Good books

Any readers around here? I am very streaky… I’ll go months without picking up a book and then winter rolls around and I go on a reading marathon.

I’m looking for good book recommendations… I usually prefer non-fiction with a focus on anything outdoors. I love stories about wilderness adventures, camping, hiking, hunting or anything about canoe country but I’ll read anything if it will get me hooked relatively quick. I’ve also been a fan of a lot of the books from the Aaron Rodgers book club recommendations.

If you have any good book recommendations, drop them below. Thanks in advance!

” The Mulligan” by Nathan Jorgenson

Not wilderness related, but..

Jack Reacher series by Lee Child.

Mitch Rapp series by Vince Flynn.

C. J. Box does the Joe Pickett series about a Wyoming game warden. Over 20 titles in the series.

The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved

Lost in the Wild: Danger and Survival in the North Woods

Gunflint Burning: Fire in the Boundary Waters

Once you open a C J Box book, you can’t put it down !

“The Falcon”
John Tanner

Fearless by Eric Blehm. Excellent!
Madhouse at the End of the Earth by Julian Sancton.
The Twenty-Ninth Day: Surviving a Grizzly Attack in the Canadian Tundra by Alex Messenger.
Fearless is about Navy Seal Adam Brown…best book I ever read.
The other 2 are Wildernesstrue stories and very good too.

Sigurd Olson.

wkw wrote:

Once you open a C J Box book, you can’t put it down !

isn’t that the warden serfdom the Yellowstone area??

I agree… Dutchboy got me hooked on them.

Wow thanks for the suggestions everyone. I’ve read several mentioned above. The big burn and CJ Box ones look like they will be the next ones in my queue. Keep em coming if you have more

True North by Jack Kulpa will hit everything you’re looking for. Collection of shorter stories separated by seasons. Think he may have used to write for Field & Stream.

Even better is he focuses mostly on that state across the river from you!

I am currently reading The Pioneers by McCullough. That’s about as wilderness as you can get.

Also reading a bunch of Jesse Stone novels. On my third in 2 weeks. I am only about a decade behind in those!

It doesn’t get much more Canoe Country than Canoeing with the Cree by Eric Serverid. Imagine graduating high school and then canoeing from St Paul to Hudson Bay just to see if you could make it.

Another Minnesota canoe classic is Chips from a Wilderness Log by Calvin Rutström.

I have a few other books but I have to find them to get the titles. There are a couple of very good ones about canoe exploration of the Canadian arctic.

If you love good writing and vivid stories you will love The Longest Silence by Thomas McGuane.

A River Runs Through It by McLean is another literature masterpiece. The novel is so rich is texture and description. Wonderful.

I read “UNDAUNTED COURAGE” by Steven Ambrose and could not put it down. It was one of those books that if you “just read one more page” before bed, it would be hours later and you will wonder where the time went…..

Its a chronicle of the Lewis and Clark expedition.

Death in the Tall Grass by Capstick and Horn of the Hunter by Rurak, both must reads. The Green Hills of Africa by Hemingway is a real good read too. Also, Jack O’Connor had a bunch of good reads, too.

Moby Dick is what I’m reading now. You learn a lot about whales and sailing.

Any Gene Hill book if you can find it. A Listening Walk…and Other Stories is sitting on my nightstand.

Grubson was telling me about a small series about Northern mn game wardens that I’m interested in picking up.
I can’t remember the name but I’m going fishing with him now and I’ll report back.
Other then that I’m hit or miss. I’ll read 10 books in a row and then won’t look at one for a year or 2. It really has to be a good book otherwise I’ll read my self right in to a sleep.

BC I have 2 of those northern Minnesota warden books. Yea pretty interesting. Sneaky fellers.

With the cabin up here some of the places are close by. They hit the red area lotws.

Krh129 wrote:

Lost in the Wild: Danger and Survival in the North Woods

Gunflint Burning: Fire in the Boundary Waters

I loved both of these. Gunflint burning – man I’ve never felt so bad for someone and also been mad at the same person at the same time (Stephen Posniak). Pretty sad the guy ended up taking his own life over starting that fire. Lost in the Wild was great too – I couldn’t put that one down.

Bird wrote:

The Twenty-Ninth Day: Surviving a Grizzly Attack in the Canadian Tundra by Alex Messenger.

This one hits close to home – the guy who got attacked is a friend of a friend and is from Duluth. It was a really good read

TheFamousGrouse wrote:

It doesn’t get much more Canoe Country than Canoeing with the Cree by Eric Serverid. Imagine graduating high school and then canoeing from St Paul to Hudson Bay just to see if you could make it.

Honestly, this book was part of my motivation to do the 200 mile BWCA/Canada border route trip last spring. Pretty crazy to think 2 high school kids did that in the days before GPS with an absolute tank of a canoe

I’m currently reading One Man’s Wilderness about Dick Proenneke. Man, that guy was an absolute stud. His movie that he self filmed is incredible. To think he did that with ancient technology and still did a better job self filming than most of the crap you see today on youtube is remarkable. Dick Proenneke is the man.

Really enjoyed the CJ Box – Joe Pickett series
Others to consider
The alpha female wolf : the fierce legacy of Yellowstone’s 06 by Rick McIntyre
The Mike Bowditch series by Paul Doiron – Mike is a Maine CO
The Cork O’Conner series by William Kent Krueger – Cork is Northern MN sheriff
The Sam Rivers series by Cary Griffith who wrote Gunflint Burning. Sam is a wildlife biologist

muskie-tim wrote:

The Cork O’Conner series by William Kent Krueger – Cork is Northern MN sheriff

I just finished William Kent Kruger’s last book “The River We Remember”…. a sheriff in a small SW Minnesota county. Very good read.

I’ve read his entire collection as I have CJ Box’s Joe Pickett series, Vince Flynn”s Mitch Rapp series, and Lee Child’s Reacher series.

I like to read bowhunting books.
Gene Wensel and his brother Barry wrote several such as the entertaining classic “And The Horse You Rode In On”.If I could find a copy I’d like to read his “Come November: The Whitetail Experience, Fifty Years Of Paying Attention To Deer”.

Here’s some free public domain archery books from the 1800’s and early 1900’s.
https://www.archerylibrary.com/books/

Can’t go wrong with jack london. I have read “white fang” and “call of the wild” several times.

This is my “to read” list:
Giants in the earth
Sand county almanac
Crow killer
Undaunted courage
The long hunters
The education of little tree
Adventures of a German hunter in America
West with the night
Rising tides

A good list I found, might have to google it link does not work.

Reading Recommendations for Stuck-at-Home Sportsmen and Women | Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership

http://www.trcp.org/2020/04/24/reading-recommendations-stuck-home-sportsmen-women/

TheFamousGrouse wrote:

It doesn’t get much more Canoe Country than Canoeing with the Cree by Eric Serverid. Imagine graduating high school and then canoeing from St Paul to Hudson Bay just to see if you could make it.

Canoeing with the Cree may be my favorite book of all time and it’s a pretty quick read – I’ve read it several times and I think once was over the course of one slow day in the deer stand. But what a story! Can you imagine any 18 yr old kids having that type of ambition today?

I’m pretty much exclusively a non-fiction reader and LOVE history.

Anything by Hampton Sides or Buddy Levy, especially Arctic expedition stuff like “Labyrinths of Ice” (Levy) or “In the Kingdom of Ice” (Sides) are MIND-BLOWING.

Sides also has a great bio of Kit Carson called “Blood and Thunder” which might be my favorite book of his. “Ghost Soldiers” (regarding the Bataan Death March and the liberation of the detainees from a Japanese Prison camp in the Philippines) and “On Dangerous Ground” (Harrowing tale of US Marines in the battel of Chosin during the Korean War) are another of couple of OUTSTANDING reads by Hampton Sides.

Another cool one – “Adrift” by Steven Callahan accounts the writer’s 76 days on a life raft after his sailboat sinks in a storm crossing from Europe to America in the 1980s

If you want a REALLY cool, light read about Canoeing, check out “The Contemplative Paddler’s Fireside Companion” by Timothy McDonnell – He’s a Minnesota guy who’s put together an awesome collection of short stories accounting his many paddling adventures across Minnesota and far into Canada. A really wonderful and peaceful read.

I read Shadow Divers this year, which was an AWESOME book! It’s about some recreational deep sea divers in New Jersey who search for an unknown sunken German U Boat off the coast of New Jersey in the 90’s that the military had no idea about. Really good book about both deep-sea diving and WW2 history, and a quick read too.

I just finished Fountainhead by Ayn Rand, and really liked that as well, with a lot of concepts that still apply today. It is about 200 pages too long, imo, like most of her books, but still really good. I’m about to start Gulag Archipelago, which is 3 books long and might take the whole year or longer without a concerted effort.

Holy smokes, my reading list is longer than it’s ever been. I’m looking forward to tapping into some of these new to me authors. Thanks for the recommendations fellas

Undaunted Courage that brandyman mentioned is a great nonfiction book (Lewis and Clark adventure etc.). The Ken Burns documentary on it is also good if you get tired of reading. Heh.

It’s been quite awhile, but books by Erik Larson are great I think. All historical non-fiction. I read The Devil in the White City years ago and it was great (takes place in Chicago 1890s…serial killer….pretty interesting.)