Adventure Journal's latest reading roundup packs six titles that double as travel inspiration — from the Arctic to the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. Here's what's on the stack.
The flagship is photographer Kiliii Yüyan's Guardians of Life, a National Geographic-backed case for Indigenous land management. The numbers do a lot of arguing on their own: Indigenous territories cover 37 percent of the world's remaining natural lands and shelter roughly 80 percent of its species. Yüyan also points to the Iñupiat, who won back the right to manage their own bowhead whale hunt after a 1977 ban and tripled the whale population within three decades. Nearly 200 images from nine Native communities make the case better than any statistic.
If you prefer your ecosystems unglamorous, scientist Merritt Turetsky's Bogland makes the case for peatlands — ground most of us associate with getting stuck. The stakes are bigger than they sound: bogs cover just 3 percent of Earth's land but hold about 30 percent of its soil carbon, and warming-driven fires and thaw could release it. Along the way: preserved Iron Age bog bodies, swamps that sheltered the hunted, and fieldwork from the muck itself.
Closer to the postcard rack, Daniel Duane's Yosemite Falls revisits a Sierra childhood spent climbing and skiing in the John Muir tradition — then pulls back the curtain on the park's history of dispossession and erasure. The book works because Duane never stops loving the place; he climbs the same granite and hauls his daughters up it while reckoning with what the mythology left out.
For something further afield, Last Quarter is the elegiac novel by an Evenki author from northern China: a ninety-year-old woman, widow of the clan's last chieftain, recounts a century of reindeer-herding life in a single day as her people are trucked off to a government settlement. Bruce Humes's translation keeps the native terms — urireng, shirangju, the soul called umai — without drowning the reader in glossary.
History fans get two picks. A 2025 novel reimagines the real story of Marguerite de la Rocque de Roberval, the sixteenth-century French noblewoman abandoned on an island in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence by a thieving cousin, where she survived brutal winters — and, per the book, fought off not one but two polar bears. And in Trees, the author of On Trails adopts "treethinking" as a worldview, with reporting that ranges from scaling a sequoia with David Attenborough to Japan's Kimura bonsai garden to sleeping in a chimpanzee nest in Tanzania.
Why it matters for travellers: these are books that change how you see the places you go. Read Yüyan before your next Alaskan or Arctic trip and you'll think differently about who manages the land; read Bogland before hiking anywhere wet and cold; read the Yosemite memoir before queuing for Half Dome. Adventure travel writers have long said the best trips start at the bookshelf, and this list is a strong argument — whether you're planning a national park summer or just want an armchair survival story with polar bears.