This is the one about ‘Into Thin Air.’

Posted February 5th, 2010 by Mike Lawson

I don’t remember why I put Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air on my Amazon.com Wishlist.  Maybe I saw him on a talk show, or saw the title on one of those books-you-must-read lists.  Whatever the reason, I got the book from Daniel’s sister for xmas, and was a bit surprised by how much I liked it.

I’m surprised that I enjoyed a non-fiction novel…I’m no fan of reality.

This story is Krakauer’s version of what happened in 1996 when he climbed Mt. Everest.  Many of his fellow mountaineers never made it off the mountain, and it’s an interesting look into the seductive control this mountain has over people.

I would only make two changes about this book.  The first thing I didn’t like about this book, which can’t really be changed, is that there were way too many characters to keep track of.  During the 1996 voyage there were four other groups of people climbing Mt. Everest at the same time as Krakauer’s team…so that made for a long list of characters.  And I guess since Krakauer was trying to accurately tell his story, he couldn’t cut anyone.

The second thing that that made this story hard to read was the way that Krakauer used first names and last names to refer to people.  Rob Hall, for example is called “Rob” in one paragraph and “Hall” in the next.  It made it difficult to follow the million characters in the book.

If I needed another reason to like this story, Krakauer quoted Joan Didion from The White Album.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live…we look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five.  We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices.  We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

If you’re keeping track, this is the 4th book I’ve read in 2010.

I was going to read  A Streetcar Named Desire a few weeks ago, but in all of the boxes and piles of books that have come with moving I wasn’t able to find it.  But now I’ve located the book and I’m going to give it a read.