Reading list
The best classic adventure books
Every adventure film you have seen borrows from about twenty books written between 1820 and 1920. Treasure maps, prison escapes, lost worlds, a man in disguise on a moor: they all started here, and they still move faster than most of what came after.
20 books, all free to read
The ranking favours books that still read like page-turners. A few are long, but adventure is the easiest kind of long book there is.
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1. Treasure Island
by Robert Louis Stevenson
The map, the parrot, the one-legged cook. Written for a twelve-year-old and still the best pirate story.
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2. The Count of Monte Cristo
by Alexandre Dumas
Wrongly imprisoned, a sailor escapes, finds a fortune and spends it on revenge. Long, and it never drags.
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3. The Three Musketeers
by Alexandre Dumas
A country boy goes to Paris, picks three duels on his first day and gains three friends. All for one.
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4. The Call of the Wild
by Jack London
A pet dog is stolen and sold into the Yukon gold rush. Short and savage, and impossible to put down.
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5. Around the World in Eighty Days
by Jules Verne
A bet at a London club, a deadline and every kind of transport in 1872. Verne at his most fun.
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6. King Solomon’s Mines
by H. Rider Haggard
Three Englishmen follow an old map into Africa. The first lost-world novel, written to beat Treasure Island.
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7. The Thirty-Nine Steps
by John Buchan
A bored man finds a stranger dead in his flat and spends a week on the run across Scotland. The template for every chase thriller.
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8. Captain Blood
by Rafael Sabatini
An Irish doctor is sold into slavery and becomes the best pirate in the Caribbean. Sabatini at full sail.
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9. Ivanhoe
by Walter Scott
Knights, Robin Hood, a tournament and a siege. The novel that gave the Victorians their Middle Ages.
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10. The Last of the Mohicans
by James Fenimore Cooper
A chase through the forests of 1757 with Hawkeye and his Mohican friends. Breathless, and darker than the films.
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11. Kidnapped
by Robert Louis Stevenson
A boy is cheated of his inheritance, shipped off and wrecked, then crosses the Highlands with an outlaw.
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12. The Scarlet Pimpernel
by Baroness Orczy
An English fop by day rescues French aristocrats from the guillotine by night. The first hero with a secret identity.
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13. Journey to the Center of the Earth
by Jules Verne
A professor, his nephew and a guide climb down an Icelandic volcano. Verne's strangest journey.
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14. She
by H. Rider Haggard
An immortal queen in a lost African city. Haggard's wildest book, and one of the bestselling novels ever.
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15. Gulliver’s Travels
by Jonathan Swift
A ship's surgeon washes up among tiny people, then giants, then talking horses. Satire dressed as a voyage.
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16. The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe
by Daniel Defoe
Twenty-eight years on an island, and a footprint in the sand. Often called the first English novel.
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17. The Prisoner of Zenda
by Anthony Hope
An Englishman who looks exactly like a king has to stand in for him. Short and witty, and the root of a hundred films.
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18. Scaramouche
by Rafael Sabatini
A lawyer turns actor and swordsman to avenge a friend in revolutionary France. It opens with one of the great first lines.
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19. Tarzan of the Apes
by Edgar Rice Burroughs
A baby raised by apes grows up lord of the jungle. Pulp, but pulp that took over the world.
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20. The Riddle of the Sands
by Erskine Childers
Two young men sailing the Frisian coast stumble on a German invasion plan. The first great spy novel, and a lovely sailing book.
Read it as a path: Great adventures
The stories every adventure since has borrowed from.
More lists
Read them free
Every book on this list is free in Doomreader: open one and it reads as short posts you scroll, with your place kept and its best pages a tap away. You can listen to any of them free too, read aloud by your device.