The most recommended Everest books

I’ve read a slew of books about climbing the big Himalayan summits and this is one of the best. It chronicles the first ascent of Mount Everest by an American team and in doing so provides a thrilling account of the climb itself, of the natural majesty of the mountain, and of the eccentric personalities of the team’s members.

George Mallory’s disputed ascent of Everest hardly qualifies as “little known history,” but I couldn’t do a top 5 list on historical fiction and not include it. You can tell from the details that Ridout is obsessed with this story. Mallory’s efforts on the climb are perfectly juxtapositioned against his wife’s less glamourous but no less difficult task of holding the family together in his absence. The novel thrives as an exploration of the intense pressure that Mallory’s final Everest attempt placed on both.

This is the Everest Bible. It has it all: every fact, every myth, every attempt, every failure, and the ultimate success. By rights, this book shouldn’t really work—so many attempts, so many near-misses, so many personality clashes, so many tragedies—but somehow it builds. The personalities are outsized, of course, the egos gigantic, and that helps, but the mountain is just too famous to ever be dull.

This book concerns vacationers at a small hotel in the Scottish Hebrides. A murder is committed. Due to the island and the hotel’s remoteness, the location creates a closed community. Everyone has reasons to be annoyed with others, adding tension and motives for murder. I particularly like the enveloping mood of the wild mountains and fog. Radio broadcasts of real-life events (Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation preparations and Sir Edmund Hillary’s climb of Mount Everest) add a strange link to the outside world for this group of isolated hotel guests. I felt it also underscored the contrast between their forced solitude and stay at the hotel as opposed to Elizabeth and Hillary’s freedom to do what they wished.

What does mountaineering have to do with leadership? Far more than you might think.

Alison Levine extrapolates her experiences leading the first all-women team to attempt to summit Mt. Everest into clear lessons that, if you grasp them early, will turn you into an expedition leader at work. The book wraps great leadership advice in a compelling adventure story (Do they make it to the summit?), told with Alison’s signature wit.

It’s a quick and enjoyable read and a great start to your leadership library.

If you’re nervous about fixing Thanksgiving dinner—and who isn’t?—this book is for you. Veteran cooking teacher Rick Rodgers provides an array of excellent holiday recipes along with a step-by-step guide to preparing, cooking, and serving the meal. While his focus is the traditional feast—turkey, stuffing, cranberries, potatoes, pies—he also includes recipes for ethnic and vegetarian favorites. Plus there’s a welcome section on what to do with the leftovers. When it comes to preparing the holiday dinner, my personal Mount Everest has always been the gravy. No longer. Thanks to Thanksgiving 101, my gravy is now rich, smooth, and delicious.

No mystery I’ve read has better captured how a chronic condition can redefine your sense of self better than The Black Hour.

This book hooked me on the first page, where we are introduced to Amelia, a sociology professor who is returning to work after being shot by a student the previous year. We witness her struggling to walk up a hill she used to climb without a second thought, and now it’s Mount Everest. She’s simultaneously vulnerable, determined, defiant, and just plain in pain.

Having a chronic illness myself, what makes this book resonate with me is the way Amelia constantly compares her post-injury self to her pre-injury self and must come to terms with the distance between those two versions.

A book that clearly depicts why it is so important to include diverse minds with diverse ideas. If you have a tough challenge, the best solutions will arise when you discuss these with those who might disagree.

The best example that the author provides is the CIA before 9/11. The intelligence service was mainly acquiring males with a Caucasian background who were not able to correctly interpret the danger signals from terrorists with an Islamic background.

If there is a crisis to solve, do not just select the top 5 experts in the world to solve the problem since they will likely originate from the same school or University. After #1 and #2, the others (3,4, and 5) will have little to add if they have the same background. Including someone in the team with a different background and opinion is better. 

Lotz's book is an intense character study, painting a portrait of her protagonist in masterful strokes.

Simon Newman is complex – simultaneously thrill-seeking but lazy, ambitious but anxious, traumatized but desperate to hide his weakness.

He has no business searching for bodies in the notoriously dangerous Cwm Pots, and he takes away exactly the wrong lessons from his survival. He certainly has no business on Mount Everest, and knows it. But now he's haunted by the (possibly literal) ghosts of his own bad choices, and he's in too deep now.

This book is a journey in its own right. 

Mount Everest is arguably the location of the most epic adventures ever.

This is my favorite book about Everest, perhaps because the author, David Breashears, is a friend who shared many Thanksgiving dinners with me during the thick of his climbing and high-altitude film career. He is most well-known for producing the popular IMAX film, Everest.

This is Breashear’s autobiography. It includes his perspective on the 1996 Everest tragedy, which he not only miraculously survived but also saved the lives of other climbers. I also enjoyed the book, Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer, which is about that same Everest episode and had much broader commercial success. Krakauer wrote the forward to this book.

However, I found this book one to be more personal, more revealing. After reading it, you’ll admire Breashears as much as Krakauer and I do.