The Wild and the Wager

"What does the body learn when you put it where the world can kill it?"

Half of these books go looking for danger; the other half stumble into it and write their way out. Abbey wants the desert to stay indifferent to him, Krakauer watched eight people die above 26,000 feet, Strayed walked the Pacific Crest Trail to outrun her own wreckage. Matthiessen and Lansing bracket the wager itself: one Himalayan pilgrimage that never finds its leopard, one Antarctic voyage that should have ended every man aboard. McPhee goes to live among people who chose Alaska knowing it might kill them, and Melville and McCarthy close it in fiction, where the hunt and the borderlands are where this stops being recreation.

9 books~32 weeksModerate

Desert Solitaire

Edward Abbey · 1968

The founding text of American environmental radicalism. Essays about the Utah desert that are both love letters to wilderness and screeds against industrial tourism. Fierce, funny, deliberately antagonistic.

Wild

Cheryl Strayed · 2012

After her mother's death, the collapse of her marriage, and a heroin habit, Strayed walked 1,100 miles alone on the Pacific Crest Trail. The memoir is what saved her, and how. It became the defining American memoir of the 2010s about a woman walking herself back into a life.

H is for Hawk

Helen Macdonald · 2014

After her father's sudden death, Macdonald trained a goshawk named Mabel and wrote a book that is simultaneously a grief memoir, a falconry manual, and a literary biography of T.H. White. The combination shouldn't work. It works completely. Won the Samuel Johnson Prize and the Costa Book of the Year because nobody could figure out which category it belonged in.

Coming into the Country

John McPhee · 1977

Three long essays about Alaska that constitute McPhee's masterpiece. The wild, the frontier, the bush. The model for place-based literary journalism.

The Snow Leopard

Peter Matthiessen · 1978

Matthiessen trekked to the Himalayas of Nepal to study the Himalayan blue sheep and wrote a meditation on Buddhism, grief (his wife had just died of cancer), and the nature of searching. The snow leopard is almost never seen. That's the point.

Into Thin Air

Jon Krakauer · 1997

Krakauer's first-person account of the 1996 Everest disaster in which eight climbers died is the definitive extreme sports narrative and a profound meditation on hubris, risk, and the human drive toward the summit. It sold millions worldwide and transformed public understanding of high-altitude mountaineering.

Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage

Alfred Lansing · 1959

Trapped in Antarctic ice for two years. No one died. The greatest survival story ever told, and it is all true.

Moby-Dick

Herman Melville · 1851

A whaling voyage that becomes a meditation on obsession, masculinity, race, God, and the indifference of nature. Melville's prose is oceanic, alternately beautiful and exhausting. It failed commercially in 1851 and was barely read for decades. Now it defines the outer limit of what American fiction has attempted.

Blood Meridian

Cormac McCarthy · 1985

Harold Bloom called it "the greatest single novel published by an American writer since Faulkner." Set on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, it is a relentless, biblical meditation on human violence. The Judge is among literature's most terrifying figures. McCarthy published it in 1985 to little fanfare; its reputation has only grown.