Recommended Reading

We first meet Nelson as a thirteen-year-old Boy Scout in the summer of 1962, his shirt and shorts squeaky clean, sash heavy with merit badges, bowlines impeccable. He strives to be loyal, brave, and kind—terms of the Scout Law. At Camp Chippewa in Wisconsin’s Northwoods, Nelson’s the ideal citizen. But his overachieving doesn’t earn any friends until Jonathan, a popular scout, takes an unexpected interest in him. This panoramic coming-of-age novel strides across three American generations, from the echoes of World War I to today in Afghanistan, and from shattering tragedies to sweet first loves. There are times you want to look away from this book, and times you want to hold it close. Through it all, Camp Chippewa remains central, with its tidy tents and fields of lightning bugs. Can the moral compass of summer camp keep us oriented throughout our lives?

“The mountains are calling, and I must go.” If you’re reading AJ, you probably live by this John Muir quote, and you definitely don’t need a brain scan or stress hormone report to convince you nature is a good, good thing. But author Florence Williams, a skeptical New Yorker at heart, asks a reasonable question: why? She takes us around the world in The Nature Fix, a wide-ranging nonfiction tour of the science behind nature’s effect on humans. Meet Japanese researchers analyzing the mental health benefits of “forest bathing,” neuroscientists in Utah mapping connections between adventure and problem-solving skills, and Korean immunologists studying how short bursts of nature enhance cancer-killing cells. From gritty urban park trails to the Idaho wilderness, it’s a heady, thought-provoking investigation that even minimalist Muir would have packed into the backcountry.

It begins with a prophecy, scratched onto a palm leaf by the village astrologer: “He will marry a girl from far, far away…” Born in a hut on the edge of the Indian jungle, PK rises from humble beginnings to become an artist in New Delhi, where he falls in love with a traveling Swedish woman. Lotta matches the prophecy, but when she has to head back home the stars appear stuck just short of alignment. It’s 1976, and plane tickets to Sweden aren’t cheap, so PK sets off on a secondhand Raleigh with no map and little more than a sleeping bag and eighty dollars. His journey takes him seven thousand miles over the roads of Afghanistan, Iran, Turkey, and Europe. Cosmic and totally groovy, it’s a profound true story of one man’s passage from wild, rural India to the modern Western world, and how an adventurous mindset knows no boundaries.

How does adventure seep into our life choices, all the way down to furniture and kids and dogs and houseplants, or lack thereof? With nearly three hundred pages of photos and interviews, the hardcover Surf Shacks is a free-spirited duck-dive into the homes of wave riders all over the world. Urban apartments, sailboats, DIY cabins, mid-century houses—the “shacks” are as varied as their residents, from industry pros to salty vagabonds and young designers. Step inside a painter’s bare bones cottage in Kauai, travel down a forested lane to meet the CEO of Japan’s Surfrider Foundation, and take a ride on the Cosmic Collider, a board shaper’s converted bus in Santa Barbara. Think about how you too should keep your snorkel mask and fins within easy reach, just in case. From streamlined design to funky quirk, Surf Shacks goes beyond mere style porn to explore how outdoor lives are made, one element at a time.