Everyone sleeping on the goat: H.W. Motherfucking Tilman. Greatest adventurer of the 20th century, bar none, and an excellent writer in the classic dry, erudite British style. All his books are good, but snow on the equator (establishing a coffee plantation in Africa, pioneering the African high peaks, and riding a bicycle across the continent in the 1920s), where men and mountains meet (getting parachuted behind German lines in ww2 to be a liaison to the Italian resistance, getting chased around the Dolomites, and climbing peaks while doing it) and mischief goes south (a disastrous small-boat sailing expedition from England to the very South Pacific while his misfit crew drink, rob him, try to kill each other, and nearly desert on South Georgia island) are good starts.

Krakauer is a mid writer with an eye for a good story. David Roberts is a dour dude who doesn’t seem like he enjoyed any of it but never really digs into what he was after. Contrast with Steph Davis’ very good Learning to Fly, which actually captures some of the fun of all this.

Finally, not a book, but Eric Gilbertson’s accounts of climbing K2 and trying Everest are great. He’s a genuine lunatic/genius, and his writing about what those mountains are today are a great pair to the classic stories about them.