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Any sort of adventurous travel comes with an almost guaranteed risk: anything can – and often goes wrong, whether it is a bad weather, bad decisions, bad karma or simply bad luck.

If you are a keen traveler and a keen reader, in addition to this best selling armchair adventure titles by authors like Jon Krakauer, Sebastian Junger or Linda Greenlaw, try these riverting accounts:

In Adrift by Steven Callahan, the author must use his inflatable life raft after his small sloop capsized after less than a week out on the open waters of the North Atlantic. The 76 days at sea that he spent fighting for his life and his sanity make for a spell-binding title.

A Voyage for Madmen by Peter Nichols is about the first Golden Globe Race in 1968, in which as the book’s tagline has it – “Nine men set out to race each other around the world. Only one made it back.” I read with a growing sense of shock – and no little admiration – how these men, for various and sundry reasons, decided to risk their bodies and their minds to take part in a race without GPS, cell phones , in boats that seemed all but guaranteed to survive the trip.

Chay Blyth, who had very little experience in open water sailing, describes the very end of his race when his boat became unmanageable during an unseasonable gale:

“So I lowered the sail… and once I had lowered them there was nothing more I could do except pray. So I prayed. And between times I turned to one of my sailing manuals to see what advice it contained for me. It was like being in hell with instructions.”

Deep sea diving off the coast of French Polynesia: could anything be more, umh, adventurous? Not according to Julia Whitty in Fragile Edge: Diving and Other Adventures In the South Pacific.

James West Davidson and John Rugge’s Great Heart: The history of Labrador Adventure chronicles the story of a failed exploration that was dogged with bad luck, as well as its complicated aftermath.

Mumbai to Mecca: A Pilgrimage To The Holy Sites Of Islam by Ilia Trojanow is one of the bound-to-be-classic travelogues: an account of the Hajj as seen through the eyes of a Western journalist sympathetic to Islam.

I enjoyed so many of the selections Lamar Underwood collected in The Great Adventure Stories Ever Told. They include both fiction and non-fiction, and describe the trips to different corners of the world so foolhardy that you will find yourself wincing with sympathy while reading this book about adventures.