Car chases. Fires. Bombs. Fight scenes. Zombies. Walking a thin wire from 1,300 feet in the air. We all need a little excitement in our lives—even if that level of adrenaline-fueled adventure is limited to just your entertainment. You can experience all the flames and fiasco from a cozy, safe seat on your couch with one of these heart-pounding ebooks or audiobooks on the Libby app or action films on Kanopy.

Kick your movie night into high gear with one of these film recommendations or explore the full collection for more. Pair them with a fast-paced read for more blood-pumping excitement!

🍿 Movie: Everything Everywhere All At Once (Leaving Kanopy in August 2024)
📚 Book: The Gone World by Tom Sweterlitsch
🎧 Audiobook

Both stories follow multiple characters as they navigate alternate worlds. The blend of science fiction, philosophical questions, and exploration of identity and purpose make for great mind-bending entertainment.

More on the movie: When an interdimensional rupture threatens to unravel reality, the fate of the world is suddenly in the hands of a most unlikely hero: Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh), a flustered immigrant mother. As bizarre and bewildering dangers emerge from the many possible worlds, she must learn to channel her newfound powers and fight her way through the splintering timelines to save her home, her family, and herself in this big-hearted and irreverent adventure through the multiverse.
🏆 Academy Award winner for Best Picture (2023)

More on the book: Inception meets True Detective in this sci-fi thriller of spellbinding tension and staggering scope that follows a special agent into a savage murder case with grave implications for the fate of mankind.

🍿 Movie: Escape from New York
📚 Book: Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
🎧 Audiobook

Get ready for high-octane action, dark, dystopian settings, and rebellious anti-heroes in this book and movie combo.

More on the movie: It’s 1997 and Manhattan has become a walled prison for three million criminals where they are left to run loose. The plane carrying the American President crashes there, and he is taken prisoner by "the Duke." Sent in to rescue him from this land of hell is Snake Plissken, former war hero turned criminal. To ensure he does not abandon his mission, two devices are implanted in his arteries, primed to blow him to pieces if he fails to return on time.

More on the book: Hiro lives in a Los Angeles dominated by franchise logos, with only the autonomous city-states offering respite. He delivers pizza to the wealthy, defending his deliveries with samurai swords. Home is a shared U-Stor-It unit, and he spends most of his time in the Metaverse, where his avatar is legendary. But when fellow hackers in The Black Sun club are taken down by a new drug called Snow Crash, which leaves them in a vegetative state both online and in real life, Hiro investigates. The search leads him back to ancient Sumerian language and a shadowy villain intent on world domination. With the help of Y. T., a fearless teen skateboard courier, Hiro must stop this looming threat.

🍿 Movie: The Three Musketeers
📚 Book: The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
🎧 Audiobook

Find swashbuckling adventures, sword fights, daring rescues, and high-stakes drama in this classic book turned movie.

More on the movie & book: The young Gascon D'Artagnan arrives in Paris, his heart set on joining the king's Musketeers. He is taken under the wings of three of the most respected and feared Musketeers, Porthos, Aramis, and Athos, whose motto is “all for one, one for all.”

🍿 Movie: The Peacemaker (Leaving Kanopy in August 2024)
📚 Book: The Sum of All Fears by Tom Clancy
🎧 Audiobook

If you’re looking for an action-packed storyline with international intrigue, nuclear threats, and intense military action, these are great picks.

More on the movie: After two trains crash in Russia, a nuclear explosion follows and alerts the entire globe. White House nuclear expert Julia Kelly and Special Operations Intelligence Officer Thomas Devoe must work together to unravel the conspiracy.

More on the book: Peace may finally be at hand in the Middle East, as Jack Ryan, Deputy Director of Intelligence for the CIA, lays the groundwork for a plan that could end centuries of conflict. But ruthless terrorists have a final, desperate card to play: a nuclear weapon hidden somewhere in the United States. With one terrible act, distrust mounts, forces collide, and the floundering U.S. president seems unable to cope with the crisis. With the world on the verge of nuclear disaster, Ryan must frantically seek a solution—before the chiefs of state lose control of themselves and the world.

🍿 Movie: Apocalypto
📚 Book: The Revenant by Michael Punke
🎧 Audiobook

With a relentless pace, vivid descriptions of the wilderness, and survival themes, this pairing is sure to give you an intense reading or watching experience.

More on the movie: As the Mayan kingdom faces its decline, a young man is taken on a perilous journey to a world ruled by fear and oppression.

More on the book: The year is 1823, and the trappers of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company live a brutal frontier life. Hugh Glass is among the company’s finest men, an experienced frontiersman and an expert tracker. But when a scouting mission puts him face-to-face with a grizzly bear, he is viciously mauled and not expected to survive. Two company men are dispatched to stay behind and tend to Glass before he dies. When the men abandon him instead, Glass is driven to survive by one desire: revenge. With shocking grit and determination, Glass sets out, crawling at first, across hundreds of miles of uncharted American frontier. Based on a true story.

🍿 Movie: Train to Busan
📚 Book: World War Z by Max Brooks
🎧 Audiobook

Get a thrill from zombies? These stories depict humanity’s fight for survival against overwhelming odds, with frantic escape scenes, desperate battles, and plenty of tension and chaos.

More on the movie: A man (Gong Yoo), his estranged daughter and other passengers become trapped on a speeding train during a zombie outbreak in South Korea.

More on the book: The Zombie War came unthinkably close to eradicating humanity. Max Brooks traveled throughout the world, from decimated cities that once teemed with upwards of 30 million souls to the most remote and inhospitable areas of the planet. He recorded the testimony of men, women, and sometimes children who came face-to-face with the living, or at least the undead, hell of that dreadful time. World War Z is the result. Never before have we had access to a document that so powerfully conveys the depth of fear and horror, and also the ineradicable spirit of resistance, that gripped human society through the plague years.

🍿 Movie: Man on Wire
📚 Book: The Walk by Robert Zemeckis

This incredible feat made headlines around the world as Philippe Petit pulled off an act of incomparable beauty and imagination—walking a thin wire between the Twin Towers. Both the documentary and the Petit’s book allow you to step into his mind as he becomes the “artist of the air.”

More on the movie: On August 7, 1974, a young Frenchman named Philippe Petit stepped out on a wire illegally rigged between the World Trade Center's Twin Towers in New York.
🏆 Academy Award winner for Best Documentary (2009)

More on the book: Philippe Petit boldly—and illegally—fixed a rope between the tops of the still-young Twin Towers, a quarter mile off the ground. At daybreak, thousands of spectators gathered to watch in awe and adulation as he traversed the rope a full eight times in the course of an hour. Petit recounts the six years he spent preparing for this achievement, a tour de force of imagination and tenacity.

🍿 Movie: Black Hawk Down
📚 Book: Black Hawk Down by Mark Bowden
🎧 Audiobook

This page to screen pairing captures the heroism, courage, and brutality of battle.

More on the movie: From acclaimed director Ridley Scott and renowned producer Jerry Bruckheimer, this is the heroic account of a group of elite U.S. soldiers sent into Mogadishu, Somalia in 1993 as part of a U.N. peacekeeping operation. Their mission: to capture several top lieutenants of the Somali warlord, Mohamed Farrah Aidid, as part of a strategy to quell the civil war and famine that is ravaging the country.

More on the book: On October 3, 1993, about 100 elite U.S. soldiers were dropped by helicopter into the teeming market in the heart of Mogadishu, Somalia. Their mission was to abduct two top lieutenants of a Somali warlord and return to base. It was supposed to take an hour. Instead, they found themselves pinned down through a long and terrible night fighting against thousands of heavily armed Somalis. Drawing on interviews from both sides, army records, audiotapes, and videos (some of the material is still classified), Bowden’s minute-by-minute narrative is one of the most exciting accounts of modern combat ever written.

Access to books and films varies by library & region.

You’ll be on the edge of your chair with these action-packed books and films. Check them out from your library on Libby and Kanopy.

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