Editor’s note: This personal list by author Lawrence Millman diplomatically omits Millman’s own masterpiece, Last Places, which many would include in this company.
— The Ascent of Rum Doodle, by E.W. Bowman. A novel that parodies particularly robust mountaineering expeditions.
— Ninety-Two Days, by Evelyn Waugh. A mordantly comic (and sometimes nasty) narrative of traveling through British Guinea in the early 1930s.
— Salt Water Taffy, or 20,000 Leagues Away From the Sea, by June Triplett (actually, Corey Ford). A hilarious parody of seafaring tales, putatively written by the daughter of a sea captain.
— Arctic Solitaire: A Boat, A Bay, and the Quest for a Perfect Bear, by Paul Souders. A harrowingly funny book about traveling up the west coast of Hudson Bay in a small boat by a fellow who has almost no knowledge of how to handle a boat.
— Map of My Dead Pilots, by Colleen Mondor. This oft-tragic account of bush piloting in Alaska contains a surprising number of humorous moments.
— The Sex Lives of Cannibals, by J. Maarten Troost. A funny, although sometimes too funny, narrative of hanging out with former cannibals in the South Pacific.
— The Innocents Abroad, by Mark Twain. American’s greatest humorist describes what it’s like to travel to Europe and the Holy Land on a chartered cruise ship named Quaker City.
— Thirty Years in the Golden North, by Jan Welzl. An Arctic pseudo-memoir that describes (among other things) its author’s being elected the first ever Czech “Eskimo chieftain” in the New Siberia Islands.
— Beauty Tips from Moose Jaw, by Will Ferguson. A travel narrative that takes on the question of Canadian identity altogether unseriously.
— Letters from a Lost Uncle, by Mervyn Peake. Written in the form of letters from an uncle lost in the Arctic, this absolutely hilarious illustrated parody describes a search for (among other things) a rare arctic lion.
— Big Dead Place, by Nicholas Johnson. A cynical, informative, biting and humorous book about what it’s like to spend a year at various stations in Antarctica.
— Vagrant Viking, by Peter Freuchen. An off-the-wall memoir that includes Freuchen’s classic description of using pieces of his frozen shit as pitons to climb out of an ice crevice.
