Recommended Reading

• Brief but descriptive odysseys through Pakistan can be found in The Great Railway Bazaar by Paul Theroux and Danziger's Travels by Nick Danziger. Other good travel narratives include The Golden Peak: Travels in Northern Pakistan by Kathleen Jamie, To the Frontier by Geoffrey Moorhouse and Full Tilt by Dervla Murphy.
• Pakistan's historical and cultural traditions get a good going over in the excellent Every Rock, Every Hill: A Plain Tale of the North-West Frontier & Afghanistan by Victoria Schofield and Words For My Brother by John Staley. Pakistan: A Modern History by Ian Talbot explores the country's lack of democratic success.
• Less recent histories and more in the 'Gripping Yarns' vein are John Keay's When Men & Mountains Meet, Sir George Robertson's Chitral, The Story of a Minor Siege and Derek Waller's The Pundits.
• For fiction, don't ignore Shame, Salman Rushdie's engrossing tragi-comic fantasy about Z A Bhutto and General Ziaul-Haq. Kipling's The Man Who Would Be King and Kim provide a British colonial perspective and a romping good read. Similarly, there's George MacDonald Fraser's swaggering Flashman in the Great Game.
• If you're looking for a light-headed buzz, read Greg Child's Thin Air about mountain climbing the Karakoram.