White knuckles and fear gnawing at the pit of your stomach: If you can’t walk the walk (or climb the climb or sail the sea), at least you can read all about it.

Points Unknown: A Century of Great Exploration, edited by David Roberts, is a fabulous collection of classic adventure literature, from the famous (Robert Falcon Scott) to the perhaps less well known (Eric Newby, Francis Chichester, Joshua Slocum).

National Geographic Expeditions Atlas is less an atlas than a chronicle of adventures and a stunning compilation of the Society’s trademark maps and photographs from expeditions that took place over the last 100-plus years. The diverse list of contributors includes Mary Leakey, Theodore Roosevelt, and John Glenn.

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Although Jon Krakauer’s devastating Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster sets the standard for personal adventure books, other climbers also wrote movingly about the same 1996 tragic climb, as in Matt Dickinson’s The Other Side of Everest: Climbing the North Face Through the Killer Storm, Anatoli Boukreev’s The Climb: Tragic Ambitions on Everest, and Left for Dead: My Journey Homefrom Everest by Beck Weathers.

The Last River: The Tragic Race for Shangri-la by Todd Balf is the story of the disastrous 1998 trip by a highly skilled and gung-ho group of white-water kayakers on the Yarlung Tsangpo River in Tibet.

Fergus Fleming’s chatty, entertaining, and historically accurate Barrow’s Boys: A Stirring Story of Daring, Fortitude, and Outright Lunacy relates the experiences of the British explorers who searched in the first half of the nineteenth century for the Northwest Passage and, in Africa, sought the location of the fabled Timbuktu and searched for the mouth of the Niger River. Fleming’s Ninety Degrees North: The Quest for the North Pole is another wonderful study of the brave and often misguided men who undertook dangerous journeys to satisfy their yearning for fame and adventure (or had a definite death wish!).

Derek Lundy’s Godforsaken Sea: Racing the World’s Most Dangerous Waters is the story of the 1996–97 Vendée Globe race, in which each of sixteen sailors attempted to sail single-handedly around the world (about 13,000 miles) through the world’s most dangerous waters.