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22 books about obsessive searches
We list some excellent books on the subject of search mania - the perfect read for your own journeys of discovery All travel is about searching to some extent. It can be a deep and yearning search for fulfillment, a soul-wrenching quest for absolution, or something far more base (Thailand, anyone?). For some, travel is a way to satisfy a resonating need, be it for knowledge, enlightenment, fame, or revenge. These obsessive searches take travelers on grand journeys through the wilderness, usually leading to incredible stories about incredible lands. Sometimes these stories are humbling; in others they are annoying, but...
22 books about obsessive searches
We list some excellent books on the subject of search madness - the perfect read for your own journeys of discovery
All travel is, to some extent, about searching. It can be a deep and yearning search for fulfillment, a soul-wrenching quest for absolution, or something far more base (Thailand, anyone?).
For some, travel is a way to satisfy a resonating need, be it for knowledge, enlightenment, fame, or revenge. These obsessive searches take travelers on grand journeys through the wilderness, usually leading to incredible stories about incredible lands. Sometimes these stories are humbling; in others they are annoying but never boring.
Books about obsessive searches
Below we list the most fascinating books about compulsive searching - the perfect read for your own trips abroad.
| 1 | Two Years Before the Mast by Richard Henry Dana (1840) While a student at Harvard, Dana has an attack of measles, which affects his vision. Dana believes it might help his eyesight and leaves Harvard to enlist as a common sailor on a voyage around Cape Horn. |
| 2 | Moby Dickby Herman Melville (1851) The story of Captain Ahab's quest for revenge for the whale that "harvested" his leg. The search becomes an obsession and the novel becomes a diabolical study of how a man becomes a fanatic. |
| 3 | Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile by John Hanning Speke (1863) Speke discovered the source of the Nile on August 3, 1858. This is his account of the challenging expedition through what is now Zanzibar, Tanzania and Uganda to the great Lake Victoria. |
| 4 | Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons by John Wesley Powell (1875) In 1869, Powell led a team of 10 men down the Green, into the Colorado River and through the Grand Canyon. No one had ever made the trip before. |
| 5 | Farthest Northby Fridtjof Nansen (1897) In 1893, Nansen deliberately froze his ship in the Arctic ice and set off for the North Pole on a dogsled. He and his companion survived a winter in a moss hut, eating walruses and polar bears. The public assumed they were dead. |
| 6 | Sailing Alone Around the World by Joshua Slocum (1900) A memoir by Slocum about his single-handed circumnavigation aboard the sloop Spray. His journey lasted three years and covered 46,000 miles (74,00 km) and saw him hunted by pirates and plagued by storms and hallucinations. |
| 7 | Kon-Tiki: Across the Pacific by Raft by Thor Heyerdahl (1948) On a 101-day voyage across the Pacific for 4,340 miles (6,985 km) on a wooden raft built with skills and materials available only to pre-Conquest Peruvians, Heyerdahl set out to prove that Polynesians could have sailed from the Americas. |
| 8 | A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush by Eric Newby (1958) Newby quits his job in London and heads to the Nuristan Mountains of Afghanistan, where he hopes to make Mir Samir's first mountaineering ascent. |
| 9 | Arabian Sands by Wilfred Thesiger (1959) Repulsed by the rigidity of Western life, Thesiger spends years exploring the vast, waterless desert that is the "empty quarter" of Arabia, in search of something more. |
| 10 | The Man Who Walked Through Time by Colin Fletcher (1968) A chronicle of the first man to walk a continuous route through the 200 mile (322 km) Grand Canyon. |
| 11 | The Fearful Void by Geoffrey Moorhouse (1974) Moorhouse set out to become the first person to cross the Sahara from west to east over 4,830 km (3,000 miles) of sand. He tried to face his fears of loneliness and destruction. |
| 12 | The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen (1978) The author's account of a 400 km journey through the Himalayas to study the wild blue sheep, but also in the hope of seeing the snow leopard, a creature so rarely seen that it is almost mythical. |
| 13 | Old Glory: An American Voyage by Jonathan Raban (1981) A cynical Englishman sails down the Mississippi in search of the meaning of America. As he observes the lives of those who live on its shores, he begins to understand the American psyche. |
| 14 | In Trouble Again: A Journey Between the Orinoco and the Amazon by Redmond O'Hanlon (1989) An intrepid but ill-prepared ornithologist and his buddy set out to meet the fearsome Yanomami tribe in the Amazon. This account of the four-month journey is both captivating and hilarious. |
| fifteen | Running the Amazon by Joe Kane (1990) Joe Kane's personal account of the first expedition to travel the entire longest river in the world is a riveting adventure in the tradition of Joseph Conrad. |
| 16 | Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer (1996)This is the now infamous story of Chris McCandless, a college graduate who rejects the West's relentless pursuit of success, gives away $24,000, and sets off into the Alaskan wilderness in search of enlightenment. |
| 17 | Chasing Cheby Patrick Symmes (2000) Half a century after Motorcycle Diaries, Symmes embarks on an adventure through contemporary South America to rediscover the revolutionary's past and lasting influence. |
| 18 | Swimming to Antarctica: Tales of a Long-Distance Swimmer by Lynne Cox (2005) Cox was the first person to swim the Strait of Magellan, one of the most treacherous bodies of water in the world. After a series of record-breaking feats, she became the first person to swim a mile in 0-degree water. This is her story. |
| 19 | My Journey to Lhasaby Alexandra David-Neel (2005) At the age of 55, David-Neel crossed the Himalayas in the middle of winter and entered forbidden Tibet, disguised as a native. She faced hunger, bandits and treacherous weather to become the first Western woman to be welcomed by a Dalai Lama. |
| 20 | The Lost City of Zby David Grann (2009) In 1925, Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett ventured to a "blank spot" on the map of the Amazon in search of a secret civilization - never to return. Eighty years later, David Grann sets out to solve the mystery of Fawcett's death and answer the Colonel's most pertinent question: Was City Z real? |
| 21 | Wild: A Journey from Lost to Found by Cheryl Strayed (2012) At 26, Cheryl Strayed's marriage falls apart and her mother dies of cancer. With nothing to lose, she makes the most impulsive decision of her life: to walk 1,770 km (1,100 miles) alone along the west coast of America. The journey holds the distant promise of a life put back together. |
| 22 | Tracks: A Woman's Solo Trek Across 1700 Miles of Australian Outback by Robyn Davidson (2013) The last of our books of obsessive searching is a memoir of the author's perilous odyssey of discovery across 1,700 miles (2,735 km) of the hostile Australian desert to the sea with only four camels and a dog for company. |
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