I just finished "The Lost City of Z" by David Grann about explorer Percy Fawcett, who disappeared in the Amazon in 1925.
Seriously fascinating.
But if you ever had any desire to visit the Amazon (even as much as it's changed in 90-something years), this will disavow you of your travel plans right quick.
Despite the piranhas and funky fish that try to swim up your privates and use spikes to stay embedded inside, I still thought it sounded interesting. I just thought "I won't go in the water."
But flies biting you and laying larvae under your skin with maggots emerging sometime later? Protozoa being deposited around your face so that it begins basically rotting off? COUNT ME OUT!!
Loved that book! Read that one on my adventure binge--I love historical non-fiction about men/women who go off into the wilderness/unknown/forbidden. Skeletons on the Zahara is another good one, along with River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey and Into Africa: the Epic Adventures of Stanley and Livingstone. Over the Edge of the World about Magellan's circumnavigation is also great. Recently finished Endurance about Shackleton's ordeal in Antarctica. These made me want to write a thriller-adventure like Theroux's The Mosquito Coast.
I'm in the middle of Wind, Sand, and Stars by St. Exupery. After I read Beryl Markham's West with the Night, I wanted to stay with the pilot/adventurer biographies. I want to find a good one about Howard Hughes.
As for the books pertaining to my fiction writing:
Mayor's The Poison King about Mithridates VI started my whole love affair with the Persian-Greek King who fought Sulla and Pompey. I'm re-reading it for the third time.
Barrett's Agrippina: Sex, Power, and Politics in the Early Empire
Pomeroy's Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity. A perennial favorite, even though I write mainly stories set in the late republic/early empire.
Adkins and Adkins's Handbook to Life in Ancient Rome, though lately I've been consulting a copy of Mary Johnston's Roman Life I got from the library and Dupont's Daily Life in Ancient Rome. The latter gives a good rundown on the Roman mindset, the citizen as compared to other people in that world, i.e. women, slaves, plebs, equites and tradesmen.
So many books, so little time...