Into Thin Air

So, this year I resolved to get through more books. Last year I did good at the beginning of the year, but did not really do anything with non-school books all fall semester. So, I am starting back up. I decided after every time I finish a book, that I will leave a post on it. This last week I finished "Into Thin Air" by John Krakauer. Krakauer was hired by Outside magazine to hike up Mt Everest with a guided tour. The trip had some problems, and many people died, including two of the best guides Everest had ever seen. It was a pretty good book-I enjoyed hearing about how the whole guided climbing works, about climbing Everest, and basically the whole book. It was a pretty good book. Nothing deep or inspirational, but, a very interesting story. At the beginning it talks about how many people die on Everest, and that as a result, anyone who decides to climb Everest is not acting rationally. It talks throughout the book about "summit fever", about these climbers who have put so much time and money into the climb, they want to get to the top so bad, that they make bad decisions and end up dying. "Thus, the slopes of Everest are littered with human corpses." This made me think a little bit about life, about how there are goals we set and things we want to do, but in the end, they may not be the best decisions for us. For example, coming to BYU, I intended to graduate with a 4.0 GPA. Is that a noble goal? Would I, along the way, make bad decisions, and leave dead relationships, lost fun, and unhad experiences behind as I sought the holy perfect GPA? Anyways, something I thought about. Other than that, there was not a whole lot of thinking involved in the book, and it was pretty much just a good tale of climbing up a mountain. Here is a quote from the introduction:

It was the afternoon of May 10. I hadn't slept in 57 hours. The only food I'd been able to force down over the preceding three days was a bowl of Ramen soup and a handful of peanut M&M's. Weeks of violent coughing had left me with two separated ribs, making it excruciatingly painful to breathe. Twenty-nine thousand twenty-eight feet up in the troposphere, there was so little oxygen reaching my brain that my mental capacity was that of a slow child. Under the circumstances, I was incapable of feeling much of anything except cold and tired.

Note to Erin M.: This post has no pictures. Use your imagination.