So this year I'm going to write about 100 books I'm going to read during the year. I know, I'm already behind schedule if I'm only starting now but I did decide a bit late. I will also, of course, cheat. The nature of the cheating will expose itself soon.
Last week I read "Touching the void" by Joe Simpson. We have taken to reading and watching mountain climbing films recently. We both read "Into thin air" by John Krakauer (having enjoyed his Into the wild and Under the banner of heaven) and decided to get our hands on the IMAX movie shot during that season. The climbing sequences in that really hammered home the craziness of the whole endeavour. This led us to watch Scream of stone by Werner Herzog - we're huge Herzog fans - partially due to Reinhold Messner being the climbing consultant. This may not be the greatest narrative film ever. Werner (my pal on facebook) disowned and didn't write the script and the acting is not actually great. But the mountain Cerro Torre, a 2KM needle of ice covered rock with a mushroom shaped summit made of windblown snow, is simply one of the most insane things I have ever seen that anyone would want to try and do a Batclimb all the way up. Back to the void. I read it over a decade ago. A few years ago this would have been a problem but I found myself with no clear memory of details from the book, as distinct from the film, which I watched maybe seven years ago. I have now rectified that by going back to the book and I realise to some extent how this happened.
Even now I read a book like this without fully understanding the climbing. I didn't draw little diagrams to work out the traverses and rappels and how the ropes were anchored during the descent in particular. I certainly wasn't entirely sure what a piton looked like and I think some of the knots and rope climbing techniques I don't really understand. I find that when a book doesn't form a coherent whole in your mind it is easy to forget. This was always the reason I didn't finish books if I really didn't like them: to allow me to forget something best forgotten. Of course in my youth I suffered from too much memory, which is not really a great problem these days. As I've got older I have discovered that if a book on a subject is interesting, it's even more interesting to read 10 or 20. And watch films. Because of that we've ended up reading a few books and watching a few more, and my intray has a few of both piling up. People ask, "what you sit at home reading and watching but don't climb?" to which I invariably reply "what is it about books and films with people losing body parts and lives to cold, ice, wind, hypoxia and falls that would make you want to get up a mountain? Oh, and we do it with the fire on on a COMFY sofa."
Back to the book: this is exactly the kind of extraordinary survival adventure that would make any sane person feel glad of their warm fire. It asks you one really important question over and over again: would you just lie back and die? Now would you? Stand on your dislocated broken knee and walk on broken scree, now would you? Thirsty passing out from pain hallucinating from hunger, now would you? How about now?
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