The Hiking Books Worth Reading: A Reader’s Guide for Walkers

Reading about walking is not a substitute for walking. It is, oddly, a decent multiplier.

Updated 1 August 2026 · Written by Will Tory · Field-tested by the iHikeFar test team

Walking has produced a disproportionate amount of good writing, probably because it leaves the mind free while the body is occupied. There is a whole tradition of it, from nineteenth-century essays on walking through the twentieth-century mountaineering canon to the contemporary nature writing boom. This column is about why it is worth reading, and what reading does to the experience of being outside.

Rather than a ranked list, here are the categories worth exploring, with the kind of book each one contains and what it will do for your hiking.

Four categories of hiking book

The first is the walking essay: short, reflective writing about the act of walking itself. Thoreau, Hazlitt and Robert Louis Stevenson all wrote in this tradition, and modern practitioners such as Robert Macfarlane and Rebecca Solnit have extended it considerably. These books change what you notice on a walk more than any gear does, which is a genuinely useful effect for anyone who has started to find their local trails repetitive.

The second is the mountain narrative — expedition accounts, disaster narratives and the long tradition of climbing literature. Read critically, these are the best available education in decision-making under pressure. The recurring lesson is remarkably consistent with what mountain rescue teams report: incidents are almost always the product of several small decisions rather than one dramatic error.

Guidebooks and why they still matter

The third category is the practical guidebook, and it is the one most people assume has been replaced by apps. It has not. A good regional guidebook contains judgement — which route is best in wet conditions, where the path is vague, which car park fills first, what the ground is actually like underfoot. That information is expensive to gather and largely absent from crowdsourced databases, which record where people went rather than whether it was a good idea.

Older guidebooks have a second value: they show you what has changed. Paths that have eroded, bridges that have gone, routes that were once obscure and are now busy. Reading a thirty-year-old guide to your local hills is a fast education in how landscapes and access evolve.

Natural history: the books that slow you down

The fourth category is field guides and natural history — birds, geology, trees, weather. These are the books that most reliably change hiking from movement through scenery into something closer to attention. Learning to recognise ten common birds by call, or to read a landscape’s glacial history from its shape, adds a layer to every subsequent walk. It also, usefully, makes short local walks endlessly interesting, which is what sustains a hiking habit through winter.

How reading changes walking

The practical effect is that reading gives you things to look for. A walker who knows what a hanging valley is sees one; a walker who does not sees a hill. Neither experience is wrong, but the first is richer and costs nothing. Weather knowledge in particular pays back immediately — learning to read cloud development turns the sky from decoration into information.

Building a small, useful shelf

You do not need many books. One good regional guidebook for the area you walk most. One navigation manual, properly worked through rather than skimmed. One field guide for whatever you find yourself curious about — birds is the usual gateway. One book of walking essays for the winter evenings. That is a shelf that will genuinely improve your hiking, and it costs less than a mid-range waterproof.

Libraries are underrated here, particularly for older regional guides and out-of-print mountain writing that is difficult to find elsewhere. Secondhand bookshops in hill towns are reliably excellent for this, and buying a battered local guide from the town beneath the hills you are about to walk is one of the small pleasures of a hiking trip.

A last suggestion: keep your own record. A notebook with routes, conditions, what worked and what did not becomes the most useful hiking book you own within a couple of years, because it is written by someone with exactly your fitness, your feet and your tolerance for bad weather.

Reading before a trip

Before travelling somewhere new, read one practical guide and one non-practical book about the place. The first tells you how to walk there. The second tells you what the place has meant to people, which is what turns a route into somewhere you have actually been rather than somewhere you passed through efficiently.