Did y'all know there's a new movement for "slow reading"? Which basically just means reading a book. Because peeps are forgetting how, can't sit still long enough, can't focus on something for more than 10 minutes without scrolling. Reading books is my thing! But I'm a victim, too. That shit takes me waaaay longer now. But I'm still doing it! You should, too.
Without further ado, I give you my top 3 favorite non-fiction books. All of them wild with adventure, of course.
North To The Night, by Alvah Simon: About a dude who winters alone in the arctic darkness on a tiny sailboat. See, he sails up there with his wife and cat (!!!), but she (the wife) has to leave, and he's left frozen there for months with his boat, with his demons, with polar bears, with the Northern Lights, with the storms, with the crushing cold.
The Man Who Walked Through Time, by Colin Fletcher: Mom sent me this book, so it's special. The author walked the entire length of the Grand Canyon in the 60s, all alone, and then wrote about it. Mom read it 30 years ago. Now me. An interesting cycle. Anyway, a quiet, relaxing text with much lovely language describing the hugeness of geologic time, the nature of beauty in the wild, and such: "Beyond shadow that still belonged to the night, a day’s incoming sunlight streamed across the rock reefs. Noon pressed down onto the Esplanade, hotter each day, more ponderously silent. Evening came, and a softer, richer silence.”
Jacque Cousteau: The Sea King, by Brad Matsen: “He didn’t particularly care about money as long as he had enough, and his chief financial tactic was simply going out and getting more cash when he ran out.” You see, Cousteau was down for living only in the now—no rehashing things past or backward-looking. “The road to paradise is paradise,” he said, quoting an old Spanish proverb. Anyway, a bit of a womanizer, but a true adventurer, through and through, Cousteau pioneered the modern-day scuba tank by trial and error with sketchy homemade setups. He's fucking crazy! So much could go wrong!
