Oh man, I have a ton of good books to recommend on the outdoors, camping, wilderness, survival, etc.
I usually take a selection of the below with me on longer trips and enjoy going through them again and again while camping. Good nighttime reading after a great meal and a good fire. You kind find some for free to read on Kindle.
Camp Cooking: 100 Years - very cool and comprehensive book with recipes from decades of US Forest Service crew
Survival Hacks - good book by Creek Stewart with great reviews, covers a variety of hacks from using everyday items around-camp to larger hacks involving more elaborate planning
Pocket Field Guide: Survival Knots Vol 1 - also by Creek Stewart, explains and demonstrates a wide variety of knots useful in worst-case survival situations
The three below make a good set. You can sometimes find them on various sites at "bargain" prices for the set, then find they're often just as cheap or cheaper on Amazon individually.
Bushcraft First Aid: A Field Guide to Emergency Wilderness Care - Dave Canterbury & Jason Hunt - title kind of says it all
Bushcraft 101: A Field Guide to the Art of Wilderness Survival - Dave Canterbury - mostly about Canterbury calls The 5 C's of Survivability
Advanced Bushcraft: An Expert Guide to the Art of Wilderness Survival - Dave Canterbury - this book builds on what he wrote about in Bushcraft 101
If you enjoy reading both fiction and non-fiction about wilderness in general and the American Southwest desert in particular, you can't beat most books by
Edward Abbey--well regarded conservationist and park ranger--including
Desert Solitaire, A Season In the Wilderness (considered by many the book that makes him "Thoreau of the American West"),
The Monkey Wrench Gang ,
The Fool's Progress: An Honest Novel (his fictionalized auto-biography, it's said) and many more. Pick one of the anthologies first if you're not sure.
Here's a great old book on building good, functional, shelter:
Shelters, Shacks, and Shanties: Classic Guide to Building Wilderness Shelters - by DC Beard, one of the founders of the Boy Scouts. This book is an excellent resource on native nomad type building, pioneer structures, temporary woodsmen shelters, etc.
Even if you're not going to build a shelter or don't do extreme or primitive camping and deep wilderness, knowing the basics to a lot of the above may save your life.
I'm a certified book geek and love having the physical book and a decent library of my own, though will often get a Kindle version just for ease of transport of several at a time.
I have literally dozens more I can easily recommend on any number of topics like Night Skies, making fires, using axes and knives, etc if there is something more in particular you're after.
Dry roads and open skies . . .hope you find some great books about the outdoors!
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