A good novel is always fun but sometimes you need a real life adventure novel to sink into. These nonfiction accounts will either inspire you to try something new or remind you exactly why you don’t engage in certain hobbies.
Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer
This book is a first hand account of a particularly tragic year for a group of climbers of Mount Everest. How intense can climbing an icy mountain be, right? Erm. Make said mountain so high that human bodies start malfunctioning at random and you’ll wonder why anyone attempts the ascent to the top to begin with. On an average year one out of ten people don’t survive, so it’s not exactly uplifting but my goodness it’s a good read.
Shooting Water by Devyani Saltzman
This memoir follows the author as she meets up with her filmmaker mother in India and Sri Lanka while she shoots the Oscar nominated film “Water.” Her emerging adventure is the kind that includes the challenges of producing a film, alongside splitting a cross-cultural identity and parental relationship between Canada and India.
Shadow Divers
This book is about the American divers who dove off the coast of New Jersey in 1991 and found a German U-boat from World War II. When the Navy’s of both countries are alerted about the nearby boat find they say that there must be some mistake. There’s not. This story is the seven-year journey that commences as the divers aim to solve the case and the personal dramas that unfold.
Paris to the Moon by Adam Gopnik
This book is a collection of a journalist’s experience of moving his young family to Paris, which can be a notoriously difficult place to assimilate. His challenging experiences create a heavy observers perspective where evocative descriptions come forth from every day scenes and items.
Adrift: Seventy-Six Days Lost at Sea by Steven Callahan
Only one guy has been lost at sea for over a month and lived to tell the tale, and this is his first hand account. Imagine how inconvenienced Los Angeles gets in a light downpour and this man survived 76 days on an inflatable raft in the Atlantic.
Touching the Void: The True Story of One Man’s Miraculous Survival by Joe Simpson
Can people stop climbing icy mountain peaks already? This is a memoir about a guy who takes a climbing trip in Peru, which begins with a broken leg followed by a 150ft drop, and continues as his unlikely survival story.
Facing the Congo: A Modern-Day Journey into the Heart of Darkness by Jeffrey Tayler
What happens when a journalist decides to canoe down the Congo in a similar fashion to an explorer from the 19th century? A lot of trouble, it turns out.
