My screen name namesake:
Icerigger by Alan Dean Foster, pure unadulterated fun and adventure.
Try some Young Adult fiction:
The Knife Of Never Letting Go, or The Hunger Games.
The Antonio Burns books by Clinton McKinzie, starting with The Edge of Justice. Mystery/thrillers set on the fringes of the rock-climbing world.
Last of the Breed by Louis L’Amour. A Cold War story about a test pilot getting caught by the Russians and attempting to escape across Siberia.
I highly recommend two other Donald Westlake novels that are not in the Dortmunder series: Kahawa and High Adventure.
I’ve read the first book of this series and enjoyed it very much.
Planet of Adventure by Jack Vance. It’s an omnibus of four short novels about an Earthman who crashlands on an alien planet populated with various alien species, and humans descended from captives taken during their ancient raids on Earth.
Great fun!
Another non-fiction recommendation: Setting the East Ablaze. It’s Britain’s and Russia’s attempt to control Afghanistan in the 19th century. A real page turner.
I always thought **The Caine Mutiney **was a good adventure story.
Seconded. Also:
The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien - a great intro to adventure in Middle-earth
Time for the Stars by Robert Heinlein - a starship goes to different systems to see what’s there
Glory Road by Robert Heinlein - a mercenary is caught up in a more wide-ranging adventure than he could ever imagine
Aztec by Gary Jennings - explores the world of the Aztecs in every direction
Ah, but Spain was once so glorious! I sip my wine and mournfully stab people. Would that modern Spain were not so corrupt! Broody broody brood.
I’ve read three of them. They’re very…atmospheric.
To add to the Westlake fun, don’t forget Help! I Am Being Held Prisoner, the story of poor Harry Künt*, who got sent to jail just for parking his car next to the Long Island Expressway**.
*Don’t forget the umlaut.
**Well, there was that matter of the mannequin he left on the hood of his car. The female mannequin. Painted to be a realistic nude. With her legs spread wide. But all he did was park his car. Really. (We won’t mention the Congressmen. It’s better that way.)
I’ve always pictured Spain as corrupt and broody.
I never did before reading Alatriste, but now I do–it comes across like Russia, only hot.
Good analogy.
A British author named Philip Reeve has emerged in the past ten years as one of the greatest adventure-tellers of all times. Unfortunately, he’s still not well known on this side of the Atlantic, but you can help fix that by reading his books and then being seized by a sudden urge to spread the word about him to everyone you know. His first series begins with Mortal Engines, a post-apocalyptic tale in which giant mobile cities rove the surface of the planet, eating each other up. This book combines action, humor, great characters, and relentlessly fast pacing. The movie rights have been sold and Peter Jackson is working on the screenplay. Mortal Engines is the first in a series of four.
After that he turned to Larklight, the first in a trilogy. The premise here is that this is actually historical fiction, set in England after Isaac Newton discovers the secrets of space travel, allowing Britain to establish an Empire that spans the solar system, which turns out to be inhabited by all manner of strange creatures. The movie of this one is one the way as well.
Non-fiction:
Into Thin Air, by Jon Krakauer. Tells one side of the story of the fated expeditions up Mount Everest in 1996, in which a lot of people died. It’s very accessible and gripping.
The Last Place on Earth, by Roland Huntford. An examination of the race to the South Pole in the early 1900s and why Norwegian Roald Amundson got there while British Robert Falcon Scott didn’t. Really nice description of survival and hubris in polar environments.
Ghosts of Everest, by Jochen Hemmleb. An account of George Mallory’s 1924 attempt to be the first to climb Mount Everest told alongside the several expeditions in the 1990s that were mounted to find out what happened to him. A mountaineering mystery (sorta) resolved - those early Brits were nuts in what they attempted with the equipment they had.
Why yes, I got caught up in a polar exploration/Mount Everest period there for a while, why do you ask?
Snowblind by Robert Sabbag.
“A flat-out ballbuster. It moves like a threshing machine with a fuel tank full of ether. . . . Sabbag is a whip-song writer.”-Hunter S. Thompson
Snowblind is an all-out, nonstop, and now-classic look at the cocaine trade through the eyes of smuggler Zachary Swan. In a brief, Roman-candle career, Swan served an elegant clientele, traveling between Bogota and the nightclubs of New York, inventing intricate scams to outmaneuver the feds. Creating diversions that were characteristically baroque, surviving on ingenuity and idiot’s luck, he discovered in the process a hip, dangerous, high-velocity world that Robert Sabbag evokes with extraordinary power and humor.
“One of the best books about drugs ever written.”-Robert Stone
“One of the first books about the cocaine trade and it is still among the best.”-Norman Mailer
“An extremely rare cut of dry wit, poetry, rock-hard fact and relentless insight.”-Rolling Stone
“A triumphant piece of reporting.”-The New Yorker
“A witty, intelligent, fiercely stylish, drug-induced exemplary tale.”-Los Angeles Times
“The ultimate slide down the precipice of hip.”-Susan Brownmiller
“One of the most dazzling and spectacular pieces of reporting I have ever read.”-Nora Ephron
“A classic.”-The National Review
Absolutely seconded-- and don’t miss the other two books in the trilogy, The Story of the Stone and Eight Skilled Gentlemen. Laugh-out-loud funny and powerful at the same time.
I would suggest almost anything by Tim Powers, who writes something that I’ve heard best described as “secret history”-- historical fiction of sorts, but hinting that there are supernatural or magical forces at work beneath the surface of the known events, that help to explain the gaps or “weirdnesses” in the recorded events. I find most of his books very, very cool.
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On Stranger Tides, the book that loosely “inspired” the latest PotC movie, is a super-fun pirate adventure romp, with puppeteers, Blackbeard, zombies and the Fountain of Youth. (It also bears almost no resemblance to the movie so you don’t have to worry about spoilers or anything.)
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The Drawing of the Dark is about the siege of Vienna in 1529 by Suleiman the Magnificent, and how its secret purpose relates to beer, which in turn is related to the success or failure of Western civilization…trust me, it makes sense.
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Declare is about the Cold War spy Kim Philby, the long-lost Ark of Noah on Mt. Ararat, and the efforts both the Soviets and the Western nations go to to capture the attention (and the support) of some very, very creepy and powerful elemental forces.
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Last Call is about a mystical poker game, the spiritual resonance of Las Vegas and poker, and what Bugsy Siegel was really up to when he built the Flamingo.
Powers’s friend and co-writer James Blaylock also has a lot of fun stuff-- including his books about Langdon St. Ives, which are very steampunk-y and adventure-y.
Another vote for Treasure Island
The Odyssey. The Name of the Rose.
Lawrence Watt-Evans writes really good adventures, for the most part, especially his Ethshar stories, which can be read in pretty much any order. The later stories do have a few references to earlier ones on occasion, but mostly they aren’t spoilers. Start out with The Misenchanged Sword and then With a Single Spell.
Avoid the Annals of the Chosen series.