Recommended Reading

Set in the Pacific Northwest, Before the Wind is a deeply funny fictional account of a lovably maddening family that communicates best through sailing. (Wes Anderson, please option the film rights.) There’s a loudmouth dad—Where’s the wind? No! Those waves are old news!—a try-to-fix-everything middle son, a precocious daughter who can out-sail nearly everyone, and a grandpa who dreams in boat design schemata. Dysfunctional, maybe, but boy can the Johannssens race. If boating is in your DNA, you might recognize yourself here. If you don’t know a thing about boating, you’ll learn a lot—about sailing legends like Joshua Slocum, insight into the siren song of racing, and things to consider before buying that “free” boat in your neighbor’s backyard. Ultimately, the story reminds us adventure is often the best therapy, and that it’s wildly rewarding to trust some of life’s decisions to the wind.

How have we gone from fearfully inching up gritstone to audacious on-sights of 5.14d, a level of climbing recently seen as humanly impossible? This is the question at the heart of The 9th Grade, an insider’s round-the-world study of the history, culture, and personalities that propelled free climbing from the early days of the Victorian era to the recent and astonishing first free ascent of El Cap’s Dawn Wall. American climbing fans shouldn’t be put off by its Euro-centric approach—getting outside the echo chamber of Yankee climbing culture will turn you onto faces you should know but might not, like Patrick Edlinger, Catherine Destivelle, and Yuji Hirayama (Sharma, Hill, and Honnold are here, too). With deep-dive anecdotes and more than 350 photographs, it’s a feast for rock-hungry eyes and soul.

In the honeysuckle-scented Tennessee summer of 1925, a pedigreed, professionally trained German shepherd is tapped to trade in his fugitive-chasing police work for life as a mountaintop guard dog. Whose ears wouldn’t perk up? This is the true life story of Smoky Jack, as told by his loyal companion Paul J. Adams. With Adams as a naturalist outdoorsman and Smoky Jack for protection, the two became the first caretakers of little-visited Mount Le Conte, nine years before the peak and surrounding hills became Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Together they spent nearly a year under towering hardwoods, red spruce, and massive hemlocks, exploring trail-less ridges and hollows, sniffing out bears and rabbits in the rhododendrons, guiding conservationists and hikers, and blazing paths that many of today’s ten million annual visitors still use. Historical images hint of a unique, magical era in our country’s past, and if dogs could whistle, one of Smoky Jack’s favorites surely would have been “Big Rock Candy Mountain.”