The 100 Greatest Adventure Books of All Time - read these books, please

This post is about 105 books.  It is about a list.  How we all love lists.  This one is among my very favorites.  It is the list of The 100 Greatest Adventure Books of All Time as assembled by National Geographic (five extra books were tacked on as lagniappe).

The list is apparently the result of a poll, with scores based on “the book's pure literary merit; its ‘adrenaline factor,’ or the level of excitement they felt reading it; and its impact on our history and culture.”  My experience is that the scoring system worked – ever book I have read from the list, several of which have been featured here at Wuthering Expectations, have defensible is rarely first-rate literary value, and there are specific passages or even moments in which the level of excitement is as high as I am likely to find in literature.

As I mentioned with Nansen’s Farthest North (#11), a great deal of the matter in any book of exploration is inevitably tedious.  The chronicle of any expedition across an icesheet, desert, or ocean is filled with many changeless days.  The great challenge is simply endurance; the reader is privileged to share the slog.

In others the excitement lies in discovery, as with Charles Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle (1839, #23) or Incidents of Travel in Yucatan (1843, #60), in which the author, “the father of American archaeology,” discovers the lost cities of the Mayans.

Many of the books on the list are about disasters, including the winner, if that is the right word, Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s The Worst Journey in the World (1922), an account by a survivor of the Scott Antarctic expedition, and a good pick to win a poll of the 100 Greatest Titles of All Time.  Owen Chase’s Shipwreck of the Whaleship Essex (1821, #61) is not a great piece of literature, however important it is as a source for Moby-Dick, yet the scene early on when the whale turns on the whaling ship, rams it, and then comes back to finish the job, is thrilling and unimprovable. 

Or think of the desert plane crash in Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Wind, Sand & Stars (1940, #3).  The excitement is unvitiated by the evidence that Saint-Exupéry will survive the crash – that crash, at least – the evidence of the book itself, I mean.  There is inevitably some survivor’s bias.  These are the books of people who made went out and made it back in, this time.

Then there’s a book like Murray’s Adventures in the Wilderness (1869, #87), where the excitement comes from chasing a trout or shooting a rapids.  Not exactly getting staved in by a whale.  But the list has a great deal of variety, with settings in caves and outer space as well as both poles and every major mountain range and desert, times ranging from Marco Polo (#10) in 1298 to the present.

There is maybe too much mountain climbing for my tastes, although when I line up the mountaineering books a miniature history of human ambition, or folly, is outlined.  I suspect the mountaineering  books would by themselves make a fine course of reading.

I have an ulterior motive in writing a post about this list, which is that I wish more people would read the books on it – any of them – and then tell me about them.  I have read only 24 of the 105 books, and since I read only about two or three travel books of any sort per year, I will likely never finish them all.  I’ve covered disproportionately more of the books about the American West than the poles, about sailing rather than mountain climbing, and about the 19th century rather than the 20th, so, although I recommend for one reason or another all of the 24 I have tried, I would appreciate hearing about the oddballs I have not tried – Osa Johnson’s I Married Adventure (1940, #95), about life with a wildlife photographer (“She tells their story in straight-on American gee-whiz style”) or Tracks (1980, #70) by Robyn Davidson, who travels “alone across 1,700 miles (2,735 km) of Australian outback on wild camels that she herself had trained.”  How can those not be good books?