Adventure reading list
I'm in a mood and that mood is hot air balloons, steampunk time travel, The Mummy (1999, obviously), discovering Atlantis, mild peril, clunky submersibles, lost jungle temples, cursed relics, accident-prone botanists and their long-suffering guides.
Sci fi back when it used to be scientific romance - a nice article on which is Before Sci-Fi Was Cool: Scientific Romance. And adventure fiction. Mostly a very Voyages extraordinaires feeling. This mood has been going a while it seems because I wrote about neo-pulp and wanting an adventure revival in December last year.
First things first, some obvious omissions. I haven't read the first of Verne's voyages extraordinaires, Five Weeks in a Balloon, and it's been a while since Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas. I'm pretty up on my Wells, also recently ACD's The Lost World, but I've never read any Haggard.
I'd also like to point out the predictable problems with reading 1930s pulp. I love the Egyptology of it all, as a basis for a fun story. But the colonialism and plunder is still so real in 2026 that I struggle to lose myself in it. Plopping the story into an Alternate Earth fantasy-style world still feels disingenuous.
So here's my ten reads. Then below I discuss a bunch of stuff I didn't pick but want to remember and may look at in future.
- Five Weeks in a Balloon, Verne, 1863
- 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Verne, 1870
- King Solomon's Mines, H. Rider Haggard, 1885
- At the Earth's Core, Edgar Rice Burroughs, 1914
- The Maracot Deep, Arthur Conan Doyle, 1929
- Crocodile on the Sandbank, Elizabeth Peters, 1975
- To Say Nothing of the Dog, Connie Willis, 1997 *
- Empire of Shadows, Jacquelyn Benson, 2024 **
- The Lost City of the Monkey God, Douglas Preston, 2017 (non-fiction)
- Jules Verne: The Definitive Biography, William Butcher, 2006 (non fiction) (seems largely unavailable)
* Which means I should finally read Three Men in a Boat, my mum's favourite book
** Included because it has the irresistible tagline to me 'Nice Victorian ladies don’t run off to find legendary lost cities.'
Other contemporary-ish possibilities include The Beetle by Richard Marsh in 1897 and Pharos, the Egyptian by Guy Boothby from 1899. There's also more Verne, but I think this will do.
I've previously read Nellie Bly's Around the World in Seventy-Two Days. There's also Amelia Edwards and her A Thousand Miles up the Nile from 1877, available on Internet Archive. And I might have to dig around stuff like the Egypt Exploration Society a bit more.
Otherwise I'm quite into the idea of the Georgia Lee series by A.H. Wang, Janet Evanovich's Gabriela Rose recovery agent series, and Into the Drowning Deep by Mira Grant. Mean mermaids sounds fun. I think it's horror, though. And I'm a terribly scaredy cat. Plus Space Opera by Catherynne Valente. Which apparently the Guardian called an 'over-the-top, absurdist extravaganza' - sounds like a great recommendation. In the 'looks interesting but I tend not to do YA' camp is What the River Knows, and Where The Library Hides, by Isabel Ibañez. Probably this is where I should finally read Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time. Maybe I will. Also The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi.
On the nonfiction side, we have 2016's Egyptomania by Ronald H. Fritze. The Evolutionary Imagination in Late-Victorian Novels by John Glendining from 2007 also ties into my interest in the evolution of evolution. However it's one of those older books you get excited is still around... then find it's £171.99 at Waterstones. Okay, sure.
I'm also in a mood to read a thousand iterations of wlw geologists or cartographers or botanists and the big strong inventors or engineers or archaeologists they are hopelessly in love with. In my mind the entire scientific community of 1885 to 1939 is just ladies kissing. Straight into my veins, please and thank you.
Shelved under reading.