What are you reading?

Items that do not fit the categories above.
Forum rules
  • This is a mountaineering forum, so please keep your posts on-topic. Posts do not all have to be related to the 14ers but should at least be mountaineering-related.
  • Personal attacks and confrontational behavior will result in removal from the forum at the discretion of the administrators.
  • Do not use this forum to advertise, sell photos or other products or promote a commercial website.
  • Posts will be removed at the discretion of the site administrator or moderator(s), including: Troll posts, posts pushing political views or religious beliefs, and posts with the purpose of instigating conflict within the forum.
For more details, please see the Terms of Use you agreed to when joining the forum.
Post Reply
User avatar
awon2zip
Posts: 22
Joined: 9/3/2012
14ers: 31  2 
13ers: 1
Trip Reports (0)
 

Re: What are you reading?

Post by awon2zip »

For school I had some options one what i could read. The one I chose was In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, it's about the murder of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas back in 1959. It's alright so far, has any one read this book and did you like it?
User avatar
Patinator
Posts: 176
Joined: 8/13/2007
14ers: 58 
13ers: 13
Trip Reports (5)
 

Re: What are you reading?

Post by Patinator »

Just finished "Creating Climate Wealth: Unlocking The Impact Economy” (http://creatingclimatewealth.co/) a few days ago and met the author, Jigar Shah, last night. While it will be red meat for anyone in finance or a startup, it is a great perspective for tackling climate change not through the use of technological innovation, but business/financial model innovation.
User avatar
Jeff Valliere
Posts: 537
Joined: 2/19/2007
14ers: 58  1  15 
13ers: 9
Trip Reports (8)
 
Contact:

Re: What are you reading?

Post by Jeff Valliere »

"Emerald Mile" by Kevin Fedarko, a story about 3 river guides who in the summer of 1983, attempt to complete the fastest trip through the Grand Canyon as the Glen Canyon Dam was in full spillway release mode. I am about half way through, it is very good and getting much better (half the book is back story about the taming of the Colorado River, John Wesley Powell, the key characters, etc...). This is one of those books where I was hooked on the first page.
Last edited by Jeff Valliere on Wed Mar 19, 2014 8:38 pm, edited 1 time in total.
User avatar
jrs1965
Posts: 703
Joined: 1/3/2010
14ers: 58  1  3 
13ers: 10
Trip Reports (0)
 

Re: What are you reading?

Post by jrs1965 »

Hungry Jack wrote:Excellent choice. A good sequel to that book would be "The Climb Up to Hell," the tale of an ill-fated attempt on the north face that resulted in a body dangling from the cliffs for several weeks.
Hungry Jack, the YouTube link here is the story of Tony Kurtz's 1936 fatal attempt of the Eiger. The video higlights portions of the book called "The Beckoning Silence" which I have not yet read.

"The Climb Up to Hell" sounds like a similiar story to Kurtz who was also left dangling from his rope on the Eiger after his death...

User avatar
High_On_Thin_Air
Posts: 98
Joined: 9/6/2013
14ers: 58  2 
13ers: 16
Trip Reports (0)
 
Contact:

Re: What are you reading?

Post by High_On_Thin_Air »

I just finished minus 148 degrees. by Art Davidson. It's about the incredible first winter ascent of Mt. McKinley. Just intense the whole climb.

hmmm what's next?
User avatar
Kent McLemore
Posts: 215
Joined: 7/30/2006
14ers: 11 
13ers: 6
Trip Reports (2)
 

Re: What are you reading?

Post by Kent McLemore »

In anticipation of next year's JMT hike I'm reading Francis Farquhar's "History of the Sierra Nevada," and "Sacred Summits, John Muir's Greatest Climbs." Both good reads and highly recommended. Some of Muir's FA's: Cathedral Peak, Mts. Ritter and Hoffman, Whitney's Mountaineer Route. Stood atop Ranier in 1888. The dude could climb.
-km
User avatar
talberta
Posts: 62
Joined: 7/26/2004
14ers: 3 
Trip Reports (0)
 

Re: What are you reading?

Post by talberta »

The White Spider, by Heinrich Harrer. Fantastically written!
"We're going to make it, Daddy!" My 10 year old daughter on Handies Peak.
User avatar
SolarAlex
Posts: 529
Joined: 8/15/2011
14ers: 35  13  5 
13ers: 92 23 5
Trip Reports (21)
 

Re: What are you reading?

Post by SolarAlex »

Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman …an unbelievably interesting book about how the human brain works and how it relates to economics.
Vincit Qui Patitur
User avatar
bohlsen
Posts: 201
Joined: 9/8/2008
14ers: 26 
13ers: 9
Trip Reports (1)
 

Re: What are you reading?

Post by bohlsen »

Working though Roughing It by Mark Twain about his adventures traveling to and living in Nevada during the boom days of silver mining. He's got an amazing, dry sense of humor and its a very interesting perspective to hear him describe so many places that I'm familiar with 150 years ago.
If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you.
KenE
Posts: 302
Joined: 4/4/2006
14ers: 31 
13ers: 30
Trip Reports (0)
 

Re: What are you reading?

Post by KenE »

awon2zip wrote:For school I had some options one what i could read. The one I chose was In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, it's about the murder of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas back in 1959. It's alright so far, has any one read this book and did you like it?
I read this when it was first published. It was one of the first "real" books that I had read. Capote (I was a small town Tennessee boy and thought it was pronounced Kaypote) changed my view of literature and I learned the power of the written word. Remember, there had never been a book written in this form before.
It's in my top five of all time. I was about the age, when I read this, of the Clutter children when they were killed. I still remember the horror of that section of the book. Be sure to see the original movie with Robert Blake as Perry Smith, and the two that were done recently are certainly worth the time.

I'm currently reading "George Daniels, A Master Watchmaker and His Art". George died in 2011. He was one of the few people on earth who could produce a watch from raw materials in his shop. They are truly beautiful creations. Well written and great photographs of his watches and the components. I'm kind of seriously into watches.

Ken
What do you call a guy like me up here
More than a hiker, but not quite a mountaineer
The thighs labor and the breathing is hard
I hold high places in the highest regard
User avatar
MtnHub
Posts: 574
Joined: 6/16/2005
14ers: 28 
13ers: 23
Trip Reports (50)
 

Re: What are you reading?

Post by MtnHub »

Just finished Diane Chamberlain's The Good Father, which was excellent! She is becoming one of my favorite authors.
User avatar
Jim Davies
Posts: 7638
Joined: 6/8/2006
14ers: 58  1 
13ers: 67
Trip Reports (5)
 

Re: What are you reading?

Post by Jim Davies »

I just finished The Abominable, a new novel by Dan Simmons. As soon as I saw that it was about a bootleg 1925 rescue climb of Everest and somehow involved yetis, I had high hopes for a farce of "Vertical Limit" proportions. Initially, I was disappointed; the author clearly has a deep familiarity with mountaineering history, and he ladles on the details (mostly accurate, more on this later) with a heavy hand, but in a generally engaging style. This book is huge and sometimes a slog, as Simmons' descriptions often run on and on (multiple pages on the drive into an English country estate, for example).

{Major spoilers follow, if you really intend to read this book for the suspense don't read on.}

{You've been warned.}













{Really, stop reading now or the whole book will be ruined.}




















But, in the end, the book delivers the accidental yucks, although it's a lot of work to get there. The protagonist, Jake, is a 23-year-old American climber who supposedly wrote this up in his 90's, after which it makes its way to Simmons in the present day. Jake turns out to be the Forrest Gump of 20th-century exploration - he not only climbs high on Everest in 1925, finding the bodies of both Mallory and Irvine along the way (taking Mallory's camera in the process), he also visits Nanda Devi and Antarctica in the 30's, and K2 in the 30's and 50's, plus along the way meets Rudoph Hess and has dinner with the entire 1924 Everest expedition, Winston Churchill, Lawrence of Arabia, and Charlie Chaplin. Their 1925 expedition not only produces the first ascent AND traverse of Everest, but along the way the small group invents front-point crampons, curved-blade ice-climbing tools, dome tents, down clothing, jumars, nylon-cored rope, and probably a few dozen other innovations I'm forgetting (Simmons does love to heap on the details). What starts out as a fast-and-light search-and-summit attempt winds up being a huge expedition supported by dozens of Sherpas, who apparently can carry a ton of gear apiece, as huge piles of gear appear whenever it's needed by the plot: tents, stoves, oxygen (excuse me, "English Air", as the author calls it at least 100 times), food, miles of rope, ladders, a pedal-powered winch, rifles, flare guns, a cratefull of chocolate, etc., etc., etc. The easy availability of gear on this "fast and light" expedition gets really laughable at times - our heros retreat from their first high attempt in despair, ready to abandon their expedition, when they're attacked by:

Nazis in Yeti Suits!

It is at this point that the book really descends into farce, as an army of machine-gun wielding Nazis attack, killing dozens of Sherpas! (but none of the westerners, of course). Our heros conveniently find a cache of oxygen, tents, stoves, and food that they've been saving for ... something ..., winch a few tons of it up to the North Col, then flee upward toward the summit. It turns out (spoiler alert!) that there are incriminating photos of Hitler in the pocket of a dead climber near the second step, which our heros retrieve (just before Jake free-climbs said step). (It's never quite explained why the two dead guys decided to arrange a photo purchase at 28,000' above sea level.) One of the heros dies heroically as the sneering German villian is about to kill them all, then two of them climb over the summit and down the south side, and the others descend north only to encounter - more Nazis! Who are conveniently killed by a real yeti, after which the protagonist escapes, gives the photos to Churchill, saves England from German invasion in WW2, etc., etc. Truly epic stuff, although I was skimming like mad for the last 500 pages or so just to get through all of it.

Read it if you like mountaineering history, and have a high capacity for boredom and/or mad speedreading skills.
Climbing at altitude is like hitting your head against a brick wall — it's great when you stop. -- Chris Darwin
I'm pretty tired. I think I'll go home now. -- Forrest Gump
Post Reply