I’m reading a book which is absolutely gripping me – I’m having to be quite disciplined not to read it when I should be doing other things. The idea of climbing, in particular climbing a mountain, especially one which is high enough to have ice and snow pretty much all the time, absolutely horrifies me. The book I’m reading – which I will write more about when I’ve finished it (probably later tonight!) is ‘Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Everest Disaster’ by Jon Krakauer. To give it some context as to why I might be interested, here’s a post I wrote a couple of years ago:
One of my first, very earliest memories, the sort of memory you can’t actually believe you remember but yet you do, is hearing about what was called the Conquest of Everest, of Sir Edmund Hilary and Tenzing Norgay, known as Sherpa Tenzing reached the summit of Everest. The two men, part of an expedition, reached the summit in 1973 when Tenzing Norgay was thirty-nine years old. I can’t have been very old, maybe seven or eight when I was given a book about it, and I was fascinated, not just by the mountaineers, but by Tibet and the Tibetan people who were in the photographs.
Over the years I have read more, and ventured into the realms of Buddhism, and those remote regions continue to fascinate me, even though I will never visit them. I may not do that, but I can vicariously through the words of others… so I am thrilled that a friend of mine, a very talented writer has published a book as an e-reader on Amazon. I haven’t actually started reading it yet, saving it for my holiday when i can enjoy it without the pressures of everyday life.
If you have an interest in the Himalayas, Everest, adventure and challenge, then I really recommend a book written by my very talented friend, Richard Kefford – “a man and his two sons set out on a journey of a lifetime together. They decided to do what was necessary to trek to a high point in Nepal so that they could experience sunrise over Everest…”
You can find “Namaste: A diary of a trek in the Himalaya” here:
Lois Elsden 