Adventure · Disaster
Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster
Krakauer was on Everest as a journalist in 1996 when a storm hit and eight climbers died. This is his own reconstruction of the decisions, weather and human error behind it. The natural next read after Into the Wild: the same rigorous, guilt-tinged reconstruction of a wilderness death, but of something he lived through himself, which makes it even more immediate.
Memoir · Adventure
Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
At 26, reeling from her mother’s death and the end of her marriage, Strayed sets off alone and almost totally unprepared to hike more than a thousand miles of the Pacific Crest Trail. Where Into the Wild ends in tragedy, this is the survival version of the same impulse, written by someone more aware of what she’s running from. Ultimately redemptive.
Nature Writing · Memoir
Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness
Abbey’s memoir of his seasons as a ranger in Utah’s Arches National Monument, before it was developed for tourism, is part nature writing, part environmental polemic, part solitary desert life stripped of comfort. His romantic, uncompromising vision of solitude and his rejection of civilisation belong to the same tradition that drew Chris McCandless into the wild.
Memoir
The Wild Truth
Written by Chris McCandless’s younger sister, this memoir describes an abusive family history that Into the Wild only hinted at, and argues that her brother’s flight was less a philosophical quest than an escape. Essential companion reading, precisely because it complicates Krakauer’s version with context many readers don’t know exists.
Travel · Memoir
A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail
Bryson sets out to hike the 2,100-mile Appalachian Trail with his badly out-of-shape old friend Stephen Katz, mixing their comically underprepared journey with the trail’s history, ecology and threats. Much funnier and gentler than McCandless’s story, but honest about his own limits in a way that still makes the risks of underestimating nature feel real.
Biography · Adventure
The Last American Man
Gilbert’s biography of Eustace Conway, who left home at seventeen to live in the Appalachian wilderness and has spent decades teaching the self-sufficiency skills he believes modern life has erased, on a nature preserve he built himself. The version of rejecting society that worked long term, sharpening Into the Wild’s real question: where does self-reliance end and naivety begin?
Frequently asked questions about books like Into the Wild
What book is most similar to Into the Wild?
Is there a book that tells Chris McCandless’s story from his family’s perspective?
What should I read if I loved Into the Wild but want a survival story with a happier ending?
What books influenced Chris McCandless before he went into the wilderness?
see you in December?
“The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon.”
— Christopher McCandless, quoted in Into the Wild
Next month’s stamp could be on your book.
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