Start with high-confidence exploration & discovery books, then narrow by subgenre or adjacent topics.
Empire of Blue Water
Stephan Talty, John H. Mayer
The Man Who Ate His Boots
Simon Vance, Anthony Brandt
The Gates of Africa
Anthony Sattin
Blue Latitudes
Tony Horwitz
The Last Place on Earth
Roland Huntford, Paul Theroux
The White Darkness
David Grann
A Wretched and Precarious Situation
David Welky, Joel Richards
Shackleton's Stowaway
Victoria McKernan
The Wide Wide Sea
Hampton Sides
Into the Ice
Mark Synnott, Mark Deakins
Neptune's Fortune
Julian Sancton
The Lost City of the Monkey God
Douglas Preston
Written in the Ruins
Paul Chiasson
The Secret History of Bigfoot
John O'Connor, John O'Connor
Life on the Mississippi
Rinker Buck
The Atlas Obscura Explorer’s Guide for the World’s Most Adventurous Kid
Dylan Thuras, Rosemary Mosco
The Third Pole
Mark Synnott
The Buccaneers of America
John Esquemeling, Alexandre Olivier Exquemelin
Enslaved
Sean Kingsley, Simcha Jacobovici
Magellan
Stefan Zweig, Cedar Paul
Everest, Inc.
Will Cockrell
