Touching the Void by Joe Simpson

Touching the Void by Joe Simpson

This book is awesome! I love ice climbing, so its even cooler because of that. :)
Anyway, Joe Simpson and his friend Simon go climbing in the Andes and climb a 21,000 foot mountain to reach the summit and to climb down the coveted east face, which no one had succeeded in climbing down before.
This takes place in 1985, and Joe and Simon take photos of their journey, until the accident on the east face. Joe was climbing down, with Simon up top, when he fell and broke his leg. Very, very bad. If your up that high, breaking your leg is essentially a death sentence. Simon decided that he would lower him down 300 feet at a time until they got to the bottom. A blizzard starts and gets so bad that niether can hear the other after maybe 20 feet and visibility is very low. When they are almost to the bottom, maybe a thousand or so feet from the base camp, Joe falls into a crevasse and Simon starts getting dragged down with him. Since Simon cannot see Joe, and since neither had seen a crevasse while climbing up, Simon thinks that there must have been something they didn't see, but cant figure out what it would be. Simon keeps slipping and Joe keeps falling when Simon makes the choice to cut the rope. He cuts it and Joe begins the first part of his journey on his own. It's a race to make it to base camp before Simon leaves, otherwise it's all been in vain. He climbs out of the crevasse (read it to find out how!) and crawls and limps his way back to base camp. It's an amazing story of human endurance in extreme conditions.
It's a very good read and, although there is obscenities in it, it's a wonderful read that makes you feel as if you are there with him. You feel his wonder, joy, and pain. I recommend this book to anyone who is a fan of ice climbing, if you ice climb yourself, or you just like reading adventure books. This one certainly qualifies.

Next up:
Pompeii by Robert Harris
The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
Faith of Our Fathers by N.C. Allen
Hiroshima by John Hersey
A Fresh Start in Fairhaven by Sharon Downing Jarvis
And more to come! I have a due date for most of these...

The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells

I love H.G. Wells' books. They are wonderful! The one I read recently was The Invisible Man.

It starts out with the Invisible Man (known now as the stranger), showing up at an inn called the Coach and Horses demanding a room and privacy. He is dressed from head to foot, with not an inch of skin showing, save for his pink nose.
The story follows him as he is driven out of the inn, pursued by the townspeople and the police, and eventually he finds himself with an old friend from college, wounded and telling him the entire story of how he came to be invisible.
He talks about the advantages he originally saw, "for I could see no disadvantages", and quickly comes to realize that there are many more cons to his invisibility than pros. He is consumed by the madness that follows his transformation into invisibility, his desire for riches and fame, and his desire to find a cure.
It's a very well written book and I would suggest it to anyone who hasnt read it.

Next up on the reading list:

Touching the Void: The True Story of One Mans Miraculous Survival by Joe Simpson
Pompeii by Robert Harris (fiction)
The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas (fiction)

I have some LDS books I'm reading as well, but they will go onto my other blog, Everything LDS! instead of this one.