68 books like Rogue Male

This book is a fantastic collection of short stories about the Zombie Apocalypse. Some of the stories broach the subject of corruption, which enabled a local epidemic to spread globally.

I first read this book in 2006 with an “imagine if…..” frame of mind, but I watched world events unfold in 2020 from the perspective of “life imitating art.” I loved the author’s conversational style of storytelling and the believable characters he described. There are no hardcore action heroes, just regular people.

This is a compulsive first-person account of the plight of Holden Caulfield, an awkward adolescent, just expelled from his private boarding school, who is shyly trying to find sex and love while pursuing a personal crusade against adult hypocrisy. (His favourite put-down is “phony”).

I read it first as a teenager in South Africa and felt an immediate kinship with Holden, a Tom Sawyer for our times, who was standing up for himself against the idiocies of the grown-ups.

Thesiger was a British military officer, explorer, and writer, who, in the second half of the 20th century, traveled on foot, horse, and by camel across Arabia, the Middle East, and Africa. Rub' al Khali, the Empty Quarter, is the largest sand desert in the world, a desolate, dangerous plane of rolling dunes, with a very limited number of waterholes. At the time of Thesiger’s travels in the late 1940s, this desert had been traveled exclusively by the local Bedu. What makes this book intriguing is the description of the harsh landscape and the people that live in it. Thesiger traveled the desert with a purpose (he wanted to find out more about a locust with some ecological relevance), so he and his guides voyaged huge distances. As the reader turns the pages, the overwhelming sense of adventure and Thesiger’s lust for the unknown become contagious. Many books have… show more.

Buchan’s books are full of DIY heroes, men thrown into impossible situations but who manage to survive through their wits, a healthy dose of humor - and if necessary, with their fists. The book follows the hero Hannay, as he tries to escape German spies, first through England and then the wilderness of Scotland. The odds are stacked high against Hannay, but his bravura and strong will help him solve the mystery and dissolve the spy ring. Some of the views expressed in Buchan’s books are no longer politically correct and his works should always be understood in the context of his times, yet they make for very compelling reading.

Vance is one of the best Sci-Fi authors of the twentieth century, although for a long time he wasn’t a household name in the genre. Over 70 years he has written an abundance of books, all of which focused on distant worlds and human societies that have differentiated into freedom-loving, anarchic and weird cultures. “Planet of Adventure” is a set of four books, and deals with Adam Reith, a single astronaut stranded on a planet ruled by four races of extraterrestrials. Humans are little more than slaves on this planet, and Adam needs all his wits to survive… and to find a way off the planet and back home. The book resembles a wild, expressionist painting; the extraterrestrials and their strange cultures and the humans that serve them provide the color and texture to a truly amazing adventure.

Verne has written many books about survival, exploration, and technical innovation. In many aspects, he was far ahead of his time, a nineteen century Sci-Fi wonder boy. He was a masterful storyteller, providing an expert rhythm of action scenes followed by contemplative paragraphs. The Mysterious Island deals with a group of people that has landed in an impossible situation: they are castaways on a deserted island. In most books of this genre, the subjects will succumb or barely manage to survive, but not so for Verne’s engineer and his companions. Through the combination of scientific knowledge, the sheer power of man’s muscles, and unwavering optimism, they quickly turn nature to their benefit and remodel the island to their liking. A thrilling adventure story!

Starting from an early fascination with graveyards, where I would (and do still) like to sit and chat to the dead, making good friends with some of them, I’ve always been drawn to themes about death. And this book is a really dark, peculiar prequel to Peter Pan where an infant Peter ends up as the unofficial gravedigger for dead babies. It’s also a very beautiful book, but defintely not suitable for young children!

This is the weirdest book I ever read, I came across it when I was fifteen and I’ve never been quite able to get it out of my head, particularly the third section. I don't know if this is a recommendation or not, to be honest, but I'd like the opinion of fellow readers, if there are any out there. I’m guessing it might be a bit too obscure for most. But if anyone else reads it, let me know.

If my book brings the perspective of a new hunter and old conservationist, then Meat Eater is the perspective of the old hunter and new conservationist.

The entertaining memoir begins with Rinella’s earliest hunting memories so the reader can follow how hunting informed his connection to land and animals over time and how that made him the activist conservationist he is today.

A great book for the non-hunter to glean some perspective from someone who was born into hunting culture.   

There are many books recounting living the wilderness lifestyle in Alaska. At the top of the list is probably Dick Proenecke’s One Man’s Wilderness. But The Hard Way Home deserves to be there, too. Steve Kahn has an engaging personal writing style that makes you think you are sitting by the fire in his cabin listening to his tales. 

And there are some whoppers: from boating on Lake Clark in imprenatrable fog to tramping the hillsides in search of Dall sheep, to being forced to walk miles through an unexpected autumn snowfall to be flown out from a hunt. Remembering idyllic summers at Farewell Lake to the horrors of the Exxon Valdez oil spill and much in between, Kahn writes like a guy who knows the real Alaska.