Here are 100 books that A Field Guide to Getting Lost fans have personally recommended if you like
A Field Guide to Getting Lost.
Shepherd is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
I’m an OB/GYN, passionate about adventuring beyond what’s expected. This has led me to pivot multiple times in my career, now focusing on writing. I’ve written a play, The Post-Roe Monologues, to elevate women’s stories. I cherish the curiosity that drives outer and inner exploration, and I love memoirs that skillfully weave the two. The books on this list feature extraordinary women who took risks, left comfort and safety, and battled vulnerability to step into the unknown. These authors moved beyond the stories they’d believed about themselves–or that others told about them. They invite you to think about living fuller and bigger lives.
I found the author's gorgeous writing and deep reflection to be irresistible. Harris is a true explorer of the world and the self as well as a brilliant writer.
This book showcases the curiosity and awe that drove Harris and her best friend to bicycle across the Silk Road. While pedaling out of bounds on her bicycle, she effortlessly led me to new territories of thought and imagination. Her descriptions are vivid, and I identified fully with her love of wildness.
"Lands of Lost Borders carried me up into a state of openness and excitement I haven't felt for years. It's a modern classic."-Pico Iyer
A brilliant, fierce writer, and winner of the 2019 RBC Taylor Prize, makes her debut with this enthralling travelogue and memoir of her journey by bicycle along the Silk Road-an illuminating and thought-provoking fusion of The Places in Between, Lab Girl, and Wild that dares us to challenge the limits we place on ourselves and the natural world.
As a teenager, Kate Harris realized that the career she craved-to be an explorer, equal parts swashbuckler and…
I am a fourth-generation Asian New Zealander who always felt ‘other’ growing up. When I was little, I hated being asked ‘where are you from?’ because I wanted to be seen as ‘just’ a New Zealander. This frustration shaped a lot of my race and identity journey, and I started reading books about other people’s personal experiences because it made me feel seen. These books also helped me recognize the richness and humanity behind my family’s story. I hope this beautiful list of books will resonate with your experiences or give you insight into a new corner of the world.
Ocean Vuong writes in a poetic prose that transforms memories into fragments that linger in your mind. His choice to write this book as fictionalized letters to his mother was deeply beautiful and heart-wrenching. This is a book that took me on a journey through the Vietnam War, my first queer experiences, and the journey of finding out what it means to become American.
Longlisted for the 2019 National Book Award for Fiction, the Carnegie Medal in Fiction, the 2019 Aspen Words Literacy Prize, and the PEN/Hemingway Debut Novel Award
Shortlisted for the 2019 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize
Winner of the 2019 New England Book Award for Fiction!
Named one of the most anticipated books of 2019 by Vulture, Entertainment Weekly, Buzzfeed, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, Oprah.com, Huffington Post, The A.V. Club, Nylon, The Week, The Rumpus, The Millions, The Guardian, Publishers Weekly, and more.
"A lyrical work of self-discovery that's shockingly intimate and insistently…
I’m a writer and professor of literary studies whose work has been deeply involved in topics of truth, realism, and public policy. My recent book considers works of fiction that openly and honestly experiment with questions of uncertainty, identity, and risk in the supermodern present. This book draws from disciplinary discourses in law, finance, and economics, which similarly contend with competing claims to truth and value and dive deep into the circumstantial and speculative games that authors play when they write fiction about reality. I have my PhD in Spanish Literature (UVA), M.A. in International Affairs and Economics (Johns Hopkins Univ.), and a B.A. from Harvard University.
This book makes American history relevant, alive, and urgent.
This is not a book to read in one sitting–but to enjoy in segments. I felt so much smarter and prepared to understand our current challenges to truth and trust after reading this book.
At this critical juncture in our democracy, this book will illuminate, enlighten, and inform!
The American experiment rests on three ideas-"these truths", Jefferson called them-political equality, natural rights and the sovereignty of the people. And it rests, too, "on a dedication to inquiry, fearless and unflinching", writes Jill Lepore in a ground-breaking investigation into the American past that places truth at the centre of the nation's history.
Telling the story of America, beginning in 1492, These Truths asks whether the course of events has proven the nation's founding truths or belied them. Finding meaning in contradiction, Lepore weaves American history into a tapestry of faith and hope, of peril and prosperity, of technological progress…
I am a passionate long-distance hiker and regularly enjoy local walks close to where I live in Oxfordshire. Over the years, I have walked many long-distance trails, including Camino Pilgrimages. The books I am sharing are those that have inspired my own walking adventures and self-reflection. I am a big believer in the benefits of walking for mind, body, and spirit, and I personally enjoy those benefits daily. My passion for walking and the depth of thinking it can help you attain has found its way into both my personal and business life. Walking to me is life!
I loved this book because I could relate to the tough, emotional place the author was in when she made this epic journey. Her rucksack was extremely heavy. It felt like it represented the burden she was carrying at the time. I loved the unfolding of both her physical and emotional journey, how much she learned about herself, and how much she was eventually able to let go of to enable her to move forward.
Reading this book motivated me to go on a similar journey, hiking many of the Camino Pilgrimage routes. This was a book I thought about long after I had finished reading it. It had the kind of truth about it that stays with you.
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A powerful, blazingly honest memoir: the story of an eleven-hundred-mile solo hike that broke down a young woman reeling from catastrophe—and built her back up again.
At twenty-two, Cheryl Strayed thought she had lost everything. In the wake of her mother’s death, her family scattered and her own marriage was soon destroyed. Four years later, with nothing more to lose, she made the most impulsive decision of her life. With no experience or training, driven only by blind will, she would hike more than a thousand miles of the Pacific Crest Trail from the…
I’m an OB/GYN, passionate about adventuring beyond what’s expected. This has led me to pivot multiple times in my career, now focusing on writing. I’ve written a play, The Post-Roe Monologues, to elevate women’s stories. I cherish the curiosity that drives outer and inner exploration, and I love memoirs that skillfully weave the two. The books on this list feature extraordinary women who took risks, left comfort and safety, and battled vulnerability to step into the unknown. These authors moved beyond the stories they’d believed about themselves–or that others told about them. They invite you to think about living fuller and bigger lives.
I read this story as a young woman in the mid-eighties before embarking on my solo hike in Nepal, and it has stayed with me ever since. Arlene Blum recounts her experience leading an all-woman mountaineering expedition in 1978, the first of its kind to climb a peak above 8000 meters.
The different personalities of these brave climbers jumped off the page. When I first read the book, I thought, if they could climb Annapurna, then maybe I could simply trek around it. Blum writes about her fierce determination to break gender barriers while being honest about her leadership challenges. She has continued to inspire me in her career as an adventurer, scientist, and activist ever since.
In August 1978, thirteen women left San Francisco for the Nepal Himalaya to make history as the first Americans—and the first women—to scale the treacherous slopes of Annapurna I, the world’s tenth highest peak. Expedition leader Arlene Blum here tells their dramatic story: the logistical problems, storms, and hazardous ice climbing; the conflicts and reconciliations within the team; the terror of avalanches that threatened to sweep away camps and climbers.
On October 15, two women and two Sherpas at last stood on the summit—but the celebration was cut short, for two days later, the two women of the second summit…
People come to songwriting from all different directions. Some have wanted to do this since they were little kids. Some like to make their parents mad. Some are wildly talented but crippled with doubt. All I can say is that no matter which way you’re facing, I think I can help you. I say this because I’ve been teaching college-level songwriting for years now, and every semester I have students who want to meet with me for office hours. They’re all repeat customers and I’ve noticed that many of them ask repeat questions. The point of my book, Music, Lyrics, and Life, is to try to address those repeat questions because chances are good that you have them, too.
A series of poetry lectures not intended for publication, they combine to form an astounding journey into language and art. You don’t need to be a poet to love the casual way she delivers bomb after bomb, and to wish you’d been her student. I guess this is as close as I’ll get, and it’s taken a long time (I’m still not done) because I can just sit on a phrase or a page for an entire subway ride. Definitely would have failed her class, but having the lectures written out is like getting an extension without needing to grovel for it.
This is one of the wisest books I've read in years...--New York Times Book Review No writer I know of comes close to even trying to articulate the weird magic of poetry as Ruefle does. She acknowledges and celebrates in the odd mystery and mysticism of the act--the fact that poetry must both guard and reveal, hint at and pull back...Also, and maybe most crucially, Ruefle's work is never once stuffy or overdone: she writes this stuff with a level of seriousness-as-play that's vital and welcome, that doesn't make writing poetry sound anything but wild, strange, life-enlargening fun. -The Kenyon…
I am a recovering trial lawyer (after 35 years of law practice) who took up fiction writing in my late 50s and became so interested in learning what it’s like to be a writer – and how to write better – that I began a podcast designed to encourage authors to open up about their writing lives. After more than 500+ author interviews, I remain fascinated by the many different ways that writers approach their craft and how they turn their “what-ifs” into interesting stories. The writing books that I am recommending are books I used to guide me in my interviews. I hope they will provide insight and inspiration in your writing journey.
While some writing books offer nuts and bolts–the so-called rules of writing–this book from Pulitzer Prize winner Annie Dillard teases the writer with essays that make you think.
We are invited into the world of writing with metaphor and we learn by comparison. Like the story of the inchworm stuck in the long grasses, frozen to the tall blades. Perhaps you should just jump, Dillard quips, and put yourself “out of your misery.”
True, writing can be miserable at times, but also, it can be wonderful. I like this book because it is a way to experience what it feels like to be a writer through the craft of prose.
"For nonwriters, it is a glimpse into the trials and satisfactions of a life spent with words. For writers, it is a warm, rambling, conversation with a stimulating and extraordinarily talented colleague." — Chicago Tribune
From Pulitzer Prize-winning Annie Dillard, a collection that illuminates the dedication and daring that characterizes a writer's life.
In these short essays, Annie Dillard—the author of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and An American Childhood—illuminates the dedication, absurdity, and daring that characterize the existence of a writer. A moving account of Dillard’s own experiences while writing her works, The Writing Life offers deep insight into one…
People come to songwriting from all different directions. Some have wanted to do this since they were little kids. Some like to make their parents mad. Some are wildly talented but crippled with doubt. All I can say is that no matter which way you’re facing, I think I can help you. I say this because I’ve been teaching college-level songwriting for years now, and every semester I have students who want to meet with me for office hours. They’re all repeat customers and I’ve noticed that many of them ask repeat questions. The point of my book, Music, Lyrics, and Life, is to try to address those repeat questions because chances are good that you have them, too.
Do not come to this book in search of warm hugs about the beauty of the process. True to the title, Klinkenborg (best name ever?) offsets each of his sentences like an epic poem in verse. The epic he describes is how epically bad your writing is, and—hopefully—how to improve. He returns to the word "notice" over and over, and that's really it. You're blowing sentences by not noticing what the sentence itself is doing. You're over-emphasizing "meaning" at the expense of the vehicle that delivers it. I sense there's a kind man in there, somewhere, who's working a side of the street he feels has been neglected by years of misguided education. But here, he's dedicated to the larger cause of clean, clear sentences. Not hugs.
An indispensable and distinctive book that will help anyone who wants to write, write better, or have a clearer understanding of what it means for them to be writing, from widely admired writer and teacher Verlyn Klinkenborg.
Klinkenborg believes that most of our received wisdom about how writing works is not only wrong but an obstacle to our ability to write. In Several Short Sentences About Writing, he sets out to help us unlearn that “wisdom”—about genius, about creativity, about writer’s block, topic sentences, and outline—and understand that writing is just as much about thinking, noticing, and learning what it…
I’m an OB/GYN, passionate about adventuring beyond what’s expected. This has led me to pivot multiple times in my career, now focusing on writing. I’ve written a play, The Post-Roe Monologues, to elevate women’s stories. I cherish the curiosity that drives outer and inner exploration, and I love memoirs that skillfully weave the two. The books on this list feature extraordinary women who took risks, left comfort and safety, and battled vulnerability to step into the unknown. These authors moved beyond the stories they’d believed about themselves–or that others told about them. They invite you to think about living fuller and bigger lives.
I read this book in a day. The writing sparkles with intimacy, vulnerability, and humor. Levy, a journalist accustomed to traveling the world, finds herself lost while on assignment in Mongolia. There, she experiences a miscarriage within the context of a crumbling relationship.
She writes, “The future I thought I was meticulously crafting for years had disappeared, and with it have gone my ideas about the kind of life I’d imagined I was due.”
An Amazon.com Book of 2017 and an NPR Great Read of 2017
'Every deep feeling a human is capable of will be shaken loose by this short, but profound book' David Sedaris
'I wanted what we all want: everything. We want a mate who feels like family and a lover who is exotic, surprising. We want to be youthful adventurers and middle-aged mothers. We want intimacy and autonomy, safety and stimulation, reassurance and novelty, coziness and thrills. But we can't have it all.'
I’m a writer and professor of literary studies whose work has been deeply involved in topics of truth, realism, and public policy. My recent book considers works of fiction that openly and honestly experiment with questions of uncertainty, identity, and risk in the supermodern present. This book draws from disciplinary discourses in law, finance, and economics, which similarly contend with competing claims to truth and value and dive deep into the circumstantial and speculative games that authors play when they write fiction about reality. I have my PhD in Spanish Literature (UVA), M.A. in International Affairs and Economics (Johns Hopkins Univ.), and a B.A. from Harvard University.
I found this book so smart in the way that it examines and questions how we have made many parts of our worlds into winner-take-all competitions or “games.” I thought Jagoda did a great job making me think about “gamified” realities that simulate real-world situations and how we virtually experiment through gameplay.
I was also drawn to the idea that games could “safely” let us play out real-world scenarios, imagining and testing out new ways of trying out alternative futures without the risks of playing those for real.
At the same time, I am reminded that however simulatively real the game feels, the consequences are not similarly real. Win or lose, we can always “end” the game, reboot, and start again–not necessarily so in real life.
