The Gift of Book Recommendations
Featuring Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer
My wife Jenny has a special talent for giving gifts. They are thoughtful and personal and surprising. I have lots of examples, but the one I want to talk about today is the gift I just received for my 40th birthday.
It’s a collection of bite-size book reviews she gathered from friends and family. I was so touched and delighted by it and carried it around with me for days to show to coworkers. It is a treasure.
Eventually I want to read all 40+ books that were recommended. There are books in there that have been on my list a long time and others I’ve never heard of. I love flipping through it and reading why someone loves a book and why they think I’ll love it too.
Into Thin Air
The recommendation from my friend Cat was Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer, which had been on my list forever. It relates the story of the 1996 Everest expedition that ended in disaster when 8 climbers lost their lives. She read it last November and it sent her on a mountaineering reading binge.1 Her enthusiasm was infectious and I started reading immediately.
The book inspired me to 1) Never climb Everest and 2) Go out and have an adventure. I have mountains in my backyard here in Colorado and hiking one in the winter would be cold and challenging.
But nothing like Everest. The 29,028 foot summit is not suited for human presence. The jet stream that pummels the mountain makes it impossible to summit most of the year. The narrow window at the end of May when conditions are ideal lead to multiple expeditions attempting to summit at the same time, which looks like this:
This traffic jam of commercial expeditions guiding inexperienced climbers is the exact thing Krakauer was attempting to discourage by writing about the 1996 disaster. Unfortunately it seems to have had the opposite effect:
I was blown away by this story and the entire enterprise of Everest expeditions. It was fun to text Cat an insane detail and then discuss it during one of our walks along Boulder Creek. And when the polar vortex rolled through Colorado, we walked anyway, unfazed by it. It was no Everest.
Everest the film
I watched the 2015 film Everest starring Jason Clarke and Josh Brolin. While I think the book is better, the movie does an admirable job depicting certain events. The story of Beck Weathers was inspiring to see on screen and Josh Brolin made that moment soar.
The marketing makes it look like an action movie, with Brolin dangling from a ladder above a crevasse. It is not an action movie, it is a tragic disaster movie. Many of the climbers who died that fateful day simply stopped moving and could not start again. Some fell and their bodies were never found. Some bodies remain on the mountain to this day. To climb Everest, you have to hike through graves. I can’t think of a more glaring warning sign.
Thank you Cat for the great recommendation and thanks to everyone who contributed to my birthday gift. If you didn’t get a chance to contribute and are feeling left out, I’ll always take a recommendation in the comments!
Kyle
In the span of a month she read three books by Ed Viesturs (K2, The Mountain, and No Shortcuts to the Top) and Touching the Void by Joe Simpson.
Into Thin Air was a very entertaining book. I don't dive into much nonfiction, but this was one any fiction reader could also enjoy. The way Krakauer laid out the narrative was super compelling. I could hardly put the book down.
Into The Silence by Wade Davis is an absolute must