Top ten adventure stories

Bear Grylls is the host of the summer 2013 NBC reality series Get Out Alive. Previously he starred for seven seasons in the adventure series Man vs. Wild. Educated at Eton, Grylls served in the elite UK Special Forces unit 21 SAS and was made an honorary lieutenant commander in the Royal Navy. He climbed Mt. Everest in 1998 at the age of twenty-three—just eighteen months after breaking his back in a parachuting accident in Africa. His latest book, Strike of the Shark, is the sixth in his Mission Survival series.

He named his top ten adventure stories for the Guardian, including:

Treasure Island by RL Stevenson (1883)

This was definitely my favourite book as a kid – such an exciting adventure of life on the high seas! Jim shows incredible resourcefulness as he deals with treacherous pirates, hidden treasure and the villainous Long John Silver. Sadly, I've never managed to find any buried treasure on any of my expeditions!

Read about the other entries on the list. 

Treasure Island also appears on Eoin Colfer's top 10 list of villains in fiction, Charlie Fletcher's top ten list of swashbuckling tales of derring-do, Robert McCrum's list of the ten best first lines in fiction, John Mullan's list of ten of the best pirates in fiction, and among Mal Peet's top ten books to read aloud, Philip Pullman's six best books, and Eoin Colfer's six favorite books.

--Marshal Zeringue