What’s in it
Tap a tag: ❤ = this matters to me · tap again ✕ = don’t care · again to reset. The list below updates each time.
24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorWild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
Cheryl Strayed · 315 pages
A powerful, blazingly honest memoir: the story of an eleven-hundred-mile solo hike that broke down a young woman reeling from catastrophe—and built her back up again. At twenty-two, Cheryl Strayed thought she'd lost everything when her mother died young of cancer. Her family scattered in their grief, her marriage was soon destroyed, and slowly her life spun out of control. Four years after her mot
Walking the Bible: A Journey by Land Through the Five Books of Moses
Bruce Feiler · 488 pages
The author recounts his ten-thousand-mile journey across the Middle East in search of the roots of the Bible to discover whether it was an abstraction or a living, breathing entity.
Arabian Sands
Wilfred Thesiger · 347 pages
Story of five years of travel with the nomad Arabs in the unknown deserts of Southern Arabia.
The Road to Mecca
Muhammad Asad · 380 pages
This autobiographical work by one of Europe's best known convert to Islam gives us a rounded portrait of a man in search of adventure and truth. It is part spiritual autobiography, part summary of the author's intuitive insights into Islam and the Arabs, part an impressive travelogue. Punctuated with abundant adventure, moments of contemplation, colorful narrative, brilliant description and lively
Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town
Paul Theroux · 494 pages
"A rich and insightful travel book in the tradition that made Paul Theroux's reputation, Dark Star Safari takes us the length of Africa by rattletrap bus, forgotten train, and rusting steamer. Theroux confronts delay, discomfort, bullets, and bad food while encountering a remarkable mix of places and people. Beginning in Cairo and ending in Cape Town, he goes on the ultimate safari to the true hea
Tracks: A Woman's Solo Trek Across 1700 Miles of Australian Outback (Vintage Departures)
Robyn Davidson · 280 pages
“I arrived in the Alice at five a.m. with a dog, six dollars and a small suitcase full of inappropriate clothes.... There are some moments in life that are like pivots around which your existence turns…” For Robyn Davidson, one of these moments comes at age twenty-seven in Alice Springs, a dodgy town at the frontier of the vast Australian desert. Davidson is intent on walking the 1,700 miles of
Cities of Gold: A Journey Across the American Southwest
Douglas Preston · 480 pages
Douglas Preston's Cities of Gold is a riveting account of his journey in the footsteps of Coronado, the legendary 16th-century explorer and conquistador who led the first European expedition through the American Southwest. Preston and a friend, Walter Nelson, set out on horseback across one thousand miles of vast deserts and unknown mountains retracing Coronado's search for the fabled Seven Cities
Wind, Sand, and Stars
Antoine de Saint-Exupery · 258 pages
English translation of "Terre des hommes". Autobiographical account of air travel, captures the grandeur, danger, and isolation of flight.
Guests of the Sheik: An Ethnography of an Iraqi Village
Elizabeth Warnock Fernea · 346 pages
Autobiographical account of two year's spent in a village of southern Iraq. The author accompanied her husband, who was doing anthropological research in the area.
The Anthropology of Turquoise: Reflections on Desert, Sea, Stone, and Sky
Ellen Meloy · 330 pages
In this invigorating mix of natural history and adventure, artist-naturalist Ellen Meloy uses turquoise--the color and the gem--to probe deeper into our profound human attachment to landscape. From the Sierra Nevada, the Mojave Desert, the Yucatan Peninsula, and the Bahamas to her home ground on the high plateaus and deep canyons of the Southwest, we journey with Meloy through vistas of both great
In Patagonia
Bruce Chatwin · 250 pages
"An exhilarating look at a place that still retains the exotic mystery of a far-off, unseen land, Bruce Chatwin's exquisite account of his journey through Patagonia teems with evocative descriptions, remarkable bits of history, and unforgettable anecdotes. Fueled by an unmistakable lust for life and adventure and a singular gift for storytelling, Chatwin treks through "the uttermost part of the ea
Come, Tell Me How You Live: An Archaeological Memoir
Agatha Christie Mallowan, Agatha Christie · 192 pages
Agatha Christie was already a celebrated writer of mysteries in 1930 when she married archaeologist Max Mallowan. She enthusiastically joined him on archaeological expeditions in the Middle East, providing backgrounds for novels and "everyday doings and happenings". Pre-war Syria years are remembered here, not chronologically, but in a cluster of vignettes about servants and aristocrats who pepper
The Road to Oxiana
Robert Byron · 292 pages
Of the journey by travel writer Robert Byron to the Middle East, this serves as a rare account of the architectural treasures of a region now innaccessible to most Western travellers, and a nostalgic look back at a more innocent time.
The Secret Knowledge of Water
Craig Childs · 288 pages
Deserts are environments that can be inhospitable even to seasoned explorers. Craig Childs has spent years in the deserts of the American West, and his treks through arid lands in search of water reveal the natural world at its most extreme.
Long Way Down
Ewan McGregor, Charley Boorman, Jeff Gulvin · 320 pages
Desert Queen: The Extraordinary Life of Gertrude Bell: Adventurer, Adviser to Kings, Ally of Lawrence of Arabia
Janet Wallach · 419 pages
Reared in the comfortable and privileged world of the "eminent Victorians," Gertrude Bell turned her back on convention and sought adventure in Arab lands. Traveling numerous times through the Syrian Desert and, at risk to her life, through the great Arabian desert of the Nejd - the last European to do so before the eruption of World War I - she wrote of her travels in widely acclaimed books. T
Desert Solitaire
Edward Abbey · 270 pages
An account of the author's experiences, observations, and reflections as a seasonal park ranger in southeast Utah. When Desert Solitaire was first published in 1968, it became the focus of a nationwide cult. Rude and sensitive. Thought-provoking and mystical. Angry and loving. Both Abbey and this book are all of these and more. Here, the legendary author of The Monkey Wrench Gang, Abbey's Road an
Foreign Devils on the Silk Road
Peter Hopkirk · 258 pages
"In the 1950's one of the most commonly-asked questions in America was, Who Lost China? Well, comfortable as it might have been to pin the blame upon 'fellow travelers' or suchlike, the real answer may involve such names as Sven Hedin, Aurel Stein, von Le Coq, and Langdon Warner. And who, pray, were they? Merely individuals who in the name of science plundered China as the generals and merchants n
In Trouble Again: A Journey Between the Orinoco and the Amazon
Redmond O'Hanlon · 317 pages
Apples Are from Kazakhstan: The Land That Disappeared
Christopher Robbins · 296 pages
Travel writer Christopher Robbins relates a story by turns hilarious and grim as he finds Eminem-worship by a shrinking Aral Sea, hears the Kazakh John Lennon play in a dusty desert town, joins nomads hunting eagles, eats boiled sheep's head (a delicacy), and explores some of the most beautiful, unspoiled places on earth. Meet the country that gave the world apples, trousers, and possibly King Ar
Looking for Transwonderland: Travels in Nigeria
Noo Saro-Wiwa · 309 pages
Noo Saro-Wiwa was brought up in England, but every summer she was dragged back to Nigeria - a country she viewed as an annoying parallel universe where she had to relinquish all her creature comforts and sense of individuality. Then her father, activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, was murdered there, and she didn't return for 10 years. Recently, she decided to rediscover and come to terms with the country her