The Thirty-Nine Steps
1915 · 128 pages
Wanted for a murder in his own flat, Richard Hannay bolts across the Scottish moors with a dead spy's coded notebook. Hitchcock filmed it, and the innocent fugitive became the thriller's engine.
★ 4.8
The Books canon
Sourced and shelved.
Every book chosen by hand and annotated for why it matters.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
Full Tilt
Ireland to India with a Bicycle
1965 · 256 pages
Murphy left Dunkirk in the frozen January of 1963 on a bicycle named Roz and rode to Delhi, fighting off wolves in Yugoslavia and thieves in Iran, and setting it down without drama.
★ 4.9
Magellan
Conqueror of the Seas
1938 · 352 pages
Five ships left Seville in 1519 and one came home three years later with eighteen men aboard. Zweig tells the circumnavigation as the story of an obstinate will set against an unmapped ocean.
★ 4.9
A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush
1958 · 260 pages
Quitting the London fashion trade with almost no climbing behind him, Newby set out for an unclimbed Afghan peak. The funniest travel book in English comes out of that mismatch.
★ 5.0
King Solomon's Mines
1885 · 320 pages
Allan Quatermain, an aging elephant hunter, follows an old map into unmapped Africa and finds a lost kingdom ruled by a tyrant. Hidden-city adventure from Tarzan to Indiana Jones runs on Haggard's machinery.
★ 5.3
The Extraordinary Journeys
Around the World in Eighty Days (Oxford World's Classics)
1872 · 247 pages
Phileas Fogg wagers half his fortune that steamships and railways have shrunk the world to eighty days, and leaves that evening. Seventeen years later the reporter Nellie Bly ran the route in seventy-two.
★ 5.5
The Last of the Mohicans
1826 · 398 pages
The scout Hawkeye and the last two Mohicans guide two sisters through the French and Indian War. Cooper made the frontiersman a national hero, and the Western has lived off him since.
★ 5.5
West with the Night
1942 · 293 pages
Raised barefoot in Kenya, Markham hunted with Nandi boys, trained racehorses, and scouted elephants from the air before flying the Atlantic alone. Hemingway said she made him ashamed as a writer.
★ 5.6
Endurance
Shackleton's Incredible Voyage
1959 · 357 pages
Antarctic pack ice crushes their ship in 1915, leaving twenty-eight men on a drifting floe. Shackleton sails an open boat eight hundred miles for help. Lansing reconstructed it all from the crew's diaries.
★ 5.6
Sailing Alone Around the World
1900 · 273 pages
Slocum rebuilt an oyster sloop, left Boston in 1895, came back three years later the first person to circle the earth alone. He recounts it in the practical voice of a working sailor.
★ 5.7
The Journals
1768 · 646 pages
Cook charts New Zealand and eastern Australia in his own hand, and sails until no southern continent is left to find. The log calls the Aborigines happier than Europeans, then claims their coast.
★ 5.8
The Right Stuff
1979 · 448 pages
Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier with two cracked ribs hidden from the flight surgeon. Wolfe named the code such men flew by, and America still tells the space race in his words.
★ 5.9
Watership Down
1972 · 476 pages
Fiver the rabbit senses blood covering the field, and others follow him out before the bulldozers come. Adams gives them their own language and mythology, then sets them against a rabbit police state.
★ 6.0
Memed, My Hawk
1955 · 392 pages
Five villages belong to Abdi Agha. The boy Memed runs, is dragged back, kills, and takes to the mountains, where Kemal turns a peasant's revolt into an epic of Turkey's Çukurova plain.
★ 6.2
Annapurna
1951 · 256 pages
Herzog and Lachenal reached Annapurna's summit in June 1950, the first men atop an eight-thousand-meter peak. Frostbite cost Herzog every finger and toe during the descent. No mountaineering book has sold like it.
★ 6.4
Arabian Sands
1959 · 400 pages
Thesiger crossed Arabia's Empty Quarter twice with Bedu companions, on a pint of water a day. He loved that life, knew oil money would end it, and wrote this as its elegy.
★ 6.5
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
1870 · 528 pages
The monster ramming ships proves to be an electric submarine whose captain has renounced every nation above. Submarine builders read it as boys, and the first nuclear boat took the Nautilus name.
★ 6.5
Treasure Island
1883 · 336 pages
Hiding in an apple barrel, a boy overhears the ship's cook planning mutiny. Stevenson invented the pirate everyone pictures: Long John Silver's parrot and missing leg, the treasure map marked with crosses.
★ 6.6
Wind, Sand and Stars
1939 · 240 pages
Flying mail over the Sahara and Patagonia, Saint-Exupery writes about what the work did to the men who flew it. The pilot Guillaumet crashed in the Andes and walked out through the snow.
★ 6.6
The Tain Bo Cuailnge
Author unknown
750 · 256 pages
Seventeen years old, Cu Chulainn holds the fords against the army Medb of Connacht raised to steal a bull, with Ulster's warriors paralyzed by birth pangs. Yeats built a national mythology on him.
★ 6.6