Exploring Top Books of Shelfari

First published in 1935, The African Queen is the story of Charlie Allnut and Rose Sayer, a disheveled trader and an English spinster missionary, who are thrown together when World War I reaches the heart of the African jungle.

Bridges over the Brazos

by Jon McConal

The Brazos River meanders 923 miles from the Texas Panhandle to the Gulf of Mexico, crossing the High Plains, the West Texas Lower Rolling Plains, the Western Cross Timbers, the Grand Prairie, and the Gulf Coastal Plain. Journalist Jon McConal has spent many hours hiking the river's banks and camping out on its sandbars, discovering the many bridges that cross the river, and studying maps and tracing the river's... (more)

An Inland Voyage

by Robert, Louis Stevenson

What am I to say for my book? Caleb and Joshua brought back from Palestine a formidable bunch of grapes; alas! my book produces naught so nourishing; and for the matter of that, we live in an age when people prefer a definition to any quantity of fruit. I wonder, would a negative be found enticing? for, from the negative point of view, I flatter myself this volume has a certain stamp. Although it runs to... (more)

by Jonathan Raban

The author of Bad Land realizes a lifelong dream as he navigates the waters of the Mississippi River in a spartan sixteen-foot motorboat, producing yet another masterpiece of contemporary American travel writing. In the course of his voyage, Raban records the mercurial caprices of the river and the astonishingly varied lives of the people who live along its banks. Whether he is fishing for walleye or hunting... (more)

Life on the Mississippi

by Mark Twain

Part travel book, part autobiography, and part social commentary, Life on the Mississippi is a memoir of the cub pilot's apprenticeship, a record of Twain's return to the river and to Hannibal as an adult, a meditation on the harsh vagaries of nature, and a study of the varied and sometimes violent activities engaged in by those who live on the river's shores. As Willie Morris notes in his introduction, it "is... (more)

River-Horse: Across America by Boat

by William L. Heat-Moon

In his most ambitious journey ever, William Least Heat-Moon sets off aboard a small boat named Nikawa (river horse in Osage) from the Atlantic at New York Harbor in hopes of entering the Pacific near Astoria, Oregon. He and his companion, Pilotis, struggle to cover some 5,000 watery miles, often following in the wakes of our most famous explorers, from Henry Hudson to Lewis and Clark. En route, the voyagers... (more)

Walden and Other Writings

by Brooks Atkinson, Henry David Thoreau

Naturalist, philosopher, champion of self-reliance and moral independence, Henry David Thoreau remains not only one of our most influential writers but also one of our most contemporary. This unique and comprehensive edition gathers all of Thoreau's most significant works (including his masterpiece Walden, reproduced in its entirety). Taken together, they reveal the astounding range, subtlety, artistry, and depth... (more)

Old Glory : A Voyage Down the Mississippi

Old Glory : A Voyage Down the Mississippi

by Jonathan Raban

Jonathan Raban is an English author who fell in love with the Mississippi River when he was a boy (he was reading HUCKLEBERRY FINN). Over the years he dreamed about drifting its length. In 1979, he flew to Minneapolis, bought a 16 foot outboard launch, and set off for New Orleans. He takes us with him every step of the way. "The book and the journey would be all of a piece," Raban writes, "The plot would be... (more)

Goodbye to a River: A Narrative (Vintage Departures)

Goodbye to a River: A Narrative (Vintage Departures)

by John Graves

In the 1950s, a series of dams was proposed along the Brazos River in north-central Texas. For John Graves, this project meant that if the stream’s regimen was thus changed, the beautiful and sometimes brutal surrounding countryside would also change, as would the lives of the people whose rugged ancestors had eked out an existence there. Graves therefore decided to visit that stretch of the river, which he had... (more)

Shelfari Book Activity

Tags: river voyage

The African Queen

by C. S. Forester

Bridges over the Brazos

by Jon McConal

An Inland Voyage

by Robert, Louis Stevenson

by Jonathan Raban

Life on the Mississippi

by Mark Twain

River-Horse: Across America by Boat

by William L. Heat-Moon

Walden and Other Writings

by Brooks Atkinson, Henry David Thoreau

Old Glory : A Voyage Down the Mississippi

by Jonathan Raban

Goodbye to a River: A Narrative (Vintage Departures)

by John Graves