10 Travel & Outdoor Books You Should Read in 2021
OVERVIEW: 10 Travel & Outdoor Books
You Should Read in 2021
For those interested in the great outdoors, breathtaking adventures, and thoughts about our planet and its conservation; this list includes classics as well as more recent books.
Featuring titles from Jon Krakauer, Bill Bryson, Richard Louv, and more.
Full Read: About 9 Minutes
Skim: About 2 Minutes
Article by Cullan McNamara
10. Wayfinding: The Science and Mystery of How Humans Navigate the World by M. R. O'Connor
Though the author sprinkles in anecdotes and tales of travel, Wayfinding is first and foremost a book on the art and science of navigation. The reader follows O’Conner as she spans the globe to uncover how humans move throughout their environments and how that movement influences the brain.
O’Conner not only offers explanations for how humans have experienced their surroundings throughout history, but she warns of losing touch in an era dominated by GPS, Google Maps, and autonomous cars.
“The path, not the place, is the primary condition of being, or rather of becoming.”
“The novelist Audrey Niffenegger has written that there are different ways to react to being lost. Panic is one. Another is to surrender and ‘allow the fact that you’ve misplaced yourself to change the way you experience the world.’”
“... our shift to sedentary livelihoods led to significant contractions: of our species’ attention to practical knowledge of the natural world, of our diet, of ritual life, and of space itself.”
9. Down Under: Travels in a Sunburned Country by Bill Bryson
Down Under is bit of a slow starter, but Bryson is an expert. As his pace increases, it seems his passion for this work does too. Enjoy a blunder and a stumble around Australia’s stunning coast and through the Outback with one of the wittiest writers around.
Though a bit over-satirical at times, his stories of the people he encounters and the landscapes he witnesses will have you researching plane tickets.
“If you needed convincing that Australia is an exceptional part of the world, then Tropical Queensland would be the place to come. Of the 500 or so sites on the planet that qualify for World Heritage status, only thirteen satisfy all four of UNESCO’s criteria for listing, and of these thirteen special places, four - almost a third - are to be found in Australia.”
“Eighty per cent of all that lives in Australia, plant and animal, exists nowhere else. More than this, it exists in an abundance that seems incompatible with the harshness of the environment. Australia is the driest, flattest, hottest, most desiccated, infertile and climatically aggressive of all the inhabited continents.”
8. Vitamin N: The Essential Guide to a Nature-Rich Life by Richard Louv
If you’re an educator, a parent, or a lover of the outdoors, this informative and instructional book empowers you to lead a “nature-rich life.” Vitamin N is packed with easily digestible tips and tricks. Louv goes beyond helpful advice, though, and he utilizes science to prove that spending more time outside does a world of good.
“The evidence indicates that experiences in the natural world may reduce the symptoms of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, serve as a buffer to depression and anxiety, help prevent or reduce obesity and myopia, boost the immune system, and offer many other psychological and physical health benefits.”
“Falling down is part of a well-balanced childhood. (And, for that matter, adulthood.) Children love exploring the dangers of nature—especially if there’s a positive adult who helps them feel secure enough to take healthy risks, and if they fall, to learn to stand up again.”
“... scientific evidence links healthy aging to outdoor experiences, which add value to exercise, improving sleeping patterns, speeding recovery from injuries, reducing pain, and helping maintain brain function and memory.”
7. The Gentle Art of Tramping by Stephen Graham
Written in the 1920s, it’s easy to tell that Graham is a romantic. Read any of the quotes below, and you’ll get the idea. (There’s no shortage of wonderful quotes in this book. And if you’re only here for captions for ‘adventure’-related Instagram posts, this is the book for you!)
Go for a stroll with Graham, and he’ll teach you how to survive and thrive on the road.
“The less you carry the more you will see, the less you spend the more you will experience.”
“Life is like a road; you hurry, and the end of it is grave. There is no grand crescendo from hour to hour, day to day, year to year; life’s quality is in moments, not in distance run.”
“No number of museums or handbooks or columns of statistics can give you the sum of reality obtained, quite simply and without particular effort, upon the road.”
6. Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer
This and Krakauer’s Into The Wild are, without a doubt, the page-turners of this list. Into Thin Air tosses you onto Mount Everest during one of its most ill-fated season’s in history. Krakauer, climbing and reporting as a writer for Outside, accurately documents his expedition’s devastating summit attempt that led to tragedy.
“... it is easy to lose sight of the fact that climbing mountains will never be a safe, predictable, rule-bound enterprise. This is an activity that idealizes risk-taking... Climbers, as a species, are simply not distinguished by an excess of prudence.”
“... she saw that it was a crucial (if perplexing) part of who I was. Mountaineering, she understood, was an essential expression of some odd, immutable aspect of my personality that I could no sooner alter than change the color of my eyes.”
5. Everett Ruess: A Vagabond For Beauty by W. L. Rusho
Everett Ruess was only twenty years old when he vanished into the Utah desert, though he lived more of a life than most in his short time on earth. Follow this young adventurer’s search for beauty in the American West and Southwest through the letters he wrote in the early 1930s.
While Rusho sheds light on the surrounding narrative of the vagabond’s stunning and short life, he ultimately allows Ruess to tell his own story.
Experience how one’s lust for passion, life, and unrelenting adventure eventually leads to their demise, but don’t forget to revel in the beauty along the way.
“... never count the cost, and never do anything unless you can do it wholeheartedly.”
“I have rejoiced to set out, to be going somewhere, and I have felt a still sublimity, looking deep into the coals of my campfires, and seeing far beyond them. I have been happy in my work, and I have exulted in my play. I have really lived.”
“On occasion, I have calculated things to a very fine point, but you may well cease hoping that I will ever be practical in the accepted sense. I would sooner die.”
4. Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer
There’s a solid chance you’ve read this book, or you may have watched the subsequent film—either way, I’m sure you’ve at least heard of it. And that’s for good reason. Krakauer effectively retraces the steps of Christopher McCandless, a recent college grad that shakes loose his identity, steps into the unknown, and eventually dies in Alaska’s brutal wilderness.
It’s another tragic exploration of a young man who ventured into the wild and did not return. Krakauer’s journalistic efforts are interspersed with McCandless’s letters, journal entries, and postcards, which give us some insight into his vagabonding.
The resulting tale is a devastatingly sad yet unbelievably enlightening one that will leave you both mournful and inspired.
“He had spent the previous four years, as he saw it, preparing to fulfill an absurd and onerous duty: to graduate from college. At long last he was unencumbered, emancipated from the stifling world of his parents and peers, a world of abstraction and security and material excess, a world in which he felt grievously cut off from the raw throb of existence.”
“So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future.”
3. The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben
If you think trees are simply stoic carbon dioxide consumers and oxygen producers, think again. They’re alive, active, and operate in an unseen “social network” that we’re only beginning to understand.
Enter the forest and unlock The Hidden Life of Trees through the scientific findings of Peter Wohlleben—experience what trees feel, how they communicate, and peek into a new, fascinating world.
“But the most astonishing thing about trees is how social they are. The trees in a forest care for each other, sometimes even going so far as to nourish the stump of a felled tree for centuries after it was cut down by feeding it sugars and other nutrients, and so keeping it alive.”
“When you know that trees experience pain and have memories and that tree parents live together with their children, then you can no longer just chop them down and disrupt their lives with large machines.”
2. Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman by Yvon Chouinard (Founder of Patagonia)
This book tackles the natural world and our place in it from a totally different perspective: from that of a business. Chouinard utilizes his own story from dirtbag climber to unlikely businessman in order to educate other corporations and leaders in how to operate more ethically.
Not only does he advocate for treating employees like people with real lives, but he desperately calls for sustainable business practices.
So pick up this book, and arm yourself with its knowledge—the lessons it contains are imperative for all of us.
“Work had to be enjoyable on a daily basis. We all had to come to work on the balls of our feet and go up the stairs two steps at a time. We needed to be surrounded by friends who could dress whatever way they wanted... We all needed to have flextime to surf the waves when they were good, or ski the powder after a big snowstorm, or stay home and take care of a sick child. We needed to blur that distinction between work and play and family.”
“Never exceed your limits. You push the envelope, and you live for those moments when you’re right on the edge, but you don’t go over. You have to be true to yourself; you have to know your strengths and limitations and live within your means. The same is true for a business. The sooner a company tries to be what it is not, the sooner it tries to “have it all,” the sooner it will die.”
“Every definition of adventure in Webster’s denotes an element of risk, yet adventure travel is almost always risk-free.”
1. The Way Home: Tales from a Life Without Technology by Mark Boyle
This is hands down one of the most important books I've ever read. It's unrelentingly honest, human, and, at times, painful. But it never retreats from showing you what a better, less technology-dependent life looks like.
Boyle, author of The Moneyless Man, expertly weaves his tale into a social commentary, and he provides tips on how to get completely (and I mean totally) off the grid. This man didn't even employ a fridge or conventional toilet.
Follow Boyle on his journey as he unshackles himself from the confines of all tech, survives on a remote island off the coast of Ireland, and lives a life in the old ways. Relish in his ability to rely on wit, craftsmanship, and community to provide for his needs.
“... rules have a tendency to set your life up as a game to win, a challenge to overcome, creating the kind of black-and-white scenarios our society leans toward. My life is my life, and it’s prone to the same contradiction, complexity, compromise, confusion and conflict as the next person’s.”
“I need the elements. They help to keep me in my place, save me from any delusions of grandeur and remind me that I need to appease the gods of water, earth, wind and fire.”
“It’s all too easy to destroy the present while exploring the past or the future.”
“A few friends suggested to me that it’s irresponsible not to keep up-to-date with global affairs, as otherwise politicians and big business will get away with murder. I get the logic, and perhaps they are right. But we’ve never been exposed to so much news, never had so many attentive followers of it, and yet politicians and big business are getting away with as much murder as ever.”
Bonus! Attempting Local: A Year Abroad in Galway, Ireland by Cullan McNamara
You didn’t think I would shamelessly plug my own travel book?? Well… you were wrong 😁 Since it feels biased and quite frankly odd to write my own synopsis, I’ll share the standard one below, along with some of my favorite quotes:
Attempting Local follows Cullan McNamara's journey as he explores Ireland, surfs the waves of the North Atlantic, hikes the country's rugged mountains, and travels throughout Europe... all while striving toward a master's degree. It’s an extremely honest account of how tough it can be to leave everything behind and move abroad, though it simultaneously demonstrates the beauty of a life of solo travel.
“Irish music plays in the background, and glasses clink behind me as I write. The Quays Bar (pronounced Keys) is alive and well, thriving, beating in the heart of Galway City. It pumps its charisma through the veins of taps, pouring life into the pints. Laughter engulfs the air, mingling with the scent of aged wood.”
“Nature, the outdoors, wilderness, whatever you want to call it, never ceases to draw me in; it never fails to consume me whole then spit me back out a changed person, at least for some time. It’s as if some powerful side-effect lingers once I depart, attaches to me and doesn’t let go until I decide to shake it off.”
“I’ve started placing roots in Ireland. I’ve made a home and chosen friends, and I’ve nurtured this life for some time. It was tough at the beginning; it needed constant attention to keep it steady. But my existence here gradually became more sustainable; the roots sank deeper. It’s finally beginning to blossom, and I’m forced to rip it all from the ground. I must uproot and transplant to a distant place. I must separate from the land that provided nourishment. I must abandon the country where I experienced the most growth.”
Buy local
Please remember to buy local! When purchasing one or more of these books, shop at a bookstore. Each title has a link to a local bookshop, usually the one I purchased it from.
📚 If you’re in the Metro Detroit area, I recommend Literati Bookstore in Ann Arbor!
✔️ Online Store
✔️ Delivery
📚 Western North Carolina? Malaprop’s!
✔️ Online Store
✔️ Delivery
📚 Back of Beyond Books in Utah has an immense travel and outdoor section; you can order online, and they deliver!
✔️ Online Store
✔️ Delivery
📚 In Galway? Head to Charlie Byrne’s Bookshop.
further reading: the previous Top 10 travel & outdoor books list
Read the list compiled in 2019 of other incredible travel & outdoor books, that are no less relevant today than they were then.
Do you think there’s a book I’ve missed that deserves to be on this list? Have you already read one of these? Have any thoughts on this blog post? If so, let me know in the comments. I love feedback, so don’t hesitate to reach out!
Thanks for reading, keep an eye out for future blog posts, and happy reading! - Cullan
*Cover Photo shot on 35mm film of my travel journal and a cup of instant coffee on Inishbofin Island, County Galway, Ireland.
“Cullan McNamara is a photographer, videographer, writer, and musician. Back in 2016, he was hired to film and photograph a client’s nine-day hiking trip through Colorado, and he’s been traveling and creating ever since. He now works as a freelancer in the United States. Catch his work on Instagram and YouTube, or check out his podcast [and book], Attempting Local: A Year Abroad in Galway, Ireland.”
— ViaggoMagainze.com
Cullan has a B.S. in Political Science, Broadcast & Cinematic Arts, and Film Studies. He also holds a M.Sc. in Digital Marketing from the National University of Ireland, Galway.
