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
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.
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
A Fine Balance
1995 · 603 pages
A widow takes in two tailors fleeing caste violence and a student, and under Indira Gandhi's Emergency the four become a family. Mistry lets you love them before the sterilization camps arrive.
★ 5.7
Young Men and Fire
1992 · 333 pages
At Mann Gulch in 1949 a wildfire turned uphill and killed twelve smokejumpers and a fire guard in minutes. Maclean, past seventy, walked that Montana slope for years to learn what happened.
★ 6.4
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
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
Into Thin Air
1997 · 332 pages
Krakauer climbed Everest on assignment for Outside magazine, summited on May 10, 1996, and came down through the storm that killed eight climbers. He is hardest on his own conduct.
★ 6.8
With the Old Breed
1981 · 352 pages
Sledge fought as a Marine mortarman on Peleliu and Okinawa, then set down the mud, the maggots, and the looting of corpses. The critic Paul Fussell ranked it with the finest war memoirs.
★ 6.8
White Fang (includes Call of the Wild and To Build a Fire)
1906 · 271 pages
Born wild in the Canadian North, a wolf-dog passes from a Native camp to a dogfighting pit to a man who tames him. The Call of the Wild runs the other way.
★ 7.0
Robinson Crusoe
1719 · 304 pages
Twenty-eight years on an island near the Orinoco, counting days on a post and keeping his own moral ledgers, until a footprint appears in the sand. The English novel grew from this.
★ 7.0
Kolyma Tales
1978 · 508 pages
Shalamov spent seventeen years in the Kolyma camps. His stories are short, about frostbite and stolen bread and men too weak to lift a shovel, and he insists that suffering teaches nothing.
★ 7.1
The Worst Journey in the World
1922 · 573 pages
Three men hauled sledges through five weeks of Antarctic winter darkness to fetch penguin eggs, in cold that cracked Cherry-Garrard's teeth. That was before Scott's polar party failed to come back.
★ 7.1
The Road
2006 · 287 pages
Pushing a shopping cart south through a burned gray America, a man and his boy hide from people who eat other people. The talk between them is the tenderest thing McCarthy ever wrote.
★ 8.3