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Recommended
Reads:
Jeff
Tucker's Travel Literature List
Jeff Tucker is a consummate
wanderer, adventurer and devotee of travel literature. When I caught
up with him, he was living in Hokkaido, Japan. To my delight, he
was able to find time between climbing and hiking adventures to compile
this wonderful list. It's one of the best adventure travel lists
I've ever seen--and I think you'll enjoy his perceptive and insightful
reviews.
Here's Jeff's introduction
to his list:
I'm a practicing
Buddhist and have a fascination with mystical quests and mythology in general,
so most of my favorite books have an element of the spiritual hidden in
them. A good example is The Snow Leopard which overwhelmed me when
I read it. Yet, one scientific type met in Khumbu later blew it off
as a "bunch of mystical crap." "This guy is full of it," I recall
hearing him say to our protestations.
Mine is a different view.
I believe that the best outdoor books are more than simple tales of adventure,
that the best books are infused with a great degree of passion, written
with care and full of wry humor, avoid egotism, and if possible, point
subtly to that something which hangs in the air we breath, best described
by the Sioux as The Great Mystery.
I have spent now the better
part of the past twenty years in Asia, and I try to read books which relate
to the local environs (thus to convince myself that I am reading as a kind
of research, or self-improvement, rather than mere diversion). Maybe
half of the books on my list deal with Asia. Due to my interest in
culture, comparative religion and mythology, and due to Asia being populated
by ancient and fascinating cultures, even in remote regions, travel and
adventure books in Asia, unlike those in the Amazon or North America, often
must focus to a much larger degree than some readers would like on the
history and peoples indigenous to the environments. But even the Journals
of Lewis and Clark were much more interesting due to the observations of
the native people and their customs, whom they met on their long holiday
to Astoria.
I began working on a list
on the weekend, and resisted going to the mountains, which anyway were
forecast to be flooded with heavy rains. The result reflects a personal
favor for travel and exploration, trekking and mountaineering, as opposed
to sport-oriented outdoor pursuits, such as mountain climbing. Quality
of writing is a major factor in each choice. All too many great adventures
have been described by those who have little skill in telling a good tale;
on the other hand, many fine writers start out with no real story to tell.
These books, for the most part, provide a good tale written well. Titles
are listed in order of preference. Enjoy them (if you can find them!)
-- Jeff Tucker.
(Material on this page Copyright,
Jeff Tucker. Permission required for use.)
*
Stars below indicate works appearing on other best book lists
1. Scrambles Amongst
the Alps by Edward Whymper
Account of numerous first ascents and other exploratory climbs
in the Alps during the golden age of mountaineering, all woven around the
ongoing obsession with being the first to scale the Matterhorn. The book
culminates with that famous climb, and the terrible accident during the
descent. Written in great style, with wonderfully descriptive passages,
and illustrated with Whymper's own famous engravings. A joy to read.
2. Trans Himalaya
(in three volumes) by Sven Hedin
Hedin's lengthy account (over 1300 pages in three volumes)
of his important explorations in central and western Tibet over a three-year
period, shortly after the turn or the century. He was a scientific explorer,
but he went because exploration was his passion, and it shows in the feeling,
the poignant descriptions of places and characters. Packed with enough
hair-raising adventures and difficulties for a dozen adventure tales. However,
it is very difficult to obtain (I got mine from the Pilgrim's Bookstore
in Kathmandu, reprinted in India with almost five hundred copies of the
original photographs).
While Trans Himalaya remains hard to find, the
500-page volume of Sven Hedin's adventures entitled My Life as an Explorer:
The Great Adventurer's Classic Memoir is available. See description
below. Information at Barnes
& Noble.com.
3. Annapurna by
Maurice Herzog
The classic tale of the first 8000 meter peak to be climbed.
Dictated to a writer from the hospital bed where Herzog was recuperating
from the adventure. Told in a fast-paced, simple style, Herzog starts,
and the story begins to sweep ahead after a few pages. Hard to put down.
Definitely the best of all the many expedition books ever written, with
the possible exception of Shipton's book, "Nanda Devi," to be found in
number five, below.
4. The Collected
Mountain Books
by William H. Tilman
Hailed by many as the greatest of all adventure-explorer writers,
Tilman's small-scale exploratory expeditions, often in the company of his
friend Shipton, provided him with ample opportunity to work on his craft.
Written in a scholarly, masterful style, but with fine balance and plenty
of dry humor and understated restraint. Requires more effort to read than
many of the more breezy, egocentric writers since, but the effort is worthwhile.
Seven books are combined in one volume, covering a twenty-five year period
and three continents.
A version by the Mountaineers also includes his sailing
books: More
Information
5. The Collected
Mountain Books by
Eric Shipton
Companion volume to Tilman, above. Written in a very different
style, more full of passion and feeling, many find him the more easy to
read. Several of the six books relate to the same expeditions as Tilman,
but it seems all the more interesting for that. Contains one of the greatest
of all tales of exploration and discovery: "Nanda Devi." The story of finding
the route to the long-sought peak and its inaccessable sanctuary, through
the Rishi Gorge, by an expedition of five members: himself and Tilman and
three sherpas, with a budget of several hundred dollars.
6. Seven Years in Tibet
by Heinrich Harrer
The classic true story which proves that truth is stranger
than fiction. Now famous because of the movie, but the book is much better,
and sticks to the facts. The facts, and the simple, straightforward way
in which they are told, need nothing more to intrigue the reader.
An Olympic skier and one of the first to scale
the Eiger's North Face, Harrer goes on the German expedition to Nanga Parbat
in the late thirties, and is thrown into a prison camp in the Himalayan
foothills of British India upon returning, with war having broken out.
Their attempts at escape, and their success,
and the long trek across the length of Tibet to Lhasa, where he and his
companion Aufschnaiter lived until nineteen fifty, with Harrer becoming
a tutor to the teenaged Dalai Lama, reads like a novel which you would
find too strange to be true. But it is true.
Things were changed on my second visit, but
the first time I went to Tibet, the Chinese had left the Dalai Lama's bedroom
untouched since his flight to India, and there, prominently in view among
the Dalai Lama's belongings, had been a photo of Heinrich Harrer.
7. Roughing It by
Mark Twain
It's not often you get to read a travelogue that takes you
through such a variety of localities and events, which features amusing
yet revealing personal meetings with historically important figures, such
as Brigham Young, and yet has been written by a renowned author. With his
usual humor, and plenty of exaggerated description, Twain leads the reader
west by stagecoach to the mining fields of Virginia City in Nevada, where
he spent considerable time, and thence on to California, finally even going
on to Hawaii, where he meets the redoubtable queen of those islands. By
turns hilarious and fascinating.
<>*
Another
Review | B&N.com: More
Information
<>8. My Life as an Explorer
by
Sven Hedin
A summary of Hedin's fantastic career as an explorer, in the
middle east, in Central Asia, and in Tibet. Written for a more casual "armchair
audience" than his scholarly accounts were, this book will keep you reading
as adventure after adventure is colorfully described, in the near-disastrous
first crossings of the Takla Makan Desert, penetration of high passes in
the Pamir or Himalaya or Kunlun Mountains, and encounters with bandits
or bouts with starvation. Beautifully described scenes of discoveries and
incidents abound.
9. The Snow Leopard by
Peter Matthiessen
A book which can change your life. A masterpiece of lyrical
writing, describing one man's inner journey during an outer journey to
study blue sheep in a remote area behind the Himalaya in Western Nepal,
with the ever-present hope of finding a rare snow leopard.
The snow leopard becomes a symbol for that
mystery which each of us, at those rare moments when our minds hold still,
may suddenly sense as we stand amid nature, but which, hard as we try,
remains unseen. Perhaps, this tale hints, it is our own effort at finding
that nameless mystery, as in the tale of Parzival and the Grail, which
prevents us from glimpsing it. Only when we let go of trying might the
infinite then appear, without being chased away by ego.
A profound and moving book on many levels;
winner of the National Book Award, and still, in this person's view, despite
the success of Matthiessen's fiction, the masterpiece he will most be remembered
by.
10. A Short Walk in the
Hindu Kush by
Eric Newby
A great story by a great travel writer about a preposterously
planned trip into Afghanistan (before the modern era of chaos overtook
the country) to do a first ascent on a previously unseen peak in the Hindu
Kush Mountains. The two solitary adventurers, with as much climbing experience
as they had knowledge of the terrain, set out into the wilds of the Afghani
frontier, and a formidable array of trouble and adventures. Written with
sublimely understated humor and dry wit, it is hilariously funny and fun.
11. The Oregon Trail by
Francis Parkman
A Western classic, by a man who was to become one of America's
foremost historians and scholars. Between the days of the Mountain Men
and before the Civil War, prior to the great streams of immigrants who
filled the western wilderness, a young Francis Parkman decided to satisfy
his curiosity about the Native American cultures of the great plains and
see the great wilderness before it was gone forever.
Innocently he wandered west, between perilous
events, right into the surprised company of the Sioux nation, where he
lived, near the Black Hills, among them for many months, before returning
east to write his account, again passing alone through lands where, had
he been caught, his life would almost certainly have come to an end. His
fascinating descriptions of the land and peoples along the way provide
a taste of better things to come, in his histories of early American and
Canadian history.
12. News From Tartary
by
Peter Fleming
By the brother of Ian Fleming, of James Bond fame, this is
a remarkable story of his trek, on foot and on pony or mule, in the company
of a female colleague, across China and Central Asia and Tibet, over the
mountains and into British India, before the war. Supposedly done to check
out the truth of rumored Russian intrigues in the islamic oases of the
old silk road in what is now China, Fleming and his associate complete
an amazing trek across some of the most remote regions of the world, and
all the while his dry humor is used well to give the reader an amusing
and interesting commentary on this "secret mission," which is more a test
of survival and endurance than anything else.
13. Passages from Arabia
Deserta
by Charles Montagu Doughty
Not for the casual reader, but for one who is willing to put
up with the author's experimental style of English, which he hoped would
revitalize the language by this project, it is a classic journal, in two
volumes, of a Victorian Englishman's explorations among the Bedouin of
the empty quarter in Saudi Arabia, in the 1880's. Full of perils and descriptions
of life in the harsh region, it was hailed by T.E. Lawrence as the greatest
book he had ever read, and by Henry Miller as one of the most influential
he had come across in his readings.
14. Exploration
of the Colorado River and its Canyons by
John Wesley Powell
Although a scientific expedition, Powell's famous penetration
of the Colorado River's canyon systems in the "Great American Desert,"
and his journals of that trip, taken in the 1860's, are among the treasures
of American experience. He could write beautifully when called upon to
do so, and the weird and unexpected scenery of the slickrock canyons moved
him often to write well. Not knowing what lay before them as they plunged
ahead ever deeper into the roaring depths of the Grand Canyon, this is
a tale of adventure as well as a commentary on the natural history and
geology of the region.
15. Dersu the Trapper
by
Vladimir Arseniev
A little known book, but a famous movie, as the Soviet government
sought out the great Japanese director, Kurosawa, to complete a three year
project in Siberia to bring this true story to film; the film won an academy
award in 1975 as best foreign language film, and has been called "the greatest
film on man and nature ever made." But if you can find a copy of the English
translation of Arseniev's journals, read them.
Arseniev was a surveyor-explorer working for
the Czar's government around the turn of the century, and assigned to do
a series of explorations in the Russian far east, along the Pacific. He
found as a guide an old native hunter, Dersu, and his tales of adventures
in the ensuing years, among the forests of Siberia, and the relationship
between himself, a man of the city and modern civilization, and Dersu,
a true man of nature, who lived alone all year as a wandering hunter, are
fascinating and often enlightening reading.
16. Desert Solitaire by
Edward Abbey
Not really adventure, or exploration, but this little classic
by America's champion of the southwest deserts, is a gem of outdoor and
nature writing. In the form of loosely connected essays, Abbey explores
many areas, and as he does so, he raises a diverse range of topics about
our society and our environment. And the love he felt for the beauty of
the deserts and canyons of the American Southwest, comes across clearly
on every page.
17. My Journey to Lhasa
by
Alexandra David-Neel
The prolific writer-explorer of Tibetan topics, in the early
part of this century, dreamed of actually reaching the forbidden city of
Lhasa, and finally, with her indefatigable companion monk, Yongden, she
made a remarkable pilgrimage to Lhasa, disguised as a pilgrim. Enduring
severe hardships, she managed, after a long journey, to reach the fabled
city, and she describes the journey in her usual, dime-novel style. It
comes off like a thriller.
The only drawback is her blatant biases, most
notably her anti-Dalai Lama bias, which colors all her observations of
Tibetan life and politics, and was due to her freindship with the Panchen
Lama. But don't let this put you off from one of the most unbelievable
tales of true adventure ever written.
18. A Journey in Ladakh
by
Andrew Harvey
Andrew Harvey went to the Tibetan Buddhist region of Ladakh,
in northern India, to explore the land, and it is obvious, to write a book
that might start a career. He succeeded in both, and more than that, he
found something spiritual, too, something which seems somehow missing from
our modern lives. Written in simple but extremely beautiful prose, almost
like poetry, in the form of interconnected short essays and passages.
19. Travels Among the
Great Andes of the Equator by
Edward Whymper
The English climber, already famous from his conquering of
the fabled Matterhorn, took a journey to South America, and his climbs
among the Andes provided him with an opportunity to write another book,
as full of detail and observations of the countryside and its people as
the earlier book (see number one, above), and with enough climbing action
thrown in to keep it interesting.
20. The Journals of Lewis
and Clark
What more can be said? The journals of this pair of explorers,
complete with all their quaint spelling errors and syntax, are part of
the American Heritage. Their grand trek across the wilderness vastness
of North America, to the Pacific and back, must be one of the great adventures
of all time, and we are fortunate to have an account of it, written not
by one, but by both of them.
21. Into Thin Air by
John Krakauer
This now over-hyped story provoked an orgy of Everest publications.
Why did so many who never before read any books about mountains suddenly
pick this up? Because it is a great book, and word of mouth spread the
news. Indisputably well-written, it is a true account of an adventure that
turned into a nightmare of survival and death. A page-turner, not many
who start to read it will fail to finish, and they will probably finish
sooner than they expect.
22. The Climb by
Anatoli Boukreev and Weston DeWalt
Should be read as a companion volume to Into Thin Air, above.
This one is told by one of the chief guides on that ill-fated day, and
provides a different perspective on the whole affair, often showing things
from a more understandable view. As one of the most respected climbers
of the eighties and nineties, Boukreev informs readers of details and thinking
which Krakauer, the author of Into Thin Air, leaves out. Many reviewers feel
this book is, despite being less well written, the more satisfying account
of that infamous day on Everest. If you read, or have read, Into Thin Air,
then this one also should be read, if only to make you realize that we
may never know what really happened out there, and why.
23. Where the Indus is
Young by
Dervla Murphy
A journey in winter in Baltistan, with ponies. Dervla Murphy
is one of the most prolific of travellers and her many books are all worth
reading. This one is arguably the best. She came to Baltistan in winter
to be sure to miss foreign tourists, and brought along her small daughter.
Together the two of them made their way from Skardu, down along the course
of the Indus River by pony and on foot, following the old trade paths in
the canyon, and staying with whoever and wherever they could, to survive.
A different kind of adventure, from a different kind of explorer, who shows
us how to find adventures without going to extremes of hurling our bodies
off precipices, and yet which are none the less thrilling. And she is a
good writer, too.
24. The Northwest Coast
by
James G. Swann
This is a famous account, published by the University of Washington
Press, about the years James Swann spent, during the 1850's and 60's, along
the coast of the Washington Territory with the Willapah native people.
At a time when very few settlers indeed had
come to these areas, Swann came from the California goldfields, an intellectual,
well-educated, and with an investigative mind, and dropped out of society
to become one of the "oyster boys" living with the natives and gathering
oysters for export south to San Francisco. Among this rough crowd, Swann
stands out, writing constantly about anything and everything around him,
and tells of his many excursions up and down the coast or into the interior,
toward the infant capital of Olympia, with the eye of a scientist and the
pen of a highly literate scholar.
25. Over the High Passes
by
Christina Noble
Christina Noble spent a year in the Indian Himalaya and the
plains of Punjab, with the nomadic Gaddi people and their flocks, following
them and living with them as they moved from the plains into the Himalaya
to their high pastures. Exhilarating and refreshingly optimistic, her narrative
tells of the people with whom she lived and came to know, and of their
adventures together among some of the roughest mountain terrain in the
world. Well written, this book helps us understand that other ways of life
are as good as our own, and that the adventures we seek are just the stuff
of daily life for many people in the world.
26. Slowly Down the Ganges
by
Eric Newby
Another story by the author of A Short Walk in the Hindu
Kush, above. This time he takes his wife on his absurd odyssey: starting
from the base of the Himalaya, where the Ganges River flows onto the plains,
he floats down the holy river in a small boat for over a thousand miles,
with his final goal the Bay of Bengal. Funny as always, his descriptions
of incidents along the way, and meetings and sights, provide great entertainment.
27. Arabian Sands by
Wilfred Thesiger
The little-known Thesiger (in the U.S., anyway) was one of
the most redoubtable explorers of the twentieth century. He was fascinated
with deserts, and people of the deserts. This book describes his journeys
in the most inhospitable of desert regions, the empty quarter of Saudi
Arabia, which he became the first man to cross from one side to the other,
and more than just once, despite the close calls with death.
28. Journal of a Trapper
by
Osborne Russell
Over a twelve year period, the mountain man and fur trapper
Russell kept a journal of his experiences. In it we find descriptions of
the great fur rendezvous, brushes with danger both human and animal, and
of the country through which he passed. Notable in his journals are perhaps
the earliest written accounts of a visit to the Yellowstone region, and
the natural wonders of boiling mud, steaming geysers, and hot springs.
An amazing book, especially considering that
he carried this diary around for all those years and through so many incidents,
writing entries diligently in his rough surroundings and company, and the
words have survived, to come down to us in an inexpensive paperback form.
An indispensable narrative for anyone interested in the history, the exploration,
and the landscape of the American west. Furthermore, a pleasure to read.
29. Three Years in Tibet
by
Ekai Kawaguchi
Another exciting and true tale to come out of that forbidden
land of Tibet. Ekai Kawaguchi was a brilliant and mysterious Buddhist monk
from Japan, who, disguised as a Tibetan monk on pilgrimage from the far
regions of the land, where different dialects are common, he made his way
to Lhasa in the beginning of this century and set himself up as a medical
doctor. He lived there for three years in order to translate lost Mahayana
Buddhist texts into Japanese . . . or is that all he was up to?
At times, and to many, Kawaguchi seemed more
like a spy, sent to Tibet by the increasingly militaristic and expansionist
Japanese government for some sort of intrigue. Whatever the truth, Kawaguchi
was a a remarkable man, a friend of the English woman, Annie Besant, who
was president of the Theosophical Society, fluent in English, a scholar
of Sanskrit, and who mastered Tibetan language and customs in several years
of hard study in Darjiling before sneaking into Tibet through the Himalaya
of Western Nepal.
He was full of biases too, and surprisingly
narrow-minded for a monk, even surpassing some Victorian explorers. Oddly
enough for an adventurer, he was woefully lacking in any sense of direction,
a fact which lends great confusion as to his actual routes, while at the
same time adds to the many adventures which he plunges himself into, again
and again, largely due to ignorance of his whereabouts. This strange and
entertaining tale is only available from Nepal or India, published by Ratna
Pustak Bhandar co.
30. Twenty Years Before
the Mast by
Charles Erskine
This is a fascinating account of the five year sailing expedition,
from 1838 to 1842, financed by James Smithson of future Smithsonian fame,
and told by one ordinary sailor. The purpose of the voyage was one of exploration
and collecting of knowledge, as Smithson already had a visualization of
what the Smithsonian museum should become. It was thus the first great
global expediton financed by the young American nation, and they went everywhere.
Erskine, a literate sailor, had spent much
of his life on various sailing ships, but the book does not cover twenty
years, as the title implies. It focuses wholly on the Smithson expedition.
In an easy-to-read style, Erskine relates what he sees: the stench and
horror of black slave-ships along the coast of Africa or in the new world,
the wonders of Hawaii, the wilderness coast of Puget sound and the area
around present-day Seattle.
In Fiji, one quote may indicate the kind of
surprises which await the reader: "One morning a big canoe came alongside
our ship with two chiefs and nine roasted human bodies. The chiefs were
bound for one of the leeward islands to have a feast with their brother,
the head chief of the island." It is a fun book to read, about America's
first foray into world exploration.
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