remoteness, the location creates a closed community. Everyone has reasons to be annoyed with others, adding tension and motives for murder. I particularly like the enveloping mood of the wild mountains and fog. Radio broadcasts of real-life events (Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation preparations and Sir Edmund Hillary’s climb of Mount Everest) add a strange link to the outside world for this group of isolated hotel guests. I felt it also underscored the contrast between their forced solitude and stay at the hotel as opposed to Elizabeth and Hillary’s freedom to do what they wished.
The tense, twisty murder mystery which will have you on the edge of your seat, from the author of Madam, Will You Talk?/font size>
'Mary Stewart is magic' New York Times
Following a heart-breaking divorce, Gianetta retreats to the Isle of Skye hoping to find tranquillity in the island's savage beauty.
But shortly before her arrival a girl's body is found on the craggy slopes of the looming Blue Mountain, and with the murderer still on the loose, there's nothing to stop him from setting his sights on Gianetta next . . .
I’ve been a ski racer my entire life. I started hiking up mountains as a teenager to get in shape for winter, but I soon found climbing peaks to be as rewarding as skiing down them. When I stand on top of a mountain I feel on top of the world! And I’ve been lucky enough as a travel writer and adventurer to trek in some truly special places, including the Himalayas in Bhutan, the Rainbow Mountains in Peru, and Simien Mountains in Ethiopia, as well as throughout North America. My favorite books are the ones that inspire me to keep exploring.
Mount Everest is arguably the location of the most epic adventures ever.
This is my favorite book about Everest, perhaps because the author, David Breashears, is a friend who shared many Thanksgiving dinners with me during the thick of his climbing and high-altitude film career. He is most well-known for producing the popular IMAX film, Everest.
This is Breashear’s autobiography. It includes his perspective on the 1996 Everest tragedy, which he not only miraculously survived but also saved the lives of other climbers. I also enjoyed the book, Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer, which is about that same Everest episode and had much broader commercial success. Krakauer wrote the forward to this book.
However, I found this book one to be more personal, more revealing. After reading it, you’ll admire Breashears as much as Krakauer and I do.
An IMAX cinematographer and mountaineer describes his participation in an expedition to Everest during the deadly 1996 season, detailing the creation of his IMAX film Everest and the dramatic impact on his life of his experiences in the face of disaster. 100,000 first printing. Tour.
