Whether you are lounging waterside or holed up in a tent waiting out a summer storm, a good book is always a welcome companion. Hailey Moore puts her own spin on a summer reading list with nine book recommendations that span the outdoor and adventure genre. Don’t see your favorite? Drop into the comments and share!
I recently heard a couple of podcasters lamenting that the “Song of the Summer” concept is dead. One theory they gave is that streaming services have contributed to the fracturing of Pop(ular) music into more niche genres, thereby liberating us all from the strictures of radio play. Another theory that the interviewee gently proffered the aging millennial host is that maybe they are simply aging out of the allure of an anthemic seasonal soundtrack. Regardless, the conversation got me thinking about another summer culture trend that I hope never dies: reading.
Summer Reading List
Whether it’s a carryover from school-day assigned reading lists, or simply because a lot of people go on vacation in the summer months, it seems like there’s a bigger focus on the best books this time of year (case in point: the whole “Beach Reads” phenomenon, though, of course, this isn’t exactly a signifier of esteemed lit). Relatedly, a friend of mine uses “reading a book in a day” as a benchmark for when she wants to chill hard.
Aside from some college cramming, I’m not sure if I’ve ever actually gone cover to cover in less than 24 hours, but there is something to be said for the transportive power of a few uninterrupted hours spent engrossed in a good read. And while that power is available 365, as an ode to the leisure and languor of the dog days, I put together a summer reading list of outdoor and adventure-focused books that have made a lasting impression on me over the years.
Rowing to Latitude (2001) – Jill Fredston
I first stumbled on Jill Fredston’s memoir of sorts, Rowing to Latitude, on a whim in a used bookstore not long after I’d graduated from college. The ocean blue cover was attractive in itself, but in its pages I found Fredston’s account of adapting her college crew skills to wilderness rowing especially captivating. After completing her Masters, Fredston moves to Alaska where she becomes an avalanche expert and co-director of the Alaska Mountain Safety Center with her eventual husband, Doug Fesler. As an emotional antidote to conducting avalanche rescue missions half the year, the pair spend summer months rowing extended stretches of Arctic coastline, around Alaska but also on the edges of Canada, Greenland, and Norway. Having confronted a few more of life’s complexities in decade since I finished my undergraduate degree, I recently decided to revisit Rowing to Latitude; Fredston’s examination of risk, relationships, and motivation hit even harder now, but what I love most is the way I can tell that she needs these trips. Plus, her descriptions of carrying months’ worth of homemade dehydrated meals, navigating iceberg-clogged seas, and near misses with both polar bears and grizzlies combine to make bike touring feel pretty tame by comparison.
Order from your local bookstore or Amazon.
Long Distance: Testing the Limits of Body and Spirit in a Year of Living Strenuously (2000) – Bill McKibben
In his book Long Distance, environmentalist writer Bill McKibben dons a different hat: that of the serious athlete. Over the course of a year-long experiment, McKibben devotes himself to the rigors of focused training for cross-country skiing in an effort to extract, what he terms, “a supreme effort” as he enters his late 30s. Like a few others on this list, here McKibben’s external struggle very much parallels an internal grappling, with self-worth, aging, and purpose. But, there are birdwalks that keep this account from feeling rote: amusing scrutiny of power lifting culture, the unique bodily discomforts (i.e. frost-bitten genitals) of cross-country ski racing, and—more poignantly—McKibben’s observations of his father’s death. By the end, perhaps more than a way of measuring performance, it seems that McKibben finds the ritual of movement as a way of measuring life’s progress and making sure that he takes an hour per day to process all that it entails.
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High Infatuation: A Climber’s Guide to Love and Gravity (2007) – Steph Davis
In this short collection of essays and reflections, climber Steph Davis writes about her first decade as a rock climber, including a few of her most notable big wall ascents in Yosemite Valley and international mountaineering expeditions to South America’s Patagonia region and Pakistan. Often stripped back, Davis’s prose reveals the driving tensions of her life; an intrinsic doggedness—at times, ruthlessness—to achieve her goals versus her pursuit for spiritual contentment/contentedness through climbing, and the often explicit bias she experiences as one of the scant few women at the spear tip of the sport. Davis writes that “climbing is the way I love the world,” and it is her preferred medium for personal growth; anyone who has struggled with finding fulfillment can gain something from her reflections.
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The River Why (1983) – David James Duncan
An allegorical novel with a modern folk hero at its center might be the best encapsulation I can muster to describe The River Why’s first person-told narrative of the young and irreverent Gus Orviston. Set in Oregon, Gus’s tale follows his life from adolescence to his early 20s, when—after being raised by two fiercely fanatical fishing parents on opposite ends of the angling ideological spectrum (“plunking” versus fly fishing)—he leaves home to find his own path. Once loosed from his lovably quarrelsome family, Gus sets himself an “ideal schedule” that involves little more than fishing out his new backdoor. However, left to his own self-obsessed angling devices, Gus finds himself… absolutely miserable. What follows is a story of self-discovery and troubled reflections on humankind’s role in the natural world, as Gus reexamines previously held absolutes. At times campy but always enchanting, The River Why is much more than a book about fishing.
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Grizzly Years: In Search of the American Wilderness (1990) – Doug Peacock
Ironically, the most well-known fact about Doug Peacock played out in a fictional space: he is the real-life inspiration for George Washington Hayduke, the brash, anarchist, eco-warrior at the center of Edward Abbey’s fifth novel, The Monkey Wrench Gang. Like Hayduke, Peacock served as a Green Beret and army medic in Vietnam and, upon returning to the United States, finds himself utterly disillusioned with society’s gluttonous attitude toward wild places. In his first book, Grizzly Years, Peacock chronicles how his existential compulsion to find, then follow, grizzly bears in the Yellowstone area evolved into intentional documentation, observation, and preservation efforts of these alpha animals. Early in the book, his initial grizzly encounters are often interspersed with disturbed memories from Vietnam, experiences that feel bereft of any unifying moral order among humanity. In one such passage Peacock writes:
“In Vietnam the primary predator was man. If I had salvaged a grain of wisdom from the agonies of combat, it had nothing to do with knowledge of killing or of waging war […] What burned deepest into my consciousness was the little acts of grace, lessons that had lain dormant in memory and now were retrieving themselves from anesthetized corners of my brain. It never mattered why. The granting of quarter itself was a transcendence.
“The grizzly radiated potency. He carried the physical strength and thorniness of disposition that allowed him to attack or kill most any time he cared. But, almost always, he chose not to.” (pg 62)
Filled with equal measures personal philosophy, practical backcountry advise, and glimpses into the psyche that shaped the fictional Hayduke, Grizzly Years feels like Peacock’s spiritual quest to find something again worth seeking.
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Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life (2015) – William Finnegan
In compiling this list, I tried to steer clear of well-known titles, but some classics continue to live up to—and exceed—the hype. I place William Finnegan’s Barbarian Days among this tier for the way it expands what the genre of “outdoor literature” can embody: along with paying tribute to surfing’s history and writing about the subtleties of the subculture in the 70s and 80s—more lifestyle than sport—Finnegan also examines the layered socio-political dynamics of many of the surf destinations he visits. A true paragon of the way an adventurous pursuit opens your eyes to the wider world.
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An Account of Passage From San Francisco to Estes Park: A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains (1873; first printing 1971) – Isabella Bird
Told through a series of letters written to her sister, Henrietta, Isabella Bird’s book A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains narrates her 1873 journey across Colorado’s Front Range. Astride a borrowed horse, Birdie, who would become a dear traveling companion, the author rode some 800 miles mostly solo and spent the fall season in Estes Park. Although told with regard for a wider audience (letters sent home to one family member in Scotland during this time could be expected to be read aloud to the group), Bird’s letters from Colorado clearly convey her infatuation with the wildness she finds in the mountains, and hint at a mutual attraction to the roguish “Mountain Jim,” the outlaw-like character who would guide Bird to the summit of the 14,000’+ Longs Peak. Inspired to travel by poor health in middle age, Bird’s adventures in Colorado place her among a very few women who followed such self-determined paths during an era when such agency in women was a true rarity.
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Endurance: An Epic of Polar Adventure (1931) – Frank Arthur Worsley
“What the ice gets, the ice keeps,” is perhaps the most famous quote attributed to the early 20th century Anglo-Irish explorer, Ernest Shackleton, leader of the odds-defying 1914-1916 British Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition. The line is in reference to Shackleton accepting the fact that the crew’s ship, the Endurance, will be soon be lost to—crushed by—the surrounding pack ice clogging the waters off the coast of Antarctica. And, it is with this moment that Frank Arthur Worsley, captain of the Endurance and Shackleton’s right-hand man, opens his retelling of the failed South Pole expedition. One might wonder what is left to say of a seafaring polar journey when the story begins with abandoning ship, but it turns out quite a lot.
After he and the other two dozen crew members all lived to tell about it, Worsley goes on to give an extensive first-person account of how they survived the 10 month period after the Endurance sinks before finding rescue in Chile. Amid passages that detail the discomforts of being beset by tempestuous seas for days in a small whaling boat that they used to reach South Georgia, or how they then traversed the island on foot for 36 unsleeping hours, it’s easy to get swept up by the Jules Verneian-like drama before remembering that Endurance is a non-fiction narrative. I listened to the audiobook version of this real-life epic over the course of a couple long rides and highly recommend hearing the tale via Michael Page’s narration.
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Coffee First Then the World: One Woman’s Record-Breaking Pedal Around the Planet (2023) – Jenny Graham
In light of Lael Wilcox’s current Around the World attempt, I decided to crack open Jenny Graham’s recently published chronicle of her own record-setting ride from 2018. A late-comer to sport in general and cycling specifically, Graham’s story of setting her sights on a Guinness World Record recognized Around the World ride is truly inspiring; as a mother and a semi-sponsored rider, she undertakes the 18,000+ mile ride in self-supported fashion, ultimately completing the challenge and setting a new record in 124 days, for under $20,000. Written through day-to-day dispatches colored with numerous encounters with kind-hearted strangers, Graham shares the standout details of her ride, starting and ending in Berlin and traveling across eastern Europe, Russia, China, Australia, New Zealand, North American, and ultimately finishing once again in Germany’s capital.
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Summer Reading List Honorable Mentions:
The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics (2013) – Daniel James Brown: Timely; an engaging—if, at times, overly-sentimental—retelling of the American rowing team’s victory at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, held under massive propaganda campaigns of Nazi Germany.
The Wild Truth (2014) – Carine McCandless: A follow-up of sorts to Into the Wild, John Krakauer’s book about Chris McCandless’ fatal journey into the Alaskan backcountry. If you read Into the Wild and found yourself confused by Chris’s motives, his sister, Carine’s, account of their intensively troubled childhood provides sobering context. At the time Krakauer was writing Chris’s story, Carine was not yet comfortable with the traumas of her and her brother’s childhood being made public.
A Ride Across America: A 4,000-Mile Adventure Through the Small Towns and Big Issues of the USA (2024) – Simon Parker: The 2023 trip at the center of Simon Parker’s most recent book was, in fact, his second time riding across the US. While riding from Washington state’s west coast to Florida, the British travel writer undertakes the simultaneous quest of trying to find the “real” America through interviews with people he meets along the way. Parker steers most of these conversations towards the political realm and layers his own observations about America’s most divisive issues into the mix of responses he hears. As a foreigner, his critiques often land a little heavier, though they are not unfounded.
To Shake the Sleeping Self: A Journey from Oregon to Patagonia, and a Quest for a Life with No Regret (2019) – Jedidiah Jenkins: Another long-distance cyclo-touring journey, Jenkins’s account of riding from Oregon to the Patagonia region of South America includes passages of vulnerable self-reflection, though the riding objective feels—at times—a bit token, as if the idea for the story came before the inspiration for the trip itself. Still, he did the damn thing and that is certainly worthy of recognition and respect.
Kiss Or Kill: Confessions of a Serial Climber (2001) – Mark Twight: Impassioned, honest and angsty, Mark Twight’s autobiographical book about his relationship with climbing is a no-holds-barred look into the motivations that drove him to pursue the cutting edge of alpinism.
A Field Guide to Getting Lost (2005) – Rebecca Solnit: More meditation on pivotal moments than memoir, Solnit’s collection of essays examine loss, change, uncertainty, often using the natural world as a mirror for reflection. Her prose is often wanderingly poetic, reminiscent of Annie Dillard’s style.
