You can’t ride your bike all of the time. And, you should turn off the TV now and then and expand your mind. Here are some of our favorite books – what do you have to add to the list?
Desert Solitare, Edward Abbey
Essays by arguably the best outdoor writer of the last century (certainly one of the most outspoken and opinionated). If Abbey doesn’t make you want to get out and crawl around the desert, you might as well move to the tropics.
Monkeywrench Gang, Edward Abbey
Did this book start the “eco-terrorism†movement? Who knows, but it’s a funny romp through the desert that makes readers who long for quieter times dream of ways to blast our way back in history.
Secret Knowledge of Water: There are Two Easy Ways to Die in the Desert, Thirst and Drowning, Craig Childs
If you’ve ever wanted to know what it’s like to outrun a flash flood or drink water from a bug-filled desert water hole, this is your book. If you’d never want to do these things, you should read it to see how the other 1% lives.
House of Rain: Tracking a Vanished Civilization Across the American Southwest, Craig Childs
Childs is a great adventurer and storyteller who chronicles his walks across the desert – without sufficient food and water – as he tries to understand the culture of the Anasazi people.
The Tecate Journals: 70 Days on the Rio Grande, Keith Bowden
It’s got nothing to do with biking and hiking, but Bowden is a reader who came up with his own adventure (floating the Rio Grande from one end of Texas to the other) and made it happen.
Brave New West, Jim Stiles
Jim Stiles is the iconoclastic editor of the Canyon Country Zephyr, once a paper and now a web-only publication that comments on and critiques our society and times. Brave New West is Stiles’ warning call that promoting tourism and the “amenities economy†may bring more problems than solutions as it did to a place he loves, Moab, Utah.
Born to Run, Christopher McDougall
This is a book about life, running barefoot vs. running shoes, American ultra-marathoners vs. Tarahumara Indians, obsessions…
Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry
If I’m ever stuck on a deserted island, this is the book that I want.
