Alastair Humphreys's Reading List

"As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning is about a young man in the 1930s who, one day in early June, walks out from the little village where he grew up. He waves goodbye to his mum at the garden gate and goes to explore, to have an adventure—as young people have done since the beginning of time, I suppose. He makes his way to Spain and then he walks the length of Spain. He plays his violin to pay his way, sleeping out on the hills, playing in bars and talking to people. He’s just living a very simple but idyllic-sounding life. It’s quite a short book and it’s very beautifully and poetically written. I first read it when I was at university, and at the time I was completely smitten with these crazy hardcore stories of South Pole suffering and mountaineers chopping off their own arms. I loved all that sort of stuff. Reading Laurie Lee was suddenly a very different perspective on adventure, because he was just a normal young guy. He was not very tough. He wasn’t very fit. He didn’t claim to be trying to do anything extraordinary. He was just out in the world, living vividly and being curious and I loved that, mostly because it sounded like me. I enjoyed reading the big tough expedition books partly because I felt that was quite distant from what my personality was, but Laurie Lee felt very much like me. Ever since I read As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning I thought I wanted to go and do the trip myself. I kept reading the book every couple of years for about 15 years, but kept putting off actually doing anything about it. So rather than walking across Spain playing my violin, I spent years doing all sorts of other stuff, the big trips we’ve talked about. I gradually started to notice, though, that the reasons I was doing those big trips—for the excitement and the risk and the fear of failure and the uncertainty—because I’d been doing this sort of stuff for about 20 years, I’d got quite good at it and therefore a lot of those things had faded away. I realized that carrying on with big adventures was just my own version of being in a rut and a routine and a comfort zone. I wanted to try to look differently at adventure, and what adventure meant to me, and also to try and find a way to get back those thrills and uncertainties. So I decided what I needed to do was something that I was very bad at, that I’d never done before and was really daunting to me. That’s when I came up with the idea of taking up the violin, learning it and then trying to walk through Spain for a month with no money or credit cards and only my appalling musical skills to see me through. Yes. Normally when someone says, ‘I’m bad at the violin’ everyone thinks they’re just being modest. The benefit of listening to the audiobook version of my book is that it actually has some of my violin playing. When I got home, I kept practising and managed to pass grade one violin—so I was worse than that when I began. If you’ve heard a six-year-old playing a violin you’ll know about how bad I was. Laurie Lee was really good at the violin, but he’d never been on an adventure and had never spoken Spanish before. So what he got out of that trip was quite different to me. My Spanish was fine. I’d been abroad many times and I’d done long walks. But I can’t really play the violin and the idea of standing up in public and performing is something that scares me greatly. I hate karaoke. I hate dancing. I find it mortifyingly embarrassing. So having to do that in order to get money was, for me, at least as frightening as some of the bigger expeditions I’ve done. Before the trip began, I was really sure I was going to be borderline starvation, rummaging in bins, stealing crusts off café tables, pinching corn from fields. That was how I anticipated it would go. No, no! Oh yes, I did once find some pork scratchings in a bin, but that was just luck, I wasn’t trying to rummage. On the very first day I actually earned four euros, which I was just ridiculously thrilled about. You can have a feast for four euros. In the whole month I earned 120 euros, so four euros a day, but I had this rule that in every town, whenever I earned money, I had to spend all of that money that day. I couldn’t hoard it up because I wanted, when I got to the next village, to be back at zero again, to be hungry and afraid and vulnerable. So it was quite feast or famine. One day, for example, I earned 20 euros. It was a Sunday morning and I ate ice creams and peanuts and all sorts of luxury things. Then, the next day, I was back to carrot sandwiches. It was carrot sandwiches when times were hard. My staple was banana sandwiches. That’s been my staple for many, many years on adventures. It’s completely different. For starters, Laurie is about 20 when he arrives in Spain. He is a young man filled with the joys of youth, of wine, women and song—literally those three. That essentially keeps him going happily through Spain, having the best time of his entire life. In my head, that is how I always imagined myself, as an adventurer. I still see myself as that carefree, young spirit, but the reality of my life is that I am now a middle-aged man with two kids. “How can I still be this adventurous individual, this carefree spirit I see myself as, and also be a stay-at-home, sensible Dad?” That becomes quite an important part of the book, this struggle I have figuring out: how can I still be this adventurous individual, this carefree spirit I see myself as, and also be a stay-at-home, sensible Dad who is paying the mortgage and taking my kids to football lessons? The frustration I had, this feeling that I was not doing either side of my life justice, is one of the things that finally booted me out the door to go and do this walk. It’s one of those things we don’t really write about. Pretty much all adventure books involve ‘Person goes off does something heroic. Isn’t life brilliant? The End.’ My reality from all my own experiences—and I also have a lot of friends who do stuff like this and write books—is that almost without exception there’s a huge anticlimax and a down period after trips. You come back and think, ‘Wow, I’ve done this amazing thing. But I’m still the same me. I still have all the insecurities or itchiness or whatever it was that drove me away in the first place.’ Pretty much everyone I know has had a big slump after their trips. But it’s not really written about, because it’s much more exciting just to write about getting to the top of the mountain. I suspect they are, because if you want to go and be a hardcore adventurer, you have to be pretty spectacularly selfish. I’ve certainly found that a big struggle in my life, between the selfish and ambitious me versus trying to be a good husband and a good dad. Essentially it comes down to a choice. The choice for me happened quite a few years ago, when I had a choice between going to the South Pole—this expedition I’d spent five years training and preparing for—and leaving behind my young family or quitting those big, extreme expeditions and trying to learn to become a new version of me. He did the ideal thing, which is go away when you’re young, do something incredibly crazy and epic—but do it just because you want to do it, not because you’re trying to get famous. He hated being famous. Then you’ve got that out of your system and can get on and do other good stuff in your life. He’s a person who did a very good job of it."

"What I love about this book is that he’s just a normal guy, living a normal life who gets swept into a prisoner of war camp. The scale of World War II is just incredible, it pretty much swept up everybody. In the camp, it’s incredibly boring. They’re Italian, just chilling out without their daily espressos and not bothering to escape, like Brits were supposed to do. Even if they could escape they’re 6,000 miles from Italy, so it’s impossible. They’re just bored out of their brains, and to make matters either better or worse, out in the distance, beyond the barbed wire, is this beautiful skyline with Mount Kenya. Benuzzi was trapped in a prison and out there was this big mountain, this symbol of adventure and freedom. He was quite a good climber so just for fun, really, and to idly pass the time, he started daydreaming about breaking out of prison to climb the mountain. It just drove him mad until eventually he did it: escaped, climbed the mountain and then, because they were Italian and not that keen on anything else, they broke back into the prison camp, apologized for escaping, and sat out the rest of the war. One of the fun parts of the book is that it goes against the modern cult of feeling you need to spend $500 on a raincoat to walk your dog. They had to get all the gear they needed to climb a pretty difficult mountain out of what they could beg, borrow, steal and make in the prison camp. So they made crampons out of barbed wire. They made ice axes out of hammers they stole. They had to hoard tiny bits of food to make supplementary rations—and they were underfed prisoners in the first place. That’s one of the joys of the book: working out how you cobble together the equipment you need in secret, without getting caught, before even breaking out of the camp. And yes, the mountain is quite hard. It’s high and it’s cold. So they had to make all the gear, escape from prison, trek through the lowlands—through the dangerous wild animals of Africa—and then climb a pretty serious technical mountain, all while malnourished. It’s pretty treacherous climbing and they failed. They didn’t actually get to the top of the top. There are a few different peaks and they got to a lower down one. But the climbing part isn’t really what this book is about. It’s about the human spirit and the lust and quest for adventure and the feeling that freedom and adventure can overcome anything, even being in prison. I really enjoy it now because so many of us in modern life like to moan that we can’t have adventures because…and then you insert an excuse: lack of time, lack of money, I haven’t got an expensive raincoat, whatever. I love the fact that they didn’t let anything stand in their way. I also enjoy the fact that when they break back into prison at the end, although they’ve committed a serious offence by escaping, the British officer just gives them a very short spell in solitary confinement because he’s proud of their ‘sporting effort.’"

"Robyn Davidson was a young woman living an urban life in Australia and came up with the idea that she’d really like to cross the desert in Australia by camel. The problem was that she had literally no experience of anything to do with camels, the outdoors or adventure and she had pretty much zero money. So that was the starting premise for her project. She took a train to Alice Springs as she figured that would be a good place to start. She spent a couple of years learning how to look after camels before she even began. So that’s an interesting part of the book, the commitment and effort needed to even get to the starting line of the trip. She has to overcome so many obstacles: not just all of the skills she needed, but also the tough male culture of The Outback: men thinking that she, being a Sheila, has got no chance of making it. There were all sorts of problems and disasters before she even began. He basically shafts her of everything in the end. He doesn’t keep his promise at all. He’s a horrible person and she has a terrible time. With No Picnic on Mt Kenya I love the story, but it’s not that well-written. Tracks is just fantastically well written. Also, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the photography for it? One of the comedy parts of the trip is that in order to fund it, she manages to persuade National Geographic to cover her story. She writes for them but they, quite understandably, insist on sending a photographer. He’s a bit of a bumbling young fool of a man who turns up every month or two. She’s always furious at him for invading her privacy. So that’s the comedy/romantic side of the trip, but the pictures he took are absolutely astonishing. She’s incredibly beautiful. He’s an amazing photographer and the landscape is extraordinary. When I first saw the pictures, I assumed they were fake and for a film, rather than the actual ones. It’s about 1700 miles. She goes from Alice westwards until she hits the Indian Ocean. She’s got a train of camels and they’ve never seen the ocean. When they get to the end, suddenly there’s more water than they’ve ever seen but they can’t drink it. So they’re quite uncertain about it. Yes, there are loads of them. They’re quite a problem. Wild feral male camels are big scary things and in the book they come along and try and take her female camels. She has to defend herself against feral camels a couple of times and even has to shoot one, at one point. They can be quite aggressive creatures, it seems."

"That’s exactly why I was fascinated. Pretty much everyone on the planet knows Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, but not Michael Collins. His job was to fly up and then, when the other two went in the landing capsule down to the Moon, he had to stay in the command module until they came back. While the other two were on the Moon, he orbited around it. He was the loneliest human in history, round the dark side of the Moon on his own. It’s extraordinary. He also knew that if anything went wrong with the landing craft—which it was very, very likely that it would—he would have to press the go-back-to-Earth-on-my-own button and leave his two friends on the Moon to die. “He was the loneliest human in history, round the dark side of the Moon on his own” What initially captivated me about Michael Collins is the way he says, ‘I’d be lying if I said that I had the best seat in the spaceship. Of course I’d have liked to go to the Moon, but wow, what a privilege it was to do what I did. I had an incredible experience.’ Whereas Buzz Aldrin has spent the last 50 years of his life being more angry about being second on the Moon than happy about going to the Moon. I really enjoyed all the training, build-up side of things as well—and the human side of the book. It’s such a rocket science-type endeavour, but Michael Collins seems like a really nice guy. He manages to tell the story of this incredible effort by elite people in a way that’s quite relatable and interesting. Another great book is Moondust by Andrew Smith. He does his best to interview all 12 people who have been to the Moon. I really enjoyed that book as well."

"Audrey Sutherland is not particularly famous in the adventuring world. I only stumbled across her because Patagonia, the clothing company, published some of her writing. She was just a woman living a normal, if slightly quirky, life with a normal-ish office job until she was in her 50s. Then she has this moment of looking in the mirror and she says to herself, ‘Why, you’re not getting any younger, are you?’ And from there she sets off. She does carry on her normal life, but every summer she goes off for a couple of months, kayaking up the beautiful coastline of Alaska through all the inlets and islands. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . She does some pretty tough, brave paddling but in a very relaxed, eccentric way. She’s got an inflatable kayak, a little yellow rubber dinghy basically, and she puts a very high priority on finding a scenic campsite every evening and cooking delicious food. I like that balance of things she does. Kayaking on your own is always quite dangerous anyway, but there are some extremely strong currents and very high tides. She has to do some quite big crossings, across open water from place to place. It’s way further than I would dare paddle in an inflatable kayak, so she’s pretty bold with what she’s doing. But she’s not on some great mission to prove something to the world, or to be the first to do x,y or z. She’s just going around doing what makes her feel excited, really. She’s trying to plot her way bit by bit right the way up the Alaskan coastline. She’s not ambling around, she does have an itinerary, but just for her own satisfaction. She meets vast numbers of bears and wolves and killer whales or orcas. On Robyn Davidson’s trip she seems to be mostly encountering horrible scary men, whereas Audrey Sutherland seems to be mostly encountering wild beasts. She deals with them fairly phlegmatically. What I liked about her book is just how down to earth it was and the priorities she has. Her reasons for adventure were quite different to a lot of stuff I’ve read. For example, she has recipes in the book. She makes a real effort to collect bits of seaweed and wild garlic along the way. She seems to have her priorities nicely sorted. Also, it’s quite inspiring that she began as a late middle-aged woman to do these sorts of things. She’s not this big strong person either. There’s one recipe she calls ‘Bear Bars’, which is essentially her homemade flapjacks that she takes on the trip. It’s a fairly standard recipe, but she says not to make them more than 24 hours before the trip begins or you’ll have eaten them all before you start. Then she writes about cooking wild mussels and things she can forage along the seashore. It’s stuff that you can make in the wild but it’s by no means survivalist food. And she takes along olive oil and she always takes a bottle of wine with her in the boat. But the takeaway of the book, the line that stands out for me is when she says, ‘Go simple, go solo, go now.’ It’s an amazing summary of how people should just get on with their adventures."

"Definitely. Trying to fit in adventure or wildness or nature, or just fresh air—whichever of those appeals to you to—round the margins of our busy days is really important. It’s nice, of course, to think, ‘This year, I’m going to work two days a week, and I’m going to spend the rest of the week wandering the hills’ or ‘I’m going to take a month off and discover myself in the mountains.’ But the reality is that 99.9% of us are busy with life and that’s not going to go away. So what can we squeeze in around the edges? I’ve been dabbling with this for a few years now. So for the last three years, I’ve been scheduling a monthly tree climb into my calendar for the first Wednesday of each month. I just climb a tree near to where I live. It’s 20 minutes of a tiny bit of exercise, a bit of fresh air, a bit of just ‘oh! Sit in a tree for a few minutes.’ And then whoosh back to the Zoom calls again. Trying to schedule it and make it a regular commitment is a really important aspect of this, I think. I could have just said, ‘I’m going wander around my map for a year. That’ll be interesting.’ But by forcing myself to go out regularly, once a week, for the whole year, not only did I see all the seasons, it was really helpful from a mental health perspective — and the physical health side of things too. I felt like I ought to suggest Walden but, in the end, I didn’t. I decided to focus on books about slowing down, paying attention, the power of curiosity, enthusiasm and repeated practice. Then, as my last book, I’ve got one that’s more specifically about getting out to explore locally."

"The premise of The Forest Unseen is that the author is a biologist who goes out with a one meter square quadrat, which is a scientific measuring grid. You put it down and see what’s within the square. He took it to a wood near to where he lived and went to look at what he could see in this one meter square regularly throughout the whole year. It sounds quite a boring premise, but it was beautiful. It’s a book about just looking and looking and being interested in everything. There’s the blossom coming in spring, there are insects — and that would then lead him off into a long explanation about the evolution of insects. It was a very educational nature book. It’s done in a way that made me think, ‘This is achievable. I could do this in one meter square of my garden if I just slow down and am interested in everything.’ Knowing the names of things is a superpower. I’m useless at it as well, but I use an app called Seek . I talk about it a lot in my book—it has been such a useful companion. It’s like having someone clever, like David Haskell, in my pocket to help me learn. Once you know the name of a tree, you start to see it more often and you start to care about it and connect with it more. It’s very important, I think, to learn names."

"Yes, it’s a similar premise. Again, it’s by a scientist—he’s a physicist—and it’s about the one-mile commute that he’s done every day for decades. What he does on this walk is to just to slow down and be interested in it. And because he’s a physicist, he comes at things from the space point of view. So he picks up a pebble and realizes, ‘Oh, this pebble was once part of a huge mountain, which was once an asteroid flying through space.’ It’s about the hugeness that you can find in a pebble—it’s that line of William Blake’s “To see a World in a Grain of Sand.” He talks about all sorts of things–from black holes to bluebirds. Again, it was a really good way of teaching me about stuff I know nothing about in a way that in a normal science book, I might have found a bit dry and boring."

"She lives in New York and walks around her city block with her dog every day, just like millions of people do. But yes, she realized that she was missing most of what she saw. So what she did was to walk around her block 11 times with 11 different experts. They point out to her the things that she has been missing. This really fascinated me. When I was doing my map of the stuff I found interesting, if I’d had different companions with me, they would have found totally different things fascinating. So she goes with an artist, a geologist, a doctor. But also, really interestingly, with a kid and with her dog. You know how if you go for a walk with a toddler, it’s so frustrating because they’re just so slow, they’re down on their knees looking at things? That frustration is actually the curiosity and enthusiasm and willingness to learn that’s at the heart of all of these projects."

"I would imagine this book is the most familiar to Five Books people—it’s been recommended a bunch of times. I love reading books and read loads of them. But, to be honest, quite often they tend to go in one ear and out the other. I read Pilgrim at Tinker Creek when I was cycling through Siberia in the middle of winter 20 years ago, and it’s one of the few books that’s completely stuck with me. She lives in a cottage somewhere near this little creek called Tinker Creek. Over a period of time, she goes out and walks down by the river, comes home, and is astonished about it. It’s borderline theological. She’s wondering a lot about God and where we fit in with creation. There’s overlap between not religion exactly, but spirituality and science. And she writes very beautifully. She writes about the awe and the terror and the brutality of the universe, but also the incredible beauty and gentleness of it all. There’s a scene in there—I think it was a dragonfly eating its mate’s head or something. I can’t remember the details, but it viscerally stuck with me. She’s just calling on everyone to throw themselves down on their knees and be astonished. Yes. On the one hand, you might think astrophysicists are the least likely to be religious because they’ve looked down their telescopes and seen zero evidence of God. But, equally, if you’re looking down your telescope at billions of years and quadrillions of galaxies, then that probably does start to blow the mind somewhat. I can see how there’s a strong overlap between thinking, ‘Wow, this is vast’ and that sense of awe and wonder. The whole of Britain is divided up into Ordnance Survey maps , so I bought the local map of where I live. It covers 20 kilometers by 20 kilometers. (The US equivalent is the U.S. Geological Survey). Once a week I went out to a place I chose at random on the map. That randomness was really important to me, because otherwise I would just have gravitated to the sorts of places I always like going to. So I’d use an online random number generator to pick where on the map I had to go. Then I’d go there, usually on foot, but occasionally by bike, with my camera. Having a camera was also quite important to me, because that forced me to slow down and be observant. My challenge was quite a conceited one, which was to see everything in that square: every street, every footpath, every bit of woodland. That woodland/countryside aspect led me to an awareness of how little of our country is open to general access, which got me got me thinking about a book by Nick Hayes, The Trespasser’s Companion . But I think Beau Miles’s book is probably more suitable in terms of thinking a bit differently about adventure."

"I think for people who are interested in adventure, there can be—and I’ve certainly done this—a feeling that if it’s not some really big adventure, then it’s a bit rubbish and pointless and not worth bothering with. Adventure can also be quite a comparative thing. You think, ‘Oh, what I’m doing isn’t as exciting as what Ranulph Fiennes or Bear Grylls are doing, therefore it doesn’t count and is not relevant.’ That’s really nonsense and that’s what Beau Miles talks about in his Backyard Adventurer book. He’s Australian and quite a wacky guy. His background is the very conventional, middle-class explorer adventures like me. But this book is about, after going all the way around the world and doing some really big stuff, coming back to where he lives, and finding excitement and adventure in much smaller, mundane things. He makes videos for YouTube , which are brilliant. One great example of what he’s done is run a marathon. That’s quite a good challenge. Lots of people aspire to do it, but it’s also quite hard to fit into your routine. So he decided to do a marathon over the course of a day by running one mile, every hour. So he runs a mile, which takes 15 minutes or so. Then he has a list of other jobs to do that day. So he spends 45 minutes on those. Then he goes to run the next mile. And so, over 24 hours, he runs a marathon, which is quite a big challenge. But he also ticks off this series of quirky things he’s trying to get done. It’s a challenge to be a bit more creative with what you define as adventure in your life. There are two ways of doing it. You can just go to a bookshop and buy the bog standard Ordnance Survey map for your area. Everyone in Britain is on one of these maps, and they cost about nine pounds. If you want to be a bit fancier, on the Ordnance Survey website you can customize the map for your house , so they’ll make a map for you with your house nicely in the middle. Yes. And it’s really about the constraint of saying, ‘This is all I’m allowing myself.’ For someone like me, who’s a wanderer and quite energetic, that felt quite restrictive and claustrophobic at the start of the year. But going out weekly, I soon realized that if I paid enough attention, one map is enormous. I couldn’t possibly do it justice in a year. It’s not too small—it’s actually far too big. That’s quoted in lots of adventure-type books, but for this one it felt really spot on. A part of it was this realization that I felt a greater attachment to far-off places than to my own neighborhood I live in. We’ve got to this thinking in our world that in order to have an adventure, you must spend a huge amount of money and jump on an airplane. And that seems completely ridiculous, really."