Also read Leo's book Closer to the Edge. With a Bear Grylls quote on the cover and a gushing foreword by Steve Backshall, I suspect a lot of climbers will pass this over as too mainstream. This would be a mistake. Although there is limited hold-by-hold accounts this is unapologetically a climbing book and lay readers would require heavy use of the glossary. The formative stuff, as you'd expect, is more interesting/ less 'normal' than I'd realised and is illuminating. Leo struck out on his own early and quickly the sheer volume of hard and big routes becomes staggering, to the point where whole expeditions are either left out or passed over in a paragraph. And the audacity of the objectives keeps ramping up; I think more detail on the difficulty of funding and preparing for the Antarctica trips could have been included but you get a picture. As Jim Perrin pointed out in Fawcett on Rock, it's one thing to compete with your peers but quite another to keep pushing when you've left them so far behind. The pacing is excellent and the writing is generally better than you might expect, especially given the limited editorial input he received. The ego is mostly in check although a couple of chapters do start by quoting himself, and the punctuation I found odd. But I think most climbers will enjoy it.
hates closure, hates having to be the one who is supposed to provide it
Hadn't seen that before, amazing! And to have Fawcett and Pollitt on belay and photography duty, wow!
how did we get from being animal to (modern) human
It's the 100th anniversary of Proust's death. Bravo Marcel!
Can anyone think of any particularly funny books they’ve read recently - I’m thinking stuff that’s come out in the last ten years, possibly amusing genre stuff (I assume the recent Richard Osman things are gently amusing - I’ve not read any of them), but really more general “this is meant to be a funny book” vs “this is a xxx book that’s also quite funny”.Anything from extremely low brow fiction written with the intention of luring men away from SAS memoirs at Luton airport Waterstones to more literary dark humour / satire… Bob Mortimer’s The Satsuma Complex is the obvious current example. I realise this is slightly asking people to spill the beans about their guilty pleasures* but seeing as pretty much everyone here has already detailed so much highbrow / scholarly material that I don’t think anyone (not least me) is going to be in any way judgemental!(* I know an evolutionary biologist and author whose idea of idea of lightweight guilty pleasure is Patrick O’Brian.)
