Recommended Reading

Irishman Mark Boyle does nothing halfway. Exhausted by industrialized, well, everything, he lived without using money for three years. Craving an even more elemental life, he bought land near Knockmoyle, hand-built a cabin, and spent a year with no modern technology of any kind (electricity, plastic, transport, nada). Thoreau might come to mind, but Boyle’s mom wasn’t around to do his laundry: The “way home” meant living with dirt, shit, blood, deer brains (to tan leather), and backbreaking work. His move cost him dearly in relationships, and small things still nagged him, like the mass production behind the pencil he used to write (next time: a quill and mushroom ink). Romance? Not a lot, but he remains thrilled with his choice and more committed than ever.

Pull a log up to the campfire and take a seat: These stories from the annals of the Explorers Club should be read by the flickering light of burning logs: tales of tomb raiders, doomed adventurers, plane crashes, and all manner of Indiana Jones-style hijinks. The “letters” of the title refer to missives sent home from the venerable institution’s members (including astronauts and ex-presidents). With this source material, author Jeff Wilser builds richly detailed narratives of true-life visits to the edge of knowledge, the edge of comfort, the edge of a volcano. Pick a page, any page, dive in, and be rewarded.

In this second novel from author and fly-fishing guide Callan Wink, twenty-something brothers Thad and Hazen are hanging on, barely, in their rustic log house on the banks of the Yellowstone River, just outside the national park. They’re saddled with debt from their deceased father’s medical bills, the roof leaks, they share an ancient pickup truck, and earning money chopping firewood for locals isn’t cutting it. Outdoorsmen from birth, they’ve turned to poaching bears and selling the gall bladders and other body parts to a sketchy, menacing character called the Scot. The Scot wants, and offers, a poaching run in the park. Bigger payday, bigger crime. Hazen wants it, Thad doesn’t, and their tension drives a fascinating study of sibling relationships and hardscrabble life at the edge of “America’s best idea.”

This is a book about walking in circles, and the obvious question is “why would you walk in circles?” The answer, in the deeply considered view of author Nicholas Triolo, is profound: because it will change your relationship with the world and yourself, and perhaps heal both. An ultrarunner in a family of high-achieving athletes, Triolo was dissatisfied with outdoor recreation’s linearity, peak bagging, and ethos of mountain conquest. After a global circumnavigation post-high school and a CV that included ultras like Western States, he set himself on the path of circumambulation, or circular walks that arise from a long tradition of spiritual and meditative action. In his exploration of how the shapes we follow shape us, pursuit turns out to be as provocative as the prey.

With luck, Tiny Worlds will trigger FOMO—and point you toward the miraculous web of beauty seen at foot level and strolling speed. Plagued by chronic migraines as a teenager, West Virginia watercolorist Rosalie Haizlett started taking long walks in nature at the suggestion of her doctors. For the first time, she saw and appreciated “even the littlest of details,” instead of chasing the “grandiose.” The move was life-changing and led, among other things, to a six-month road trip up the Appalachians, chronicled with love and attention in this cheerful book. It’s a mix of field guide, trip report, journal, and art book, infused with personal warmth and dedicated to the overlooked, forgotten, and right-there-under-our-noses.

Some critters will go a long way for a little privacy. Ten years after the Chernobyl nuclear accident, thirty-seven forms of fungi were found growing inside the abandoned reactor, some of them thriving; this led microbiologist Nelli Zhdanova and colleagues to the radical hypothesis that the fungi are using radiation for energy. British science journalist Alex Riley’s Super Natural is filled with such cases. Wood frogs in Alaska, for example, freeze solid, “the heart, brain, lungs, and digestive system are no longer part of a large whole. The frog, it can be said, has ceased to exist.” Extremophiles like this remind us life is tenacious and opportunistic—and the frontiers of science lie in places most of us can’t, or won’t, go.